Badlands
Director: Terrence Malick
Year: 1973
Plot Summary: Young lovers, Kit and Holly, go on a killing spree across towards the Badlands of Montana.
Malick's first debut remains one of cinema's finest moments almost 40 years after its release charting the road trip that Kit Carruthers, a young garbage collector, and his girlfriend, Holly Sargis, take towards the Badlands of Montana after killing Holly's father.
While the cinematography is what is usually the talking point of Malick's work, it's the characters in Badlands that take the centre stage. He instead invests a lot of time in the meaningless direction of Kit and Holly's life in Badlands as well as the loneliness of the former and the poverty of the latter.
Moreover, the innocence of Holly in contrast with the ruthlessness and detachment of Kit creates a spellbinding chemistry between the two characters. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Holly comforts one of Kit's victims by asking him about his pet spider as he bleeds to death from a bullet to the stomach. Similarly, the contrast is apparent between Holly's innocent, near childlike voiceover and the hinged dialogue that Kit spouts throughout the narrative.
Malick wonderfully uses the symbolism of dogs to convey this theme. In the opening scene, Holly sits alone in her bedroom and plays with her dog as a voiceover explains that her Dad never really noticed her. Moments later, Kit walks past a dead dog and looks at it like a scrap of litter on the street before joking about wearing it with a fellow bin man.
Badlands, therefore, unlike many stories about serial killers, refuses to romanticise the main character of Kit or justify his actions. In the words of Bruce Springsteen who wrote a song about Charles Starkweather, upon whom Kit is loosely based, "there's just a meanness in the world." Instead, Terrence Malick's drama is about the journey that Holly's innocence takes as she hits the road with Kit in a killing spree.
Martin Sheen's performance is spellbinding and is the finest of his career in Badlands. He perfectly captures the unhinged nature of Kit as well as the need to fit in, be loved and to chase the American Dream that he embodies. His vacant gazes help, moreover, to enforce the fascinatingly enigmatic nature of Kit, attracting you to analyse his every action in search for an insight into his complicated psyche.
However, it doesn't at any point feel like this movie is about killers as its tone and atmosphere is so poetic with the stark dialogue, open scenery and delicate score.
Malick is one of the best directors in cinema and his debut feature only confirms that. Badlands is a masterpiece.
5/5
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