richard gere

Days of Heaven (1978)

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One of the most beloved jokes among film people is the one about how everyone wishes that they could be like Terence Malick and take a twenty year vacation. This is a reference to the fact that Malick was so exhausted by the making of 1978’s Days of Heaven that he didn’t attempt to mount another film production until The Thin Red Line, which was released in 1998. The fact of the matter is that if this had been the last thing that Malick ever made, it would still be a masterpiece. With almost all of the film being shot during dawn and dusk, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful movies of all time, an almost impossibly staggering work of art. 

Bill (Richard Gere) is a manual laborer in a steel mill in Chicago in the mid 1910s. He has a temper, and when he knocks over a foreman during an argument and accidentally kills the man, he flees the city with his younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams). In order to avoid judgment and gossip for being an unwed couple, they pretend to all be siblings. They find themselves in the Texas panhandle, not far from Amarillo, and take on work as seasonal laborers at the farm of a wealthy but reclusive farmer (Sam Shepard). When Bill overhears that the farmer has been given a prognosis of only a few months, he convinces Abby to marry the man so that she can inherit his wealth when he dies and they can be set for life. Abby does so, reluctantly, but then finds herself actually falling for the farmer, while he in turn seems revitalized. Only the farmer’s trusted foreman (Robert Wilke) seems to think that anything’s amiss, but the farmer sends him off to another part of the huge ranch in a fit of pique. After a period of easy living, Abby and Bill get a little careless, and her husband starts to sense what’s happening. Before anything can really be done about it, Bill leaves the farm for a time, citing “business” elsewhere; he returns the following harvest at the same time as a new group of seasonal laborers, but a swarm of locusts isn’t far behind, and the attempts to burn them out only create more tribulation, with tragedy soon to follow. 

Narratively, Days of Heaven is a little thin. Famously, Malick decided late in the process to cut a great deal of the dialogue and instead let a voiceover from young Linda carry most of the exposition, along with her insights. In turn, the voiceover was largely ad-libbed, which lends the whole thing an unfinished, extemporaneous quality. It’s the thing that I like least in this film, even though it was, legendarily, the only way that he could think of to make the film work, so who am I to judge? Further, I would say that there are parts of the film in which the narration is to the film’s benefit; this is most obvious in the early scenes, as it establishes the characters and their relationships to one another. There’s also a good bit of foreshadowing built in when she talks about her encounter with a traveling hellfire-and-brimstone minister, which neatly sets up the fire at the farm at the end in particular but also the general biblical influences that are found throughout, fitting for a film with “heaven” in the title. Like Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, a couple has to go into hiding and pretend to be siblings; like Jacob, Bill is kept from being with his beloved and forced to labor instead; like Moses, Bill survives a plague of locusts but never gets to enter the promised land because of the consequences of his temper. It’s relying on those associations to make the plot work, but that’s really not what’s important here. 

What matters are the feelings of longing, and the way that the photography captures that transitional space between day and night (and vice versa). Everybody here is in a constant state of utter yearning, and the way that this is caught on film is lightning in a bottle. I also can understand why that made this one a nightmare to create, with less than an hour a day of the perfect light. That craftsmanship is apparent in every frame, however, and it’s definitely worth seeing if you have the chance. I was fortunate enough to catch this one at my local arthouse cinema, and I would say it’s the best way to go about it. If that’s not an option for you, then you’re in luck; although the original 2007 Criterion release has been out of print for a long time, there’s a Blu-Ray pressing that’s currently available. 

I also don’t want to end this review without calling out Brooke Adams’s performance. I adore her as the mother to Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk in 1992’s Gas, Food, Lodging, and she’s also amazing as Sarah in Cronenberg’s Dead Zone adaptation. And who could forget her performance in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? In spite of all of those triumphs, this might be a career best performance for her, as she’s torn between the two men in her life. There’s a way that her face just breaks when she realizes that her world was never as solid as she thought it was when Bill’s temper gets the best of him for the last time, and it’s so subtle and so lovely. This is a slow one, but its reputation is as well-earned as Malick’s rest was.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

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The Broad Theater is currently screening a series of films programmed by Damien Echols, a formerly incarcerated member of the West Memphis Three (who were famously misconvicted of murder as teenagers at the tail end of the Satanic Panic era).  Echols kicked off the series with the early-aughts supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies, which he watched dozens of times while incarcerated, since it was among his wrongful prison’s severely limited media library.  It was Echols’s first time watching the film projected in a proper theater, and it was my first time watching it in any setting (besides catching out-of-context clips while flipping channels on broadcast TV).  Only one of us had a clear vision of what we were doing there.  Since his release from Death Row, Echols has pivoted into full-time promotion of ceremonial magick, a one-man religious crusade that has apparently expanded from books & blog posts to theatrical programming.  To him, The Mothman Prophecies is a spiritually significant work of populist art that uncovers some hidden truth about real-world magick, transcending the film’s more obvious commercial concerns.  In my jaded, agnostic eyes, it’s a well-made but largely unremarkable example of mainstream horror filmmaking in its era.  Seeing this anonymous PG-13 Studio Horror for the first time in such a reverent, religious context was (third) eye-opening, but less in the way it specifically reveals something about the mechanics of the universe than in the way Echols’s personal enthusiasm for it reveals the spiritual power of movies that happen to hit the right audiences at the right time.

