Amazon.com Essentials:
Still one of American cinema's most powerful, daring
filmmaking debuts, Terrence Malick's Badlands is a quirky,
visionary psychological and social enigma masquerading as a simple
lovers-on-the-lam flick. Inspired by the 1958 murders in the cold,
stark badlands of South Dakota by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann
Fugate, the film's plot, on the surface, is similar to that of other
killing-couple films, like
Bonnie and Clyde
and Gun
Crazy. Martin Sheen, in an understated, sophisticated
performance, plays the strange James Dean-like social outcast who
falls in love with the naïve Sissy Spacek--and then kills her father
when he comes between them. The two flee like animals to the
wilderness, until the police arrive and the killing spree begins.
What sets the film apart from others of its genre is Malick's
complicated approach. Gorgeous, impenetrable images contrast sharply
with Spacek's nostalgically artless narration, serving as ironic
counterpoints, blurring concrete meaning, and stressing that nothing
this horrific is simple. Malick observes, rather than analyzes, the
couple in a manner as detached and apathetic as the couple's shocking
actions. No judgment or definitive motivations are offered, though
Malick's empathy often leans toward his senseless protagonists, rather
than the star-struck society that makes killers famous. Compared with
the interchangeable uniform cops who hunt them and the film's other
nameless characters stuck in suburban banality, the couple are
presented like tarnished, warped and frustrated results of squelched
individuality.
Badlands, on one level, views America's suffocating homogeneity
and, conversely, its continued obsession with celebrities (individuals
considered different but adored) as hypocritical. Ambiguous and bold,
the movie hints that society may be as guilty as the killers.
--Dave McCoy
