Days of Heaven-Greg Weinstein

Days of Heaven is one of the most beautifully shot films I have ever seen. It truly rises to its' title acting like the characters really are in heaven. To borrow from another famous film, if someone asked, "Is this heaven?", I would reply with "No, this is Texas." The grand scale of the farm mixed with the time of day in which the movie was shot creates this almost ironic sense of the story as two of our main characters have no place being in such a beautiful place. Back in Detroit, Bill kills his boss or someone, we never really get any explanation at all, and you sense that they would now get this new start in Texas, especially when you see the scene of the trail of people and horses crossing the real and metaphoric gates to the farm with the setting sun off in the distance, and one expects that they are home ready to be free, but it is apparently not in them to be copasetic with their place in life. As the narrative gets darker, so too does the scenery as we get more scenes at night with a darker setting sun before a swarm of locusts and fire set Heaven ablaze. It is then that you hear the narration from Linda and it hits you that although the story is set around this love triangle, the innocent kid who just gets dragged along with her brother is setting the scenes and filling in the loose ends that the sporadic narrative barely lets us grasp. And although her voice is annoying, although basically anything written in this story is annoying, you let it pass as its a way to see more of 'Heaven'.