Badlands

Saw Badlands (thanks, Steve!) It was like the picnic scene from Bonnie and Clyde (67) stretched out to 90 minutes. Full of strange poignant moments, it celebrates the idea of the outlaw, though not the reality. It was deliberate but not boring, full of steady shots and declarative voice-over from the Bonnie character that is lyrical and slightly opaque. The pair seems to drift into a life of crime, going on the lam because it is the most logical next step, rather than because of any desire for notoriety or anything like that. In another life, they both might have been perfectly happy and law abiding.

The film is directed Terrence Malick, of recent Tree of Life fame. I'd only seen his film The New World which I found also deliberate, but sleepier than this one. The wild beauty of nature is on great display and after the pair go on the road, the film becomes almost a series of vignettes. It neither glamorizes nor condemns the pair, eschewing their growing notoriety and their daily struggles in favor of documenting their idle time and their half-understood (and high-school-ishly half-developed) inner lives.

Unfortunately, though I enjoyed the film there's not much I can easily grab on to to tease it apart. There was only one concrete thing I didn't understand and that was the fish on the bedside table near the beginning of the film. There's a catfish on the nightstand. I've no idea why. Apart from that uncharacteristic absurdity, this film is too amorphous for me to attack. I don't know why but it leaves me feeling confused and pleasantly unsettled, as though I'd seen a magic trick. If I hadn't just seen a good movie, I'd be pretty aggravated at the failure of my powers of analysis.