director/screenwriter
Terrence
Malick
based on
the novel by
James Jones
producers
Robert Michael Geisler
Grant Hill
John Roberdeau
cinematographer
John Toll
music
Hans Zimmer
editors
Leslie Jones
Saar Klein
Billy Weber
cast
Sean Penn (Welsh)
Adrien Brody (Fife)
Jim Caviezel (Witt)
Ben Chaplin (Bell)
George Clooney (Bosche)
John Cusack (Gaff)
Woody Harrelson (Keck)
Elias Koteas (Staros)
Jared Leto (Whyte)
Dash Mihok (Doll)
Tim Blake Nelson (Tills)
Nick Nolte (Tall)
John C. Reilly (Storm)
John Savage (McCron)
John Travolta (Quintard)
Kirk Acevedo (Tella)
Miranda Otto (Marty Bell)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 170m
u.s.
release: December 25,
1998
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
|
I
feel sorry for anyone who goes to see The Thin Red Line
expecting a star-studded war movie. Yes, it is set in World War
II during the Battle of Guadalcanal, and yes, it does boast a
formidable roster of actors. But neither of those attributes
means much of anything in The Thin Red Line, the first
film in twenty years by the legendary, hermitlike director Terrence
Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven). Treating James
Jones' novel (which was filmed before in 1964) as a blueprint,
Malick has crafted nothing so much as a poetic tribute to his
own artistic sensitivity. And believe me, that's every bit as
tedious and pompous as it sounds.
Malick has a spectacular reputation based on two movies from
the '70s, neither of which is exactly a household word today.
Yet a platoon of top-flight actors -- Sean Penn, Nick Nolte,
John Cusack, John Travolta, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson,
as well as many up-and-comers or newcomers -- chomped at the
bit to work with Malick. Why? You got me; Malick is not, to put
it mildly, an actor's director. In The Thin Red Line,
the shimmering palm trees, rustling tall grass, and noble wildlife
get more attention than the soldiers. We get the point: Man the
warrior, man the destroyer, is an outsider in the glory of nature.
Only the dreamers and poetic souls among the soldiers (whose
thoughts, very unfortunately, we hear as narration) are as one
with Nature. This isn't a war movie or even an anti-war movie;
it's the invasion of the interloper Man into the Garden of Eden.
For a while, you may want to go along with the woozy perversity
of this -- a war movie crossed with Koyaanisqatsi. But
two hours and fifty minutes is a long time to indulge a director's
flights of fancy; at times, the floating hippie-dippiness made
me nostalgic for the comparatively clearheaded Saving
Private Ryan, which, despite its grandiloquent
passages, at least didn't wander off into the weeds photographing
parrots. As if someone had tossed ice water on him, Malick does
snap awake and stage a crisp battle halfway through; coiled with
tension, a hellish action painting in fiery reds and dark greens,
it made me understand, for a fleeting moment, what all those
actors and critics see in Malick. But then it's back to the hushed
picture-postcard images and insights like "Maybe we're all
part of one big soul." Some may see art in this; I see tremendous
waste and emptiness.
I enjoyed one other scene in the movie, which I'll mention to
make a larger point about the movie's failure. Nick Nolte, as
a rabid lieutenant-colonel, speaks with respect and affection
to subordinate soldier John Cusack. "You're like a son to
me," Nolte tells Cusack, then, oddly, adds "My son
is a bait salesman." What does that mean? Is it anything
so vulgar as a joke? (This movie, by the way, redefines "humorless.")
I enjoyed the actors' moment -- Nolte's gruff expression of soldierly
love; Cusack's quiet, ambivalent acceptance of it -- but we have
no idea why Nolte's character feels this way, no sense of their
history together, and in any event, there's no follow-through.
The father-son bond is a popular sentiment in the film: demoted
captain Elias Koteas says the same thing to his men, and
George Clooney, in his gratuitous cameo at the end, tells the
new crop of soldiers that he is their "father." I'm
sure this means a lot to Malick. I'm sure it means zilch to anyone
else.
The Thin Red Line begins with images that seem designed
to confuse those pitiable viewers who came to see a war movie:
Two American soldiers (who, we learn, are AWOL) dance and play
and swim with innocent Melanesian natives. Oh, so man is destructive
except for these untouched natives? Don't they also hunt
animals and live off nature? The movie gets no better from there;
even when it puts on its helmet and goes to war, it's got flowers
in its hair. Malick is known for deleting most of his dialogue
in the editing room; judging from the pointy-headed dialogue
he kept, I have to wonder, How dumb was the dialogue he
threw out?
The burnished visuals, the folksy-eloquent platitudes, the arrogantly
abstract characters -- all of this might impress the same people
who have invested so much, over the last 25 years, in the notion
that Terrence Malick is a poet of imagery. (He damn sure isn't
a poet of words.) But on the basis of the master's grand
total of three films, I can only conclude that Malick has achieved
a film-buff version of mass hypnosis. The Thin Red Line
is nothing if not hypnotic, though the trance I entered was closer
to nodding off. Maybe all those Malick acolytes are part of the
same big soul. They certainly aren't part of the same big brain. |