For a directorial debut, Badlands is quite an achievement. In this crime story, Martin Sheen plays Kit, a twenty-something garbage man in small-town South Dakota. Sissy Spacek plays the waifish and homely-looking Holly, a 15-year old girl living with her father and pet dog. Kit meets Holly, and they strike up a friendship that develops into something more. When Holly’s father tells Kit he forbids him from seeing his daughter, the trigger-happy Kit shoots him point blank. The lovers run away together and live a Thoreau-esque existence in the woods, raising chickens and hunting for food. But when three men find their whereabouts, Kit shoots them too.

They take off towards Montana, with the duo committing murders along the way. Nothing fazes Kit; he imagines himself as James Dean – rebellious, misunderstood, alienated. But from what? Unlike Dean’s movie characters, Kit doesn’t know what he’s being alienated against, and as for being misunderstood, he doesn’t give us the slightest hint that there is anything TO understand. He’s rebellious because, well, he just doesn’t have anything else to do. Maybe this is what Malick intended, but I didn’t like the fact that there wasn’t an explanation for Sheen’s lifeless character. He’s an empty shell who kills not even because he wants to, but because people just happen to get in his way.

As for Miss Holly, she, like Kit, is also empty inside. Most of the background information we learn about each character is told through Holly’s banal voice-overs. As much as I like narration (especially narration of thoughts, like in Wings of Desire or Elevator to the Gallows), this was a bit of an over-kill. Holly’s prosaic character wasn’t very convincing to me either; her lack of concern for Kit’s victims, especially her own father, was more confusing than it was shocking. Her indifference towards the murders did make me feel uncomfortable though: it is what she does not do that makes the murders more harrowing. However, there wasn’t enough evidence of Holly’s love for Kit or for anything to justify her standing by him throughout his killing spree. She was completely uninterested, and I gradually became uninterested in her.

All in all, I do appreciate Malick’s immense talent. His filming style is unique and the cinematography is this movie just beautiful. But is Badlands as multi-textured and deceptively complex as some make it out to be? Not quite. Perhaps I am too naïve to fully understand this film. Or maybe it really is that empty.