Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven is a wonderfully colorful tapestry. It flows from shot to shot, scene to scene, in the carefree yet persistent manner of the wind, the river, the rain and other elemental entities represented in the film. Days of Heaven is an uplifting, even hopeful film — despite the tragedy of the main characters — in its portrayal of a time in America (at least in Malick’s interpretation) when people carried a humanistic pride in themselves.

The optimistic hopes and dreams of the characters is an integral part of Days of Heaven. The people of the film each have hopes for their lives, but it would seem that none of them have come true — even for the rich wheat farmer (Sam Shepard) with his huge land holdings and incongruously ornate house on the Texas plains. The farmer was unaware of his desires, his lacking, before meeting Abby (Brooke Adams), a young woman hired for the wheat harvest. Abby tells the farmer that she could have been a dancer, and tells Bill that before the farmer proposed to her she received compliments from many rich men. Bill (Richard Gere), Abby’s lover, who, with his sister Linda (Linda Manz) was also hired for the harvest, wants to make something materialistically substantial out of his life. Bill has lived believing the gambler’s fallacy that one day his luck would change and he confesses this to his character counterpart, the farmer, in one scene. It is not important what the desires of the individual are, only that these wishes have not been fulfilled. Bill wants to own the kinds of things the farmer has; for him it is a visible sign of a buffer against the hard times Bill has always had to endure. The farmer wants Abby so that he may complete his life; he is dying and perhaps knows inside that his life is nothing without loving someone. These desires are understandable and justified until yearned for with a fervor that generates chaos and pain in another person’s life. Abby doesn’t desire with the intensity that the farmer and Bill do. She appears to be satisfied with whatever situation she finds herself in at any moment. Abby only partially wants to be a dancer; she expresses no other aspiration during the course of the film. At the beginning she is picking through scrap heaps in Chicago to help supplement Bill’s income. Abby slips as easily into the lifestyle the farmer provides — although it is not provided by the man she perhaps at first wanted. Of note is the moment when Bill returns to the farm after a long absence and sees Abby on the back porch of the house dancing. Bill at that moment must realize that he has failed to provide for Abby the things he wanted for her and that she has fully accepted the farmer as her husband. Her gradual progression from one conviction to another tells of her flexible nature, her free-flowing spirit.

These desires appear to have an opportunity for success or failure for the three main characters within the microcosm of the wheat field setting. Along with the beauty of the 20,000 acres of wheat field, the farmer’s house stands as a full-sized doll house in the middle of a playground for the imagination; a paradise, a heaven. After the harvest is completed and Abby has decided on the farmer’s invitation to stay, the farmer, Abby, Bill and Linda do more playing than work. During this time the characters chose for the most part to ignore their goals and enjoy the simple life in each other’s company. Linda says, “In my opinion, as long as you’re around, you should have it nice.” Soon, however, the unfulfilling unsavoryness of the situation begins to prey on the minds of both Bill and the farmer. Abby’s happiness is the common concern of both men, though they are unaware of the selfishness of their desires deep inside. Abby becomes an undeclared prize neither can win, and when this becomes apparent the dreamland playground disintegrates.

The main characters of Days of Heaven all have objective correlatives — as Richard Corliss has observed in his review (New Times, 2 October 1978) — and, in fact, each member of the love triangle has more than one. Abby’s obvious correlative is the herd of wild horses seen in the background as she contemplates the proposition Bill has made for her about marrying the farmer. In this sequence Abby is also seen against the background of her elemental correlative: water, as in the scene when Bill bathes Abby’s legs in the river; and when she and Bill go to the river on their midnight tête-à-tête. We must interpret the significance of both correlatives in order to reach an insight into Abby’s nature. What seems immediately characteristic is freedom. Water, in the form of the river, flows on without surcease. It can be directed, as Abby is directed by Bill’s pressure to marry the farmer for his money, but it continues to flow. The wild horses roam on the farm uninhibited.

It would seem that though the farmer is associated with animals (his horse and dogs) it is simply an extension of the farmer’s earthly sensibilities that Linda, whose elemental correlative is earth, recognizes and is sympathetic to. Abby’s freedom becomes apparent in the closing moments of the film as she leaves Linda in a girl’s home and boards a train to points unknown; starting over again seemingly unencumbered by grief for Bill and the farmer.

Bill’s objective correlative is the Machine, which he seems destined to work with all his life. He is often seen working near a steam thresher, or against a background of steam tractors. He is later associated with his bright red motorcycle. Bill’s elemental correlative is obviously fire. It is present when we first see him in the mill as he is stoking a furnace. All the machinery Bill is associated with utilizes fire to function; furnaces, steam tractors, the motorcycle. It is fire that sweeps through the wheat fields, destroying the crop and thus the farmer’s fortune, and this tragedy is foretold in the fire at the dance. Abby agrees to stay on with the farmer and the two of them dance around the fire. We see a shot of Bill watching them through the fire; he turns to leave the dance and a log that has been in the foreground of the shot falls into the fire in a shower of flaming sparks.

In the destruction of the wheat field, it is important to note that it is not instigated by Bill but by exterior aggression. All the fights we see involving Bill are started by others; the steel mill foreman, the sacker who starts a fight by making suggestive comments about Bill and Abby’s relationship, and the farmer setting the big fire with his lantern. This suggests Bill is not an aggressive force himself, but rather has low tolerance for suppressive forces of aggression around him. This makes Bill’s character more worthy of admiration and pity. We feel that Bill should be handled as one handles fire. Note that when Bill and the farmer are fowl hunting and Bill is contemplating shooting the farmer, he cannot quite bring himself to do it. Bill’s correlatives converge in the burning wheat field sequence; one shot shows a tractor slowly plowing through flaming debris apparently as out of control as the fire itself.

