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The only things more alarming than Duel's vacant desert are the used-car lots, drive-ins, fried-chicken diners, and centrifugal, arrested energy that here fill its spaces. "Nothin' but a couple of kids" on the run, the distraught mother (Goldie Hawn) who bullies her husband (William Atherton) out of jail to retrieve their toddler from the foster home, a tour of Texas with fumblingly hijacked patrol car and trooper (Michael Sacks). "You got a strange notion on how to hitchhike." The motorcade proceeds with the police captain (Ben Johnson) and his caravan of deputies behind them, the Fordian horizon is recreated so a pair of eager yahoos can race into a burnt-orange sunset. Steven Spielberg's Badlands, with dolly and zoom and a wagonload of familial issues. Astonishingly kinetic, full of screen movement continuously heightened by camera movement—people scramble to try out their wheels and the young virtuoso tracks alongside them, in the back seat of a speeding car he turns 360° while dialogue unspools on the radio. The restlessness finally (and purposefully) unsettles, as it's the agitation of stunted children in a landscape of dead-end jamborees and disappointed, impotent parents. "To settle down like real folks" is a fantasy, Johnson's paternal cowboy cannot prevent the violence. Hawn compulsively collects Gold Stamps (cf. the boy and his labels in Catch Me if You Can), the couple's transitory sanctuary is the motor home where they watch Roadrunner cartoons. (When the Coyote plunges into the precipice, the image freezes along with Atherton's smile.) Morons with shotguns, "a wrong turn in life," the Wilder carnival (Ace in the Hole). Still raw and hungry, Spielberg pushes the fable of parental devotion to brackish limits: The heroine's brassiness erupts into hysteria and then catatonia, the bleeding husband has a final moment of clarity ("My wife's so loud"). Eastwood in A Perfect World offers a calm revision. Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. With Steve Kanaly, Gregory Walcott, Merrill Connally, and Louise Latham.
--- Fernando F. Croce |