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BY KIM MORGAN |
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The Thin Red Line Rated R Opens Friday, Jan. 15 American filmmaker Terrence Malick is cinema's greatest mystery. In 1973 the director created one of the most sublimely haunting pictures ever made, Badlands. Five years later he released the beautiful and psychologically enigmatic Days of Heaven. Both films were of supreme elegance, grit, innovation and provocation. Marked by disturbing, detached characterizations and idiosyncratic narrative styles, both Badlands (loosely based on the real-life murder spree of two natural-born killers in the 1950s) and Days of Heaven (a film about a torrid love triangle) were more concerned with cinematic poetry than plot. Slow moving, yet punctuated with moments of jolting violence, Malick's impressionistic film meditations were embraced by most critics but rejected at the box office. Then, for reasons unknown, Malick bowed out of Hollywood, moved to Paris and quit making movies. His two films swiftly turned into cult favorites, and Malick became elusive. Like the odd, laconic characters he so lovingly put to celluloid, Malick remained a mystery. Twenty years later the living ghost has returned. Arriving with cinematic sensibilities untouched by time, Malick has come bearing a big, beautiful gift that is tough to unwrap. Attempting to understand The Thin Red Line is like trying to make sense of a dream; you get some of it, but much of it remains an undercurrent lapping at your unconscious. Adapted from the 1962 novel of the same name by James Jones (From Here to Eternity), The Thin Red Line chronicles the costly early World War II battle of Guadalcanal, a grueling six-month attack in response to Japan's containment of the Solomon island east of New Guinea. Though the battle was a victory for Americans, Jones' semi-autobiographical retelling (he was wounded at Guadalcanal) isn't a laudatory statement about the triumphs of war. Instead, it is a psychological and political exploration of characters fighting the famed battle. Malick's interpretation, like Jones', is personality-based. Removing Jones' more political stance (indeed, any such influence would feel like an agenda), Malick studies the inner minds of his characters with an intensity at once obvious, elusive and distracting. The story is told through the viewpoints of five characters: three Army superiors and two young privates. Nick Nolte plays the aging Lt. Col. Gordon Tall, who is itching to finally lead a battalion into combat. He is intent on taking the island from the Japanese fighters at all costs, regardless of American casualties. Sensitive Captain James "Bugger" Staros, played by Elias Koteas (Exotica, Fallen), doesn't want to see any more of his men killed and defies the colonel's orders. Sean Penn plays a more existential sergeant who, though tough and ready for battle, is honest about his life--he knows he is a man with no meaning. Lower in rank, but still at the heart of the film are Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) and Private Bell (Ben Chaplin). Witt is a green, thoughtful soldier who, before the big battle, goes AWOL among the natives on the Pacific Island. Bell is a tragic romantic who, in the midst of all the blood and guts, dreamily thinks in soft-focused flashbacks about his wife back home. She soon breaks his heart with a Dear John letter. The film's pivotal movement (movement, rather than sequence, describes Malick's visual symphony) is when the battalion takes the hill where Japanese soldiers are positioned in a bunker. As the American soldiers make their way up the hill, their various internal and external personalities are revealed through voice-over narration, flashback and visual flourishes. After many casualties, and with the efforts of Capt. John Gaff (John Cusack), the soldiers take the bunker and claim a victory for the country, but not necessarily themselves. Spiraling into the different reflections of the characters' souls, the film continues, no longer as a war movie but as a transcendent experience full of questions asked by a myriad of characters: "Why does nature war with itself?" "How did we lose the good that was given us, let it slip away, scattered, careless?" These questions create such a quagmire that we can't remember who is asking them. Characters we thought we would follow as protagonists are obliterated into a confused mass consciousness. But with Malick, confusion is the point. Undoubtedly, Malick's simultaneously detached and emotional style will annoy many viewers hoping to see another Saving Private Ryan, and some critics will dismiss his ponderous techniques as a nonsensical and pretentious mess (like they did with Coppola's Apocalypse Now). It is easy to read the film's style as flawed narrative structure: There is no storyline, there are no good guys or bad guys in the traditional sense, and some of the film's cameos are glaringly out of place (notably those of John Travolta, at the beginning of the film, and George Clooney, at the end). Besides the bad cameos, these criticisms are invalid given Malick's unique style. Malick's intent is not to tell a story; it is to tell a consciousness, and as he is a pure filmmaker, he uses pictures, poetry and music. Discordant, gorgeous, ugly, exotic and mentally confusing, The Thin Red Line is to the war picture what Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was to conventional classical music: spellbinding, abstract, maddening and unforgettable. It is no surprise, then, that Malick chose the music of 20th-century
American composer and visionary Charles Ives to accompany the proceedings.
Like Ives, Malick expresses himself through transcendental means and
in the process reveals a consciousness that is at once truly American
and wonderfully exotic. In both artists' work, low brow and high brow
are mixed to a brilliant level of near absurdity, though both artists
are dead serious about what they are doing. Appropriately, Malick features
"The Unanswered Question," Ive's most fascinating work, as the film's
predominant anti-anthem; this song title sums up Malick's style, his
characters and Malick himself.
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