The Thin Red Line - Review

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by Richard Alleva

Some writer was once described as being long on genius but short on talent. Terence Malick, who wrote and directed The Thin Red Line, actually has plenty of both, and his masterpieces of the '70s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, exist to prove it. But the peculiar exigencies of making a World War II combat movie have discombobulated his talent without obliterating his genius. The new film stumbles time and again, but a vision of war as Original Sin, the canker in the rose of life, shines steadily through.

First, let's get a comparison, not odious but inevitable, out of the way, for there's no denying that Malick's film dwells rather in the shadow of Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg's film drives forward ruthlessly to its climax with the force of great, brutal, unshaded art. Despite minor glitches, it never swerves. The Thin Red Line meanders, runs into fog, has moments of inanity, even downright goofiness. Ryan's battle scenes seek to engulf us with the terror felt by the soldiers, while Malick wants to give us a certain distance from the violence even as his camera plunges into it - a Buddhistic calm strives to make itself felt amid the fury.

The story takes the audience with the U.S. Army's Charley Company into the invasion of Guadalcanal. Malick uses James Jones's novel, laden with the minutiae of battle and of men getting on each other's nerves, to meditate on the nature of man and the nature of nature. Much of this reaches us through the consciousness of Witt (Jim Caviezel), a country boy who seems to have read a surprising amount of Ralph Waldo Emerson, judging by his meditations heard on the soundtrack. "Is each person just part of one large soul?" he asks. Then why does each particle of that soul try to destroy the others? "Why can't we just reach out and touch the glory?" And is nature itself at war with nature? Is that what's killing us? Conversely, why is life so beautiful both in its physical aspect (this is emphasized by the beauty of Guadalcanal itself) and in the human capacity for tenderness, loving sexuality, compassion?

And how must a man live his life? Like Witt, who goes AWOL whenever the impulse to bask in nature and consort with islanders seizes him, but who also demonstrates devotion to his company when he returns to action? Or is the way of Witt's enemy/friend, Welsh (Sean Penn), preferable, who maintains a philosophy of absolute nihilism? Does it matter to the world at large, since the life-loving Witt kills in combat as any soldier must, while the seemingly life-despising Welsh ("In this world a man's nothing...and there's no other world") can't help being generous and self-sacrificing, especially on Witt's behalf? (Like Prewitt and Sergeant Warden in From Here to Eternity, also by James Jones, the two men seem to reflect each other's possibilities, which may be why they both deplore and love each other.)

And, in light of the yoked bestiality and tenderness resident in men, how does a leader lead? Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) is determined to keep his agenda on track, no matter how many of his men die. But Captain Staros (Elias Koteas in a particularly subtle performance), believing you can't win in war if you don't have the trust of your men, refuses to sacrifice them for the sake of strategy. (Moreover, he's just too humane to regard humans as pawns fit for sacrifice.) Which man is right? Or is some synthesis possible?

Given the themes of this movie, Terence Malick was exactly the right man to make it.

And given the genre and scope of this movie, Terence Malick was exactly the wrong man to make it.

He was the right man because, among American filmmakers, he is the supreme brooder over humanity's inexaustible talent for destroying itself. There is a scene in which a dying Japanese soldier seems to plead with a G.I. for a moment of understanding. Full of a hate oddly gentled by fascination with impending death, the American, wagging his finger tic-toc like a metronome, kills the prisoner's hope of comfort and indicates that the world wants no more of his existence. Matching this is a close-up of a Japanese face, seemingly petrified in an avalanche of earth and gazing out at the Americans like a bas-relief. The G.I.s seem to hear the buried corpse's voice warning them that he once felt as much life as they do now, and that soon they will be as dead as he is.

Malick broods just as much over man's capacity for tenderness. Look at the death scene he gives Woody Harrelson. Playing a macho redneck sergeant who accidentally blows himself up with a grenade, Harrelson seems to subside into a child as death seeps into him. His men hover above him, sheepishly assuring him that: (a) he won't die, and that (b) he will die but not in vain. Humanity as tender and as atrocious as this seldom reaches the screen, even in good movies.

Though not a virtuoso director of action sequences like Spielberg, Malick nevertheless gets exactly what he needs: cross-hatchings of sporadic anguish and terror within the larger picture of overwhelming violence: Nolte's colonel spasmodically raking his fingers through his scalp as Captain Staros radios his refusal to obey orders; a crawling soldier in a field singing with bullets suddenly swerving away from a gorgeous and malevolent-looking snake.