Dave-369

Egoyan's breakthrough work bears too much resemblance to his earlier (and more pretentious) films to be entirely rewarding. Egoyan's first forays into movie-making were so concerned with form that they forgot to be interesting. Sure, the guy goes to a strip joint out of nostalgia. Sure, you don't know that until the end. Who honestly cares?

The first time I saw this movie, I fell asleep--but I don't blame the movie at all. I was tired. Before I fell asleep, I found it frustrating and oblique. But when I woke up, suddenly the dream logic of the movie seemed to make sense. Then I saw it again.

Often compared to Eraserhead, I think this movie has much, much more to offer than Lynch's first feature. Institute Benjamenta doesn't have any kind of decoder...in fact, it refuses any. Filmed in a hazy, drowsy black-and-white, with scenes of flat, if surreal, simplicity, interspersed with dreamy, nonsensical interludes, it must be accepted before it can be enjoyed.

I've heard the word "mythic" tossed around a lot in comments about Terrence Malick's work, and I think it may hit the mark as well as any. Anything, any image, that takes on a meaning greater than what is there explicitly, any image that is more than the sum of its parts, could be called mythic. Some critics of this movie turn a blind eye to its myth-making, and write it off as another lesson in the banality of evil...which makes some sense: Martin Sheen kills with as little affect as Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. But, like the characters in the movie, Malick seems much more concerned with the ride than with the destination. The movie doesn't seem to be pushing a message as pushing a medium. Really, the film splits into three parts: the actions of the character (the plot), the images through which their actions are told, and the precocious, dizzyingly wrong-headed narration of Sissy Spacek. Her words whitewash their adventures in dime-store novel romance, and the images of nature are so stunningly photographed that you almost forget what's going on in the foreground. But it's the very mismatching that makes a myth out of a massacre. And the sublime sequence when the two build a mansion of a tree-house in the woods looked like something out of One Hundred Years of Solitude in its absurd, self-contained logic. And there's also an absurd beauty to the scene when Martin Sheen shoots his friend with a shotgun, only to hold the screen door for him when he needs help inside. Badlands is based on a true murder spree, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing that it gave Malick the inspiration to write the movie. A curse that he's doomed to end it as it actually ended. Although the end is almost as inspired as the rest of the movie, I sensed that it was also a little restrained. Regardless, Badlands is a movie unto itself, and anyone who places it under the same heading as Bonny and Clyde or another semi-surreal crime movie, has missed something along the way. It shouldn't be watched for the message, but for the myth.