Review of THE THIN RED LINE
By Jerry Saravia
It took director Terrence Malick twenty years to make a film, which is about a decade longer than it would take Stanley Kubrick. Did he run out of ideas, or was he sick of Hollywood? It is an inconsequential matter because Malick has crafted one of the most poetic, life-affirming statements on war that has ever been produced by a Hollywood studio. "The Thin Red Line" is a masterpiece - a quiet, powerful observation of men in war, their lingering thoughts on what war means to them, and how violent human behaviors affect nature.
The film's opening shot is not of bullets grazing and imploding on the beach of Normandy, but of a crocodile entering a lake underwater. The next few shots centers on Private Witt (James Caviezel) cavorting among the natives on an island off the coast, but where are we? Why are we here? Isn't this a war film? Later, an American patrol ship spots Witt and another soldier, and it is up to First Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) to remind Witt what their God-like mission is. Their mission, as Lieut. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte) explains, is to ascend upon a certain hill on the Guadalcanal island to infiltrate a Japanese bunker. This is the conventional section of the film - the war itself to find the bunker, and the risk of being shot down like flies by the Japs. With its sweeping grandeur, artfully shot and edited battles, and incongruous points-of-view, this long sequence caught me off guard, and is thus tinged with more emotion and heartbreak than anything in "Saving Private Ryan." I think the reason it works so well is that we are aware how unfair and unpredictable war is - bullets and gunfire can come from anywhere. One soldier (played by Woody Harrelson) accidentally pulls the pin on a grenade thus literally blowing himself apart!
Malick also invests time on how his characters think of war in the context of their lives, and their loved ones back home. One particular soldier, Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), is always reminiscing of his days with his wife, whom we see in short shrift during flashbacks. He wants to be with her, but knows that he may meet her "in the dark waters." Nolte's ferocious lieutenant wonders why he's fighting, then he realizes that war is what he's been working up to for twenty years. His fierce attitude is upheld by his notion that war makes a man virile - "My son is a baker salesman." When he speaks eloquently about his tough career to Captain Gaff (John Cusack), he says to him: "You are my son."
Malick also makes vivid points about nature, and how the brutal inhumanity of war affects it. This is where his artistry truly lies - his films, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," are inherently about nature. This time, along with the help of cinematographer John Toll, he shows us the raping of the earth by men of war. Although nature is a process of violence, war rapes the blades of grass and the soil by its incessant violence upon it, including explosions. This is a theme that the mass audience will not care to understand - close-ups of colorful parrots, bats, rattlesnakes, and crocodiles do not a war film make, do they? Yet, these innocent animal species did not ask to be part of it, nor did the natives who walk among the pastures or the soldiers who are killed arbitrarily. That close symmetry between man and animal is repeatedly and intelligently paralleled by Malick.
"The Thin Red Line" is not the type of film that is character-driven, but rather character-oriented. In other words, this is a film about faces within the confines of nature, and the chaos that surrounds them. The interior monologues are told through voice-overs (originally voiced by Billy Bob Thornton) of individual men and their perceptions of what war entails.
The actors who make the strongest impression are James Caveziel's divine Private Witt (the dreamy, poignant hero of the film), Nick Nolte's memorably furious Colonel, Elias Koteas's straight-arrow Captain Staros who refuses to send his men to death, Sean Penn's amazingly watchable Sgt. Welsh, Ben Chaplin's courageous Private Bell, and the stoic, eccentric quality of John Savage's McCron. Other actors (John Travolta, George Clooney, John C. Reilly, Adrien Brody) are left in the dust (there was extensive recutting), but Malick's astute direction always rivets our attention.
Malick has crafted a beautiful film full of some potent, sublime images. I'll never forget the shots of the tortured Japanese soldiers and their cries of pain; Caveziel's beatific face and the moment he's confronted by the enemy; the deployed cargoes crashing on the water; the sunlight peering through the trees. Overall, "The Thin Red Line's" overt, lingering lyricism indicates that nature should be restored and not ignored, in light of virile fighters on the terrain. Rarely has such a war film made the point that our surroundings, and what we make of them, is infinitely more important than the evil that men do.
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