The Thin Red Line - Review

Film Comment, Jan, 1999 by Gavin Smith

let there be light

ORDERED TO ADVANCE in broad daylight up a long hill towards concealed Japanese positions, a callow Infantry lieutenant, a kid really, signals to his two scouts to advance, then, when they don't move, signals again, more forcefully. The two GIs trade looks, and are up and running. From above, the first shots of this battle erupt: two brief bursts drop both men and silence falls again. The long grass ripples in the breeze and then magnificent sunlight unfolds across the landscape, as if a signal from the heavens. The lieutenant sounds the charge and he and his men rise up and rush forwards to be decimated by the machine-gun nests and mortars lying in wait for them. That glorious epiphany of radiance and the terrible carnage that ensues together form one breathtaking movement, and encapsulate one of the main principles at work in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

There has truly never been a film about modern war quite like this one: a kind of lyric epic poem about the way men are transformed forever by the experience of war, carefully balancing romanticism and dispassion, action and introspection. Like Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven, it is spare, fleet, elliptical, and establishes a careful middle-distance from the circumstances of its characters, disarming the processes of audience identification and implication for all but the briefest of moments. More significantly, and unlike Saving Private Ryan, it also seems determined to evade the mythopoeic impulse -- that which makes a film larger than life and proffers it to stand in for history.

Adapted from James Jones's 1962 novel, The Thin Red Line chronicles the experiences of the men of Charlie Company who are part of the American force charged with seizing the strategically important tropical island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese in 1942-43. With certain notable additions and adjustments, Malick extracts his basic events and characters intact from Jones's narrative: the disembarkation, landing, and march inland of the Company; the Company's protracted battle to take a hill stubbornly, defended by Japanese troops, which is the main body of the film; a period of r&r away from the front after the Company's victory; the self-sacrifice of a soldier that enables his Company to escape from advancing Japanese forces, an episode largely invented by Malick; the departure of the surviving members of the company from Guadalcanal.

Where Saving Private Ryan establishes its primary characters within minutes, its secondary ones by the beginning of its second act, and then creates a GI microcosm through the device of the mission, The Thin Red Line is more of all ensemble film and takes a much more leisurely and oblique approach -- you may be halfway into the film before you figure out who you should be watching in narrative terms; even then, Malick keeps directing your attention to somebody you've never seen before and may never see again -- which presents minor problems of emphasis when recognizable actors like Woody Harrelson briefly pass through. There is little sense of the camaraderie associated with WWII (or is it only WWII films?); you get the feeling these men barely know and don't much like each other, and Malick refuses to be sentimental. Like Jones's novel, the film doesn't have a protagonist, but shifts from one character's point of view to another. But where Jones scrutinizes the calculations and rationalizations going on in his characters' heads to show that their actions are determined as much by, for example, preoccupation with how others perceive them as by fear of death, Malick by contrast takes most of his characters at face value. In fact, he pointedly keeps all but a few of them deliberately sketchy and undefined. The only defining moments that matter to him are those that convey a significant response to or perspective on war as an experiential event of the profoundest magnitude. As much as anything, the raison-d'etre of the stunning sequence where Captain Gaff (John Cusack) leads a small group of men in an attack on an inaccessible machine-gun bunker complex is to witness the emotional aftermath for the survivors on both sides. Though Malick has inherited his title from Jones, who in turn derived it from an old Midwestern saying. "There's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad," his film is as much about the psychic fortifications men bring in order to survive war as it is about its emotional and moral consequences.

One of the key elements of the unique cinematic idiom Malick established in his first two films was his use of refractive voiceover. It is equally integral to the articulation of The Thin Red Line, if not more so, but there are pronounced differences in how it is applied. Where the earlier films offer a single (mote naive than unreliable) narrator. The Thin Red Line dispenses with narration altogether; replacing it with multiple subjective voiceovers (sometimes accompanied by fleeting visual flashbacks) that insinuate themselves into the action as it proceeds. These fleeting glimpses into the characters' souls or semi-coherent fragments of thought are presented in a variety of registers, from naturalistic to poetic. But just as the narrations in Malick's earlier films create a certain poignant distance, here direct access to the inner lives of these men, however glancing and intermittent, creates a singular push-pull of intimacy and distance, and reinforces the sense of the GIs' isolation from one another: each is imprisoned in his subjecthood.