There’s nothing specific to The Mothman Prophecies that you can’t find echoed elsewhere in mainstream cinema, so it’s tempting to discuss it entirely in terms of comparisons.  The most charitable comparison would be to call it The Sixth Sense meets The Empty Man, but given how generic it can feel from minute to minute, the more truthful one is Stir of Echoes meets The Bye Bye Man – those films’ Great Value equivalents.  Music video director Mark Pellington livens up the assembly line proceedings with some spooky excitement in the scene-to-scene transitions and titular Mothman visions, but his quick-edit visual style is so typical to 2000s studio filmmaking that his efforts just emphasize the movie’s overall anonymity.  There’s also something warmly nostalgic about its grand finale—a widespread disaster set piece in which a metal bridge collapses into the Ohio River—being staged through miniature modeling and other practical effects, since its modern equivalent would certainly be simulated in rushed-to-market CGI.  Even so, that says more about the time when it was made than it does about this movie specifically.  Every commendable detail of The Mothman Prophecies is a result of its effectiveness as an aughts era time capsule: its reliance on the star power of Hollywood hunk Richard Gere; its casual inclusion of tender sex scenes; its pre-torture porn tendencies towards subtlety, sincerity, and restraint.  The only context where the film should be cited as anything special is when padding out one of those “Christmas Movies That Aren’t Really Christmas Movies” lists that auto-populate every December to juice up the streaming numbers for Die Hard. 

That is, unless you’re Damien Echols, who has obviously found much deeper spiritual meaning in his record-setting repeat viewings of the film.  Echols explained that the characters’ visions of a winged “mothman” foretelling future disasters resonated with him as someone who has had similar visions of angels visiting his prison cell.  The Mothman figure is even described as an angel in his initial introduction, where illustrations of him are feverishly scribbled into a hospital patient’s bedside notebook in the exact art style you’d imagine in a mainstream horror of the era.  When Debra Messing is introduced as said hospital patient and—more significantly—Richard Gere’s wife, you instantly assume she will be fridged, because you have seen a movie before.  The Mothman Prophecies quickly obliges, freeing Gere to travel the country in search of the mythical Mothman who visited his wife in her final days.  Two years later, Gere inexplicably finds himself in small-town West Virginia while traveling elsewhere on assignment for his newspaper job, where he discovers that locals have been suffering the same Mothman phenomena that haunted Messing’s hospital room.  Even to the audience, the Mothman only appears as quick, hallucinatory visions, recalling Pellington’s music video background instead of a Roger Corman creature feature.  He’s more symbol than monster, and his appearance is merely an omen of impending natural & manmade disasters that Gere is helpless to prevent.  There’s a distinct terror in not knowing the whats, the whens, and the wheres of those disasters until it’s too late, and in having your vague Mothman-inspired warnings dismissed as lunatic rants, but that does little to compensate for how indistinct the film can feel elsewhere. 

Hearing Echols describe The Mothman Prophecies‘s accuracy to the magick of tuning in to the world beyond our material one was interesting, but I think it says more about how limited media access can add personal significance to all generic pop culture ephemera than it says about this movie in particular.  Practically every title that The Mothman Prophecies recalled to me in the moment—the supernatural visions of The Sixth Sense, the inescapable doom of Final Destination, the hallucinatory pavement lines of Lost Highway—were all released when Echols was incarcerated, making it unlikely that of all the movies in the world, those were the few he could’ve accessed in prison.  The other two selections in this ceremonial magick series at The Broad were produced after his release in 2011: the low-budget occultist horror A Dark Song and the ludicrous sci-fi novelty Lucy.  Since I’ve already seen those films, I believe my personal magick journey ends here.  In fact, I left early during Mothman‘s increasingly abstract, philosophical Q&A so I could catch the most convenient bus home.  Still, I appreciate the narrative progression that Echols has sketched out in this short program – from the initial inkling that there’s a world beyond this one in The Mothman Prophecies to the ritualistic magick practices of A Dark Song to the unlocked, all-powerful mental magick of Lucy.  In my mind, this series opener was the most unexpected, idiosyncratic choice of the three. It has endless competition that covers the same subject, so in a way it’s the most personal to the programmer behind it; there’s no other reason to single it out.  It was also just nice to see local goths out & about having a good time, as the audience appeared to be more fans of Echols’s brand of magick spiritualism than they were diehard Mothheads.  Others may have had a richer experience at that screening, but my biggest takeaway was that no one in the world is a bigger fan of The Mothman Prophecies than Damien Echols, since the circumstances of his fandom are so personally specific and the movie itself is so broadly generic.

