Rating: PG
Genre:
Crime
Release Date: 04/27/1999
SubTitles: English/French
Dubbed: English/French
Sound: 5.1/1/2
Run Time: 95 Minutes
Flags: Violence, Not For Children, Profanity
Distributor/Studio: Warner Home Video
"He wanted to die with me and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms." A young couple goes on a Midwest crime spree in
Terrence Malick's hypnotically assured debut feature, based on the 1950s Starkweather-Fugate murders. Fancying himself a rebel like
James Dean, twentysomething
Kit (
Martin Sheen) takes off with teen baton-twirler
Holly (
Sissy Spacek) after shooting her father (
Warren Oates) when he tries to split the pair up. Once bounty hunters discover their riverside hiding place,
Kit and
Holly head toward Saskatchewan, leaving dead bodies in their wake. As the law closes in, however,
Holly gives herself up -- but
Kit doesn't hold it against her, as he basks in his new status as a momentary folk hero. Inaugurating the use of voice-over narration that he would continue in
Days of Heaven (1978) and
The Thin Red Line (1998),
Malick juxtaposes
Holly's flat readings of her flowery romance-novel diary prose with the banal and surreal details of their journey. Singularly inarticulate with each other,
Kit and
Holly are more intrigued by mythic celebrity gestures, as
Holly peruses her fan magazines and
Kit commemorates key moments before orchestrating a properly dramatic capture for himself (complete with the right hat). The sublime visuals lend a dreamlike beauty to the couple's trip even as their actions are treated casually;
Malick neither glamorizes
Kit and
Holly nor consigns them to the bloody end of their fame-fixated predecessors in
Bonnie and Clyde (1967). With the couple's opaque dialogue and
Holly's fanzine dream narration,
Malick further denies an easy explanation for their crimes. Made for under 500,000 dollars,
Badlands debuted at the
1973 New York Film Festival, along with
Martin Scorsese's
Mean Streets, and was released within months of two other outlaw-couple
road movies,
Steven Spielberg's
The Sugarland Express and
Robert Altman's
Thieves Like Us. Although
Badlands did not make an impression at the box office, its pictorial splendor and cool yet disquieting narrative established
Malick as one of the most compelling artists to come out of early-'70s Hollywood.
~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
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