The Thin Red Line (1998) Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, John Cusack, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Arie Verveen, Dash Mihok, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly, David Harrod, John Savage, George Clooney, John Travolta, Paul Gleeson, Jared Leto, Tim Blake Nelson, Larry Romano, Tom Jane, Polyn Leona, Miranda Otto. Music by Hans Zimmer. Cinematography by John Toll. Directed and written by Terrence Malick, based on the novel by James Jones. 170 minutes. Rated R, 2.5 stars (out of five stars)
Review by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly www.nuvo-online.com Archive reviews at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Edward+Johnson-ott To receive reviews by e-mail at no charge, send subscription requests to pbbp24a@prodigy.com
William Thomas Cummings said "There are no atheists in foxholes." According to "The Thin Red Line," there was at least one, along with a number of bad poets and first year philosophy students. Visually sumptuous and astoundingly pretentious, "The Thin Red Line" takes a bracing portrayal of the battle of Guadalcanal and buries it within nearly three hours of nature footage, muddled philosophizing, and endless navel-gazing. Some have proclaimed the film a masterpiece that transcends traditional narrative structure to become a cinematic meditation. I found it more a grandiose doodle, the kind of thing a screenwriter might come up with after smoking too much dope while watching old war movies on TV.
If a novice director had screened this film, he would likely have been told, "Nice cinematography, Skippy. Now put away your bong, take this self-indulgent rough cut back to the editing room and chop out about an hour and a half. You might start by lopping off that wandering-in- paradise opening sequence along with the virtually incoherent 45 minutes at the end. Get rid of those godawful voice-overs, Hallmark Hall of Fame flashbacks, and a lot of the Wild Kingdom animal shots. Turn down the orchestra so we can hear the dialogue, color-code the soldiers so we can tell one from another, and lose those distracting cameos from John Travolta and George Clooney. Oh, and you know those scenes where you were trying to show that the Japanese soldiers were scared, confused human beings just like the Americans? It might help if you added subtitles. Think about it, kid."
But instead of a novice, we're dealing with writer/director Terrence Malick, who dazzled filmgoers with "Badlands" in 1973 and "Days of Heaven" in '78, then dropped out of the filmmaking world for 20 years, becoming an icon in the process. Given the blind eye turned to the woozy metaphysics and astounding lack of discipline shown by Malick in this endurance test, it appears that absence really does makes the heart grow fonder, and the critical skills duller.
Loosely based on the James Jones novel, "The Thin Red Line" boasts amazing cinematography and, midway through the film, a lengthy, gripping depiction of American troops battling to capture a hilltop machine gun nest from the Japanese. The sequence eloquently conveys the fear and chaos of warfare, along with the utter randomness of who lives or dies, as soldiers attempt to follow battle plans while bullets and grenade fragments rip through their comrades.
But Malick isn't content to let the horror of war speak for itself. His sights are set much higher. He intends the film to be a grand tone poem, about man and nature and God and stuff. After shooting a tremendous amount of footage and assembling a six hour version of the movie, he reinvented the story in the editing room for the three hour cut. By the time he was finished, one major character was left with only two lines, while others disappeared completely. The disjointed result minimizes dialogue, replacing it with orchestral swells, symbolism-loaded shots of birds, dreamy flashbacks and loads of voice-overs.
Oh, those voice-overs. It feels like open stage night at the World War II coffeehouse as the audience is subjected to lines like "Love, where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us?" Wait, there's more. Try these on for size. "What's this war at the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? Is there an avenging power in nature?'' "How did we lose the good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered. Careless. What's keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?" The film is packed with gems like these. Hell, one guy even narrates his own death.
Out of all the chatter, I found the ongoing debate between a spiritual soldier ("Maybe all men got one big soul that everybody's a part of") and a foxhole atheist ("Only one thing a man can do. Find something that's his. Make an island for himself.") engaging, but their intriguing relationship is given scant attention, as Malick instead focuses his camera on waving grass and prismatic beams of sunlight cutting through forest canopies.
I've said little about the actors because they tend to blur together. Two major players (Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin) resemble each other so much that it's hard to distinguish between them, and the rest come and go so quickly that you can't get a handle on their characters. That said, Sean Penn and Elias Koteas make the most of their screen time, Nick Nolte is imposing as a throwback to the John Wayne era and Woody Harrelson has a brief, but tragically moving scene.
If you're interested in a cinematic meditation on life and death that actually has substance, rent Peter Weir's "Fearless." I wish Malick had. Then he might have realized that pretty pictures and vague pondering do not a movie make. War is hell, and, moments of brilliance aside, so is "The Thin Red Line."
© 1999 Ed Johnson-Ott
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