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Having vanished from the cinema making business following the release of Days Of Heaven in 1978 (his only other feature was Badlands in 1973), Mr. Malick has acquired a beguiling cachet born of one-time greatness and cabalistic absence. And whether real, imagined, or simply manufactured by the movie studios, the mystique can't help but spill over into the beautifully tangled fibres of his epic war poem set to celluloid, scantily based on the autobiographical novel by James Jones.
The filmmaker's style is grandiloquent, schizophrenic, an unintentional metaphor for the duality he insists on evoking in practically everything. Lusciously photographed, it is an enigmatic look at the battle of Guadalcanal, at once grand and astute, trite and incoherent, frequently within the very same frame. But, whether or not you feel we really needed two rather lengthy films this year to convince us that war is hell, one thing's for sure. Serving as the Pacific bookend to a movie season that began its WW II ruminations in the European theatre of operations with Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line is even bloodier and just as realistic. The bill for red dye #3 alone was probably in the thousands of dollars.
Attempting to put war into a poetic perspective, trying to make sense of the senseless, it's nothing for this movie to turn from the ponderously meandering to the violently cataclysmic in a South Pacific second. All hell breaks loose with a regularity that soon becomes familiar, ushered in with a chilling whoosh that proclaims impending death.
Haphazardly framing the chaos, narrative duties switch from soldier to soldier, the pretentious voice-overs playing symbolic/ironic counterpoint to what is being depicted on the battlefield. One frequently invoked contrast is the gauzy flashback of the beautiful gal back home, basking in warm yellow shades of peacetime sanity. Meanwhile, back at the madness of Guadalcanal, one momentarily victorious soldier uses pliers to pull gold-capped teeth from his shrieking captive. Unsettling, to say the least.
Mr. Malick's storied history boasts a real skill for depicting nihilistic behaviour (it took me years to forgive Richard Gere for murdering someone with a screwdriver in Days of Heaven), and here he shockingly applies that honed sense of the repulsive to the horrors of war. Frightened GI's vomit uncontrollably before battle; the moan-filled jungle writhes with all manner of suddenly deformed young men; and a mutilated soldier despairs that he cannot find some final dignity. It gets worse. An award-worthy camera panning the utterly beautiful landscapes takes time out on at least six occasions to zoom-in on a painfully dying soldier, penning a mini-thesis of his unmitigated fear as the life oozes from him.
This is undeniably tough stuff. Whereas Saving Private Ryan concentrated the bulk of its gore in the first twenty minutes, The Thin Red Line promises constant carnage, albeit interjected with sophomoric philosophy and poor poetry. So, pick your poison. The blood and guts crowd will tune out the verse and concentrate on the viscera; their headier brethren will attempt to ferret out the anti-war messages strewn among the tortured prose.
Since the Academy Awards folks still haven't added that long overdue cameo category, this isn't the film to be in if you're shooting for an Oscar. A huge cast of stars and novices, some credited, some not, portray the usual array of stereotypical characters. Problem is, it's often very hard to tell who's who in those identical uniforms, especially amidst the confusion of battle.
Still, there are some veritable diamonds in the miasmic rough. Nick Nolte is aces as gung-ho Colonel Tall. Perennially passed over for promotion to general, the career officer finally has the war he's needed. Sean Penn is somewhat likeable (for perhaps the first time in any film) as the sergeant who hides his caring behind a shield of cynicism ("It's all about property"). And in a role with potential never fully realised, James Caviezel is nonetheless interesting as the brave and serenely introspective Private Witt, the tacit conscience of the film.
There are moments of sheer grandeur in Mr. Malick's magnus opus, truly bold strokes about the ugly business of war (and make no mistake about it; it is business) and man's inhumanity to man. But these sublime assertions must share the screen with rhetorical embarrassments like, "How did we lose the good that was in us?" and "What's keeping us from reaching out and touching the glory?"
Perhaps trying to make up for lost time, the director uses Guadalcanal as a self-indulgent soapbox for every philosophical query under the sun. His treatise on war is stuffed with all manner of meditation -- on God, love, nature, the origins of evil, and on and on and on. With a swath of self-indulgence this thick running through it, no wonder The Thin Red Line gets blurred.
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