Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven begins in an early 20th century Chicago represented, in triptych, as a trash-strewn ruin, an industrial Gehenna, and a Gordian knot of railroad ties before the action shifts to the West Texas panhandle: an ocean of wheat, light and space dotted only by a single, severe house, a constricted absurdity rising in defiance of the surrounding void. This new setting suggests an Eden reconceived as a rural American idyll; such a Biblical allusion would be of a piece with the film's two central motifs, wrath and flight. Bill, a steelworker played with vacant rebelliousness by Richard Gere, accidently kills his supervisor in a fit of rage, forcing him to flee the city with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and little sister Linda (Linda Manz) in tow. Working the wheat harvest of a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard), Bill and Abby - who have posed throughout as brother and sister to protect themselves against accusations of impropriety - decide to exploit the farmer's attentions towards her by having her accept his proposal of marriage. The plan has been hatched on the belief that the farmer (he is unnamed in the film) hasn't long to live; when he fails to expire or show any recognizable signs of deterioration, awkwardness transfigures into claustrophobia and suspicion. Bill and Abby's masquerade wears thin, and the farmer slowly uncovers their subterfuge. He confronts Bill, who flies off with a visiting aerial circus, and during Bill's absence cements his marriage to Abby; Bill's return at the start of the harvest - we never learn his whereabouts during his months-long absence - is accompanied by a devastating plague of locusts. Another Biblical allusion. More destruction; more death; more running.
The very title Days of Heaven refers to our infinite, self-defeating capacity to cast ourselves out of paradise should we ever find ourselves in it. Bill and Abby, finding themselves in secure material circumstances for the first time in their lives, cannot suppress their love for one another, the price of said security. Yet never do we, the audience, feel that they are trading a lesser happiness for a greater one, as is the custom in these types of fables. Rather we see only the paradise lost, a land of constant twilight traded in for a compromised existence; not the greater of two happinesses, but no happiness at all. Even in death, we do not, as is again so often the case, feel as though at least love in principle has triumphed. Instead there is a profound sense of inevitability as the film draws to a close, an epilogue consumed with yet more scenes of flight. This time a great wandering, but paradise no more.
