“I got some stuff to say,” Kit says to Holly, in the first few minutes of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. “Guess I’m kinda lucky that way.” Released 50 years ago, Badlands is the violent, compulsive opening of Malick’s singular moviemaking life; he has spent that life directing films that demand seeing and re-seeing. For his part, Martin Sheen, who played Kit, describes the Malick effect for those fortunate enough to be susceptible to it as “a certain kind of lyricism that just strikes some deep part of you and that you hold on to.” For this reason, writing about any Malick film is strangely awkward. You feel his suspicion of having “some stuff to say.”
The director turns 80 this year. From the 1950s desert of Badlands to the 1916 Texas panhandle in Days of Heaven toward a culmination of sorts in 2005’s The New World––which makes the 1607 English arrival in Virginia and the romance of John Smith and Pocahontas into a tragic foundational myth—his films are both universal and wholly American. His debut starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as Kit and Holly, a young couple on a desperate, murderous ride across the Midwest.
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