The windmill generator atop his house with which he is so often seen is a clue to the farmer’s elemental correlative: air, or wind. The wind is as omnipresent in Days of Heaven as the farmer is through his property. The sheer size of the farmer’s spread should humble the likes of Bill, as the farmer’s gradual absorbing of Abby humbles Bill, but instead it fires desire in him. Bill has no ambitions for tumbling the farmer from his position, only to be present when the eventual death of the farmer makes his fortune up for grabs. Such a thing could be the “big score” Bill mentions to the farmer, the one he thought was always coming when he was younger. Only through the injection of the elemental and social chaos represented by Bill does the farmer get brought down. When Bill has returned to the farm after his absence and the farmer observes Abby and Bill together, not knowing it is a moment of farewell between them, he interprets this as a direct threat to his happiness and marriage. The farmer’s jealousy, and concern for keeping that which he considers no man can take away, can only fan an unwanted flame. As Linda notes about Bill: “He seen how it was — she loves the farmer.” It is the farmer, not Bill, who instigates an act of vengeance. When the wheat field has caught fire, the farmer confronts Abby — he realizes he has been betrayed — but his anger and jealousy prevent him from seeing that Abby truly has fallen in love with him. The farmer accuses Abby of being a liar and ties her to a porch post of the house; what he in essence doing is tying her to himself.

As Linda, Bill and Abby drift down the river Linda notes, “Nobody’s perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just got half devil and half angel in you.” We all have the same capacity for good and evil, and it is this sensibility that runs ture through Days of Heaven. There are many references to angels and devils, Heaven and Hell in the film, not the least important of which Linda mentions in her narration of the train ride to the farm: that a fellow named Ding Dong said one day the earth will be consumed in flames, the “people going to Heaven are gonna escape all that.” Also that “If you’re bad, God don’t even hear you.” The farm is symbolically changed from a heaven into a hell in the course of the film. When Bill, Abby and Linda arrive at the farm, they ride through what can be considered the gate of a heaven. When they leave the farm, after the destruction of the wheat field and the death of the farmer, they can be considered to be riding, in the reversal of the original shot, through the smouldering gates of a hell. Perhaps in fleeing in a boat, the characters can be viewed as floating down the River Styx. The farmer tells Abby, “You’re like an angel.” She replies, “I wish I was.” Guilt from crumbling morality effects Bill and Abby, most particularly. While the flying circus is visiting and the pressure between Bill and the farmer is ready to give way, Linda senses a rise in the spooky feeling of invading evil; “I think the Devil was on the farm. He just sits there laughing while the snakes eat all your systems out.” Linda might possibly be speaking of the farmer, who is gradually being blinded by his jealousy. Abby tells Bill when he is pressuring her to marry the farmer, “You never used to be like this.” And the farmer later says nearly the same thing to Abby, “Why are you so uneasy with me? Seems like I don’t know you.” Though Abby is burdened by guilt from the farmer’s death, she is somehow purged of her guilt in Bill’s death. The secret is perhaps hinted at in the shots following the fire. A tall white bird stands alive on the charred ground. Next year there will be new wheat to cover the burnt area. Note that there is still an abundance of life present in the film after the deaths of the farmer and Bill. There are people on the shores of the river, people on the streets in the town, with bands playing while Abby is waiting for the train that will take her away.

Days of Heaven is a succesful exercise in shorthand storytelling, yet we still know what has been said before. We witness key sections of each conversation, each decision. Sometimes an entire scene has been reduced to a single sentence that, in context, has all the richness of a longer scene. Sometimes shots negate any need for explanatory dialogue. A case in point is the scene where Gere returns to the farm on a motorcycle. He sees a bicycle leaned against the steps of the front porch, the wind blowing through the leaves, then the front doors, the right-hand door slightly ajar. These three shots establish elegantly that life on the farm has gone on as usual without Gere’s presence.

At important times in the characters’ development two actors rarely share a shot. Note especially when Shepard asks someone off camera if they know anything about Adams. Also when Shepard asks Adams why she is uneasy around him; we see only her face in close-up and Shepard’s hand and chest. A similar shot of Adams occurs when she and Gere have run out to the river at night and are discussing their initial attraction to each other.

There is great beauty in the way Malick and Nestor Almendros set up a shot; the movement of busy workers in the background as Gere and Adams talk; the symmetry, the balance of the shot of the sitting room where Gere wanders through the house, the wagon out the center window now in view; the exquisite shot of Linda Manz watching the train take her friend away, the sun setting behind her; the important shot of Bill and the farm foreman (Robert Wilke), best men at the wedding of Abby and the farmer; the shot of the crew of workers at sundown walking in from the fields; the gracefulness of the airplanes taking off from the farm, and their sleek path through the frame, balanced by the placement of people and background of the house.

The remarkable binding factor of Days of Heaven is Linda’s narration of the story. Linda Manz’s voice, accent and phrasing are beautiful. She is a remarkable observer, being at times insightful, at others comical. Linda’s musings on the river shore people, on Bill and Abby, on her friend (Jackie Shultis), on the farmer, and her own feeling, carry the story along, keeping it from getting heavy-handed. Her thoughts on being a “mud doctor” and on talking to the wheat patches and how they talk to her at night in her dreams are all wonderful, as is the moment she is feeling a little sorry for the farmer because he didn't have anyone to hold him when he needed someone.

If I may take a line of Linda’s out of context to explain how I feel about the film, “It’s good. I like it.”