The Nature of War
THE THIN RED LINE
Terrence Malick's return to filmmaking is everything you'd reasonably hope for - and more.
With Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel
Screenplay by Terrence Malick, based on the novel by James Jones
Directed by Terrence Malick
THE LAST 20 YEARS have been slightly more generous to Terrence Malick than he reasonably deserves. The shy, reclusive Texan - a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard, after which he attended film school - became a celebrated cinema artist when he made Badlands in 1973, Days of Heaven in 1978, and then nothing for 20 years, until the release right now of The Thin Red Line, a story of the Allied siege of the Pacific island of Guadalcanal early in World War II.
Badlands, which introduced us to Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, is a disturbing, enigmatic, great American film: The story of a young killer on the run in the 1950s, and the girl running with him, it's told with ghostly vision that presages the kill-for-thrill media and real-life culture of the late millennium. Days of Heaven, which helped to launch Richard Gere, is more beautiful than sage: It concerns a scam artist in the Heartland, his lover/accomplice, and an adolescent girl whose backwoods appearance contradicts her thick urban accent, and whose drab narrator's voice belies an ingenuous wisdom about human love and suffering.
Days of Heaven came along at a time when too many people couldn't distinguish between a great film and a great filmmaker. So it benefited from what had, by 1978, become the recognition that Badlands was the former and Malick was the latter. Then, Malick disappeared for 20 years, living in Texas, New York and Paris, and having the modest misfortune of returning to work with a war film in the year of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.
Certainly nobody expected The Thin Red Line to be better than Badlands, if only because our admiration of Malick's seminal film has evolved so much throughout the years of his long absence. Certainly Malick would not make another movie as ravishingly slender as Days of Heaven , which benefited from the good will of Badlands and suffered from a sophomore curse.
And so The Thin Red Line lives up to our reasonable expectations, and then surpasses them: Palpable with suffering and death, it sets up its themes and metaphors in the opening sequence and then plays them out against a relentless and dramatic re-envisioning of history. Tranquil, eloquent, horrifying, tense, and deeply, quietly moving, it's distinctly the work of its creator - a return that's just about everything we'd hoped for.
Most important of all, it reintroduces a filmmaker who's done something rare (made a great film), and who seems willing now to keep working: He's adapting Walker Percy's somber novel The Moviegoer, a perfect union of author and director, who both tell serene, anguished stories of human affliction.
The central figure in The Thin Red Line completes a trilogy of narrators in Malick's work. After the vacant reflections of Holly in Badlands, and the nascent awareness of Linda in Days of Heaven, he introduces us here to Witt (Jim Caviezel), an Army private who, when we first meet him, has gone AWOL on a Pacific island, where his tanned shirtless torso stands out among the black bodies of the Melanesian children, whom he gentle caresses in play and swims among in the clear blue sea.
"What's this war in the heart of nature?" Witt asks in his flat, Southern voice, as if dazed or wearied, and clearly not educated, despite his wan, sagacious reflections on the duplicitous human world. "Why does nature vie with itself? Is there an avenging power in nature, not one power but two?"
We meet Witt after he's made his mortal discovery. He may not have answers, but at least he's figured out what questions to ask, and what metaphors to use for the insanity he's witnessed so far. He's transcended his circumstance, and now he's like an ange l at the side of every fatally wounded man in that distended moment before death: He knows how to hold a dying man's hands, gazing at the fallen soldier with a calm half grin, then sending him off peacefully to somewhere else. (There's no mention of God or Heaven, just nature and its mysterious twin.)
Witt's counterpart in the drama is Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), a replete existentialist, but also a contradiction, like the one Witt sees in nature. Compassionate in one encounter, indifferent in the next, Welsh is never lonely - except when he's with people. When a callous soldier tells him, "I don't care about nothin' any more," Welsh replies, "Sounds like bliss." And he's a cynical realist, too. "Property," he mumbles, summing up the purpose of the war. "The whole fucking thing's about property."
Finally, there's Lt. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte), a barking, Patton-like commander, but a bit too much of a corporate flack, who believes that words alone can make something true, especially the romantic cliches of glorious war because he's been waiting so lo ng to fight in one. He's the grandest stock character in a movie that purposefully abounds with them, yet he's also Malick's freshest character, thanks largely to Nolte's steely, rabid, flawless performance.
The rest of the characters you already know. A bonhomie captain (Elias Koteas) who loves his men as if they're his sons. A frightened trembling private who dreads landing on the beach like he dreads his Dad's beatings. A grumbling private who enlisted before he knew there would be an actual war. A lonely private (Ben Chaplin) w ho imagines his lover back home. A cocky soldier (Woody Harrelson) who blows off his leg with his own grenade. A promising young officer (John Cusack) who leads a successful charge. A wounded man with a hole in his stomach who flails and shrieks as he wai ts for death. A bemused soldier (John Savage, apparently still shell shocked from The Deer Hunter) who wanders around babbling in madness.
These character types take on a deeper resonance and a universal importance in the midst of Malick's momentous and intelligent drama. They come to represent the hundreds of thousands like them, and because The Thin Red Line is such a long, slow contemplation of death, Malick masterfully cuts through the cliches and gives them all a larger meaning.
Saving Private Ryan was about dying, and so is The Thin Red Line. But Malick's film is also about waiting to die, and he keeps you on the edge of sudden death for almost two hours before he relents for a short while. Then he takes you back again.
From its calm, patient, symbolic opening - first we watch an alligator slink into a murky swamp, then we see the serene island village where Witt has taken refuge - to the climax of Witt's resolute journey of discovery and transcendence, Malick never once releases you from his taut drama. He distills his material to an essence and puts it all in a landscape that's at once beautiful and menacing. It's a place where death is the only hope and the only sure release, a place where Witt has discovered the utter duplicity of everything - and yet, he manages to rise above it and find his own personal heaven.
Like Stanley Kubrick, another great American filmmaker who keeps his own counsel, Malick seems to make the same movie over and over, adjusting the formula slightly each time and playing with his favorite concepts. The Thin Red Line is a piece with his two earlier movies. It's Full Metal Jacket with a heart, Saving Private Ryan with an idea, Apocalypse Now with a clue. It's good to have Terrence Malick back.