Badlands

Terrence Malick is well known for being one the more reclusive personalities in the movie business. We have placed his most recent movie Tree of Life on our Netflix queue so when this movie appeared on television I decided it was a good chance to see another Malick flick.

Released in 1973 Malick's first film starred Martin Sheen as Kit a rebellious greaser type and Sissy Spacek as Holly, a teenage girl who becomes his girlfriend. Kit, as the movie begins, is working on a garbage route but then decides that is not for him as, as after meeting Holly who tells him that her father would not approve of her seeing a boy who works on a garbage truck.

Of course Holly's Dad would not approve of her dating a man ten years her senior, which at 25 Kit is. This does not stop the couple, they are soon finding places to meet in secret. Soon after their relationship becomes advanced Holly's father finds out and punishes her by keeping her home and not allowing her to see Kit. Kit goes to Holly's house one day to gather her things together, presumably to prepare for them to run off together, but is interrupted by Holly's father. As the man yells at Kit and goes to call the police Kit calmly shoots him. Kit is certainly a psychopath, he shows no emotion when he kills him, and Holly, under his spell, has a muted reaction herself.

Now on the run they move into the woods until they are spotted and a posse shows up. The movie is narrated by Holly who by talking in romantic notes about Kit and his reasoning for what he does provides a severe contrast to what we, as viewers, see on the screen. Kit continues to run, Holly becomes more and more ambivalent about their future, but still speaks lovingly of him as the body count rises.

The movie was loosely based on the Starkweather murders of the fifties, the same murders that set the scene for Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. Still the movie is fiction as the stories are not the same and while Holly in the movie eventually gets probation and Caril Ann Fugate, Starkweather's accomplice, served a long prison term.

Sheen and Spacek are top notch in the movie, Sheen especially adept at playing a killer so personally attractive with so much charisma that the police officer's who arrest him all shake his hand as they give him up to the South Dakota policemen who have come to extradite him. Malick shoots the film beautifully and one can easily see why right away he was known as a Director and Film Producer to watch. Malick has made fewer movies than one would expect, and his movies are rarely big hits. He does not do the most accessible movies but this one, despite the dark material, will hold you.

Not a great movie, but a very good one.