6/140
Just one of the many films on my list of 140 that I'm embarrassed at not having seen, watching this forty years after the fact its resonance and influence are obvious.
While parts of it are recognisably Malick in their slow, dreamy pace and measured cinematography I was surprised (and impressed) by the taut, lean narrative. Once Kit's fired his first shot he and Holly are hurtling towards disaster with barely a backwards glance and the film follows them closely without once dwelling on the corpses they leave behind (because Kit doesn't).
It did jar slightly that Holly is so impassive and relatively unruffled by the shooting of her father, but in Malick's words "she isn't indifferent about her father's death... she just wouldn't dream of telling you about it. It wouldn't be proper". She's an unreliable narrator, as Malick says "an innocent involved in a drama over [her] head" and her every voice-over segment is laced with dry irony.
The now typically Malick visual style comes to the forefront by the middle of the film, when Kit and Holly maroon themselves in the middle of nowhere like the Swiss Family Robinson and Holly gets a brief taste of her idea of a fairy tale romance.
Sheen is brilliant as Kit, the wannabe James Dean (in fairness, looking the part) who's enigmatic, inscrutable and unpredictable. He's an arbitrary and dangerous anti-hero - vain, charming and, as is made clear in the film's final act, utterly empty. Despite the trail of destruction wrought by Kit and Holly (and their looming, inevitable fate) the sense throughout is one of calm. Kit is the eye of the storm, it's everyone else who's going frantic.
In Jon Ronson's book "The Psychopath Test", he argues that although Kit seems more like our mental image of a psychopath, most psychopaths are more like Holly - just totally unaware that anything has gone wrong.
I watched "Giant" specifically so that I could get the James Dean references in this. That was, like, THREE HOURS just to get the five second shot of Dean with the rifle across his shoulders like Kit in the poster. Giant wasn't exactly bad, but I probably wouldn't recommend bothering.
I have yet to read the Psychopath Test, it's in a pile of books on my bedside table nearly as big as the list of films I've got to watch. That's a really interesting point. Malick's quoted opinion on Holly doesn't quite tell the full story - one of the most striking things about the film is her denial and total lack of analysis. Most 15 year old girls would ask a few more questions.
Isn't the image of Dean with the rifle across his shoulders the cover image for the DVD release of 'Giant'? I certainly recognised it and I haven't seen the film. Could have saved you three hours, there.
Quite possibly. The only information I can add is that a VERY SMALL amount of screen time is spent with James Dean doing that gun thing. It's pretty tangential to the plot, in fact.