Badlands
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Badlands
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1993.
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Badlands is a 1973 American neo-noir period crime drama film written, produced, and directed by Terrence Malick, in his directorial debut. The film stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, and follows Holly Sargis (Spacek), a 15-year-old who goes on a killing spree with her lover, Kit Carruthers (Sheen); the film also stars Warren Oates and Ramon Bieri. While the story is fictional, it is loosely based on the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in 1958.
Badlands was released in 1973 to positive reviews from critics, who particularly praised its cinematography, soundtrack—which includes pieces by Carl Orff—and the lead performances. At the 49th British Academy Film Awards, Spacek was nominated for the Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles award; at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, Sheen won the Best Actor award.
Why It Rocks
- Despite the characters being fictional, and the film taking numerous liberties with the factual record (such as Starkweather in real life killing both of Fugate's parents and not just her father), it still captures a pretty accurate sense of the Charles Starkweather-Carol Fugate murder spree through the Midwest in 1958. The film's take on the story wasn't tied to facts, but it's very stark and brutal about its content.
- Incredible performances by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as the two major leads with the film being important for both of them. For Sheen, he had done a lot of television acting, but this was his first important feature, and Spacek, it was her second movie. Martin Sheen's performance as Kit Carruthers paints him as a killer lashing out against a society that ignores his existence. He's forceful and properly weird as the mass murderer, strutting around pretending to be James Dean, while Sissy Spacek's character Holly Sargis is a naive teenage consort who doesn't quite understand what he's all about but goes along anyway.
- There's a rather unique approach to narrative as the film neither romanticizes nor condemns the major characters, maintaining a low-key approach to the story that results in a fascinating character study. By intentionally using trite narration with an emotionless voiceover by Sissy Spacek, refusing to dramatize the story's violence, and equating the killers to cycles in nature, the director seems to paint Kit and Holly as sympathetic and/or innocent, suggesting they were a natural outgrowth of the 1950s. They were taking their hero worship of James Dean -- and of movies and pop culture in general -- to its logical conclusion (inspired by comics that lack the consequences of violence, rock songs they don't know how to dance to, and a sense of rebellion tied to nothing and everything).
- Unlike most "couples on the run" films where the runaways are portrayed as lovers, or as victims of capitalism, society, or sexual dysfunction, here nothing and nobody is responsible for the killers being who they are, and they're indifferent to their fate. The film also never gives the duo backstories, so the audience sees them as shown onscreen.
- Beautiful cinematography, as usual with a Terrence Malick film. Nature always plays a major role in Malick's films as there tends to be vast detail of animals, fields, trees, skies, and the like, which especially gets put on full display in a road movie such as this.
The Only Bad Quality
- The film will not appeal to everyone with its insane amount of violence that may shock some people, or the film's languid pacing and digressive style which will no doubt bore a fair amount of viewers.