-Brandon Ledet

Breathless (1983)

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The most impressive thing about the 1993 genre spoof Fatal Instinct is that it riffs on two genres at once.  1980s & 90s erotic thrillers were already such a direct photocopy of 1940s & 50s noir that it’s difficult to tell where one genre’s tropes end and the other’s begin in that Carl Reiner goofaround.  It turns out that Fatal Instinct had already been outdone by the 1983 remake of Breathless, though, which adds a whole other layer of post-modern cultural ouroboros to the noir nostalgia cycle.  Whereas Fatal Instinct is a disposable novelty that clowns about at the intersection of erotic thrillers & classic noir, Breathless makes an extra pit stop at Jean-Luc Godard’s doorstep to translate that genre overlap into high art – the very pinnacle of the artform, even.  If anything, the entire Hollywood noir experiment was only worthwhile so that it could be filtered through French New Wave art snobbery and then later perfected in this 80s pop art orgasm.  I’m only partially kidding.

I was surprised to swoon so hard for the 80s Breathless update, since the 1960 original didn’t exactly wow me when I saw it at the New Orleans French Film Fest in 2018.  I did appreciate the ways its flippant story of a womanizing car thief was blatantly influenced by American gangster pictures, filtered through a more casual, hands-on French New Wave aesthetic, then later filtered again through New Hollywood crime pictures like Bonnie & Clyde back in America, and the cycle goes on. I struggled at times with the poisonous machismo of the film’s chain-smoking antihero, though, even though he admits up front to being an asshole and most of the humor positions him as the butt of the joke. Even with all that self-deprecation, the movie thinks he’s a lot cooler than he is.  The original Breathless has a handheld, exciting immediacy to it that makes its place in the Important Movies canon immediately apparent, but it could easily be remade as a (hyperviolent) Pepé Le Pew cartoon, which was a huge turnoff for me at the time.

The remake doesn’t really do anything to soften or rehabilitate its party boy hedonist antihero other than casting a young, hot-to-trot Richard Gere in the role.  Somehow, that’s more than enough.  Gere’s performance as the heartbreaking, carjacking Jesse Lujack is just as much of a slimy little shit as Jean-Paul Belmondo was in the original, but he’s a thousand times cooler while smoking a thousand fewer cigarettes.  And maybe that’s just a result of my ignorant biases as an uncultured American.  This is the one American remake of a foreign art film I can name that out-performs its source material specifically because it is American.  Gere plays around with Silver Surfer comics, Jerry Lee Lewis cassette tapes, and loaded revolvers as American fetish objects, packaging his brash boyishness as a rock n’ roll cowboy routine – a young, dangerous, beautifully idiotic nation personified.  He makes total sense as a lethal object of desire, luring a French college student (Valérie Kaprisky) to ruin through his roadside-diner sex appeal.  Well, that and his muscular, naked body.

The Breathless remake is a post-modern pop art melt down.  You don’t need to hear the third-act Link Wray needle drop to know Tarantino drooled all over this in his formative years as a pop-culture obsessed video store clerk.  It dresses up 1950s jukebox rock in the sneers & plaids of 1980s punk.  Before Gere starts fiddling with his library of cassettes in a stolen Cadillac, it’s not even clear what decade we’re in.  Is the Argento crosslighting of the dive-bar neons supposed to feel modern & fresh, or is it a throwback to the rock n’ roll diners of old?  Is this more of an erotic 80s update to the Godard original, or a colorized echo of the noir films that inspired it?  You can’t mistake the country it’s set in for any other place in the world, though.  As much as the 1960s Breathless was in love with American crime pictures as the pinnacle of the artform, its 1980s remake was the real deal – truly American in all the best & worst ways, and truly the height of cinema.

Full disclosure: I had already written and scheduled this review before it was announced that Jean-Luc Godard had died at 91-years-old. I’m noting that timeline just to make it clear that I did not post this as some kind of gotcha putdown of a great artist who recently passed. If anything, it speaks to Godard’s influence on the medium of filmmaking that his work was already on the tip of some amateur, genre-nerd blogger’s tongue before his name was in the daily headlines.

-Brandon Ledet