Gun Crazy

By JAY COCKS

BADLANDS

Directed and Written by TERRENCE MALICK

This is a deadeyed, deadpan existential amorality play that has found a metaphor to make the 1950s come alive. At least it spins a superbly ironic fairy tale out of the emotional hibernation of those years in America, the simmering, collective detachment that could muffle hysteria and dull death.

The source material, unacknowledged, would appear to be the history of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who went on a murder binge in 1958 that resulted in the deaths of ten people in Nebraska and Wyoming. Their motives were mostly abstract. They were moved to the initial killing because they both resented Caril's family, but they just carried on from there. Like their counterparts in Badlands, neither showed any considerable remorse over what they had done. Starkweather, to borrow a phrase from the film, took the juice in 1959; Fugate is still in prison and hoping for parole.

The two protagonists of Badlands --Kit Carruthers, 25, and Holly Sargis, 15--are casual about everything. Holly chats pleasantly with the victims before Kit executes them with the same care and concern he might have for a loose shoelace. Kit and Holly could be called callous except that both of them are far distant from any recognizable emotion at all. They are pathologically detached, macabre mutations of their time.

It is a difficult problem to work a narrative out of numbness, but Terrence Malick, a former screenwriter making a fine start as a director, has solved it smoothly. Badlands is narrated by Holly in a swoony, slicked-up prose that rings with a sort of distorted familiarity. Her reveries are shaped and peopled by popular legend. Kit, to her, looks just like James Dean. Her reminiscences sound like a diary read to a blank wall. She recalls that her father kept his wedding cake in the freezer for ten years, and that after her mother's funeral he presented it to the yardman.

She sheds a desultory tear when Kit kills her father but becomes quickly absorbed in her relationship with her new, and first, boy friend. She draws a snug blanket of smarmy romanticism over everything. Hiding out in the countryside, Kit and Holly build a tree house and pretend they are pioneers. When they are discovered and Kit guns the intruders down, she watches it all as if he were bagging a couple of animals for supper.

Kit and Holly are two ends of a parenthesis around emptiness. They play at love--as if re-enacting the lyrics of some Hit Parade ballad--but remain remote from each other. Talking about their eventual capture, Kit is most concerned about whether he will still be alive enough, after the shootout, to hear the doctor pronounce him dead. They are both living out parallel fantasies of glory, and Malick tells their story in the language of their secondhand dreams. He thus leaves himself open to accusations of condescension to his characters, but Badlands, which can cut sharply, also has a sort of reluctant compassion for Holly and Kit. The poverty of their desensitized lives not only propels them but makes them true.

Badlands is excellently cast. Sissy Spacek is a thoroughly convincing Holly, Martin Sheen a superb Kit. He makes him a shabby, landlocked buccaneer, a psychotic pirate. Sheen conveys Kit's craziness so effectively because he does not ever act the madman; he is, instead, a disturbed man trying to act sane.

Malick, who is 30, is a protege of Arthur Penn, whom he thanks in the end credits and to whose Bonnie and Clyde he is indebted. Badlands, however, is very different in its sensibility -- chilly, savage and rueful. It might better be regarded less as a companion piece to Bonnie and Clyde than as an elaboration and reply. It is not loose and high-spirited. All its comedy has a frosty irony, and its violence, instead of being brutally balletic, is executed with a dry, remorseless drive.

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