Badlands (1973)

Directed by Terrence Malick. Starring Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates, Ramon Bieri, John Carter, Alan Vint, Gary Littlejohn. [PG]

Remorseless yet lyrical study of love, death, violence, crime, arrested development and uncertainty, reaching for meaning in meaninglessness and coming back with the sort of dry irony that may speak volumes to some, and say nothing at all to others. Bleak and cut to the quick, first-time writer/director Malick follows a lovers-on-the-lam structure, but the passion is juvenile and the killing is frigid, and the lead characters always look on the verge of being swept up into the remote Midwestern/Mountain West scenery. Sheen and Spacek are Kit and Holly, a shiftless antisocial greaser lookin’ like James Dean and an underage freckle-faced baton-twirler who fall for each other quickly and take off across the Montana badlands after he shoots her father (Oates), embarking on a sheltered hideaway “adventure” and statewide manhunt as it turns into a murder spree. They’re modeled off the real-life case of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but there’s no effort to explain their motives or psychology, and this is anything but a traditionally lurid crime thriller. It’s more concerned with desolate mood and mystique, banal amorality and fairy tale delusions, all of it as American as crab-apple pie. Sheen’s young sons, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, can be spotted as extras in an early scene, making it the film debuts for both.

92/100