A waste of time

Spectator, The, Feb 27, 1999 by Steyn, Mark

Cinema

The Thin Red Line (18, selected cinemas)

At the Oscars this year, you'll either be up to your neck in muck and bullets or up to your neck in doublet and hose. Hollywood loves Elizabethan England and it loves the second world war, but, on the evidence of the new school of war movies, the day before yesterday seems just as remote to contemporary film-makers as Shakespeare's time. Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is a baby boomer's lament - hey, why was my generation cheated out of a `finest hour'? But, denied the opportunity to expel the Nazi hordes from France and the Low Countries, the boomers have instead embarked on a campaign to expel their parents from their own past and annex it for themselves. The standard line on Ryan is that it took Spielberg to get it right, to show the true horror of war: critics who've never been anywhere near a battlefield hail the uncanny verisimilitude of a director who's never been anywhere near a battlefield, while deploring the old-school second world war pics made by and for people who'd actually been through the damn thing. In fact, The Longest Day - the 1962 D-Day movie now routinely disparaged in Spielberg reviews -- shows men on Omaha Beach frozen in fear, scared literally stiff by the carnage all around. The boomers seem to think they've stumbled on a great secret - war is hell, like wow, man! What they don't seem able to grasp, unlike those directors of 40 or 50 years ago, is that war is other things, too.

True, Terrence Malick is not your typical Nineties director: for one thing, unlike Spielberg, who makes an Important Cinematic Statement every three months, Malick hasn't made a film in 20 years. But The Thin Red Line (based on James Jones's 1962 novel) takes the distorted assumptions underlying Private Ryan and hammers you over the head with them: if John Wayne's genial action flicks are, as we're always told, fascistic, then Malick's threehour non-epic is an exercise in pacifist totalitarianism. He begins in paradise, with a saintly deserter, Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), gamboling in the translucent lagoons of a Pacific idyll, surrounded by beautiful Melanesian natives living in peace and harmony with nature. Witt's utopian frolic doesn't last long. He's soon yanked back into the war, but, even during the bloodshed that follows, the dislocated trance-like passivity of the opening sequence somehow lingers: The Thin Red Line is a flower child's war movie. As charred birds flap helplessly in the artillery fire, Malick seems to be saying that, out here in the south Pacific, war is an affront against nature (the raw, unceasing violence of nature itself is, of course, discounted).

Witt's company has to scramble ashore and take a hill: that's it, that's the plot. It's not D-Day, just one of a thousand small actions history will never remember but which cumulatively add up to a great victory at Guadalcanal. Nonetheless, the triviality of the exercise seems to mock the men's sacrifice. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is not a concept Malick or Spielberg has much time for, mainly because of the pro patria bit: what reason is that to die? In America, they sold the film with the line `Every man fights his own war' - which is true. But, under Malick's lethargic direction, every man seems to be fighting the same war - that's to say, no one wants to be there, no one thinks it matters, it's all a waste of time, everything's a lie, winning the war won't change anything, the world is diseased, getting a Purple Heart sucks because the system's corrupt, and all these homogeneous thoughts are mostly expressed in interior monologues. I've never seen a war movie where the guys never talk to each other. The only exchange of dialogue I can recall is between Caviezel and Sean Penn: `You ever get lonely?' `Only round people.' Pretty much everyone in the film feels the same way, so the movie proceeds entirely in thought balloons. The somnolent halfbaked Buddhist aestheticisation is unrelenting: the film settles into its mood and never shifts; you know these boys are never going to burst into `There Is Nothing Like A Dame', much as one might wish it.

It may be the case that war is alienating but, as a matter of practical storytelling, a drama in which the characters don't even rise to perfunctory social exchanges is going to have its work cut out. It doesn't help that Jones's characters have been whittled away to nothing by Malick: they drift in and out of the picture, registering only to the degree of the actor's familiarity. Why, here's John Travolta! With a moustache! Pretending to be a general! And that's all we ever know about the general: he's John Travolta in a moustache. Woody Harrelson from Cheers drops by for a bit, George Clooney from ER checks in for one scene, Britain's Ben Chaplin hangs around a bit longer. But no one makes much of an impression, no one is allowed to intrude on the director's grandiloquent torpor except for Nick Nolte's gung-ho colonel, whom Malick presents to us as self-evidently bonkers. Otherwise, the dehumanising effect of war is as nothing to the dehumanising effect of a Terrence Malick picture: The Thin Red Line is the first war movie in which characters are subordinate to images of swaying bamboo stalks and actors are reduced to camera fodder.