The story seems Biblical, and it's not just the plague of grasshoppers making me say that. It's 1916. Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are lovers who present themselves as brother and sister. They travel west with Bill's odd sister Linda (Linda Manz), fleeing a crime committed by Bill. They end up on a farm in Texas owned by a man who goes unnamed (Sam Shepard), helping with the harvest. The farmer falls in love with Abby, and Bill, with the knowledge that the farmer is dying, convinces her to marry him. When he doesn't die, and Abby starts to love him, Bill leaves the farm with an air circus (really). He returns for the next harvest, but the farmer suspects that Bill and Abby are too friendly to be siblings. A plague of grasshoppers descends to ruin the farm, and the farmer's anger at Bill and Abby explodes into rage, leading to the destruction of the farm and a murder. It's an Old Testament punishment, but for what? For Bill and Abby's illicit love, or their defrauding of the kindhearted farmer? Perhaps it's for the farmer cheating death. Perhaps it's a sort of take on Genesis: the farm is paradise, and Bill and Abby's actions make them unworthy to stay.

The events of the film are narrated by Linda Manz. It's not your usual narration. She doesn't inform you of character motivation or fill you in on details of plot or backstory. She doesn't offer filler. Instead, she remarks, in her own odd way, her outsider's take on what's going on. She doesn't understand the specifics of what's going on with the adults in her life, but she understands the feelings. She knows when she's happy, and she knows when her brother is, and she understands why he acts the way he does. Sometimes she chats about nothing, but it sneaks up on you, like when she predicts a fiery apocalypse. Some of her words are surprising: late in the film, as she sits on a boat watching people on the shore, she comments that she can't tell what they are doing. "They were probably calling for help or something—or they were trying to bury somebody or something." This melancholy saturates the film, which is infused with a pervasive sense of loss. Even the "days of heaven" of the first half of the film are weighed with the certainty that this, too, must end. Bill tells Linda early on, as they flee Chicago, "Just got to get fixed up first. Things aren't always gonna be this way." She doesn't really believe him, and neither do we.

Richard Gere at first struck me as the wrong person for this film. There are some people who just don't look like they could exist in certain historical settings. Gere doesn't look like he belongs. Quickly, though, he made me forget my ambivalence. This is Gere in his angry young man phase, and the way he struts around, dressed to the nines despite his poverty, fits the character perfectly. Bill is "tired of livin' like the rest of 'em, nosing around like a pig in a gutter," according to Linda. He's not a bad person, just impulsive. The waiting game that he must play, waiting for the farmer to die, doesn't suit him. Playwright Sam Shepard, in his acting debut, is perfect as the farmer. He's completely natural in the role, never stretching or seeming to "act." He's a simple man who just wants to share his good fortune with Abby. Linda Manz is an odd one. Her angular face and gravelly voice made it difficult at first for me to tell whether she was a boy or a girl. Her narration is the driving force of the movie.

Well, no, the driving force of the movie, and the most noticeable feature, is the heartbreakingly beautiful cinematography. Every shot is suitable for framing. It is among the most beautiful films I have ever seen. What makes the plague scenes so horrifying is their utter difference from what came before—it is like God has cast down a blight upon paradise. The film was shot almost entirely during the "magic hours" around dawn and dusk, and the images glow like oil paintings. The photography is credited to Nestor Almendros, who won a much-deserved Oscar for this film. However, there's the issue of Haskell Wexler's credits listing as "additional photography." Wexler claims to have shot more than half of the film, but studio politics led to his demotion in the credits.

This film was Terrence Malik's second: he had directed the wonderful Badlands in 1973, then this one, then he disappeared for 20 years, returning with the disappointing The Thin Red Line. In his first two films, he showed a genius for depicting the desperation of Americans at the edges of society, against the beautiful and seemingly unlimited backdrop of the American West. These films share many of the same themes as Westerns, in that they are about marginal people who seek freedom and a new start in the West, only to have the forces of society assert themselves.