The Thin Red Line Review
by M. Armstrong (cinderjeff AT aol DOT com)January 24th, 1999
Director: Terrence Malick
Writer: Terrence Malick (based on the novel The Thin Red Line by James Jones) Director of Photography: John Toll
Featuring: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack.
It has been 20 years since a Terrence Malick film hit theaters. His new film, The Thin Red Line, is a strange, beautiful, enigmatic mess of a movie.
The first thing that jumps out to one when they see the advertisements for this film is the huge cast. It is filled with above-the-title stars. The cast, for the most part, gives great performances. John Travolta, whose role is nothing more than a cameo, seems not to have attacked his performance with that much verve. George Clooney, whose role became a cameo in editing, gives a strange performance. One wonders if he knew that his performance would become the object of ridicule through a character's narration. The rest of the cast, especially Nick Nolte and Elias Koteas, are unambiguously fantastic. These actors (and they are, with two exceptions, men) were lured by the name of Malick.
Terrence Malick is a cinematic legend. He has often been called "The J.D. Salinger of cinema." His two previous films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, are spectacularly beautiful and obscure motion pictures. After he made them, he disappeared for 20 years. This film marks his return. What he's made with The Thin Red Line is a film that seems less concerned with plot than with the emotion of the moment. The narration which fills the film (and perplexes many) not only lets us hear the narrators (the characters themselves) pontificate, but also lets us hear such of-the-moment thoughts as "I'm scared." The rather simple plot of The Thin Red Line is used as a canvas on which many stories are painted. The plot couldly simply be boiled down to an assault on a hill. A plot synopsis for The Thin Red Line is difficult, because the story is fractured. Many stories are here, from the clash between the Lieutenant (Elias Koteas) and the savage Colonel (a voracious Nick Nolte) to the private (Ben Chaplin) who uses his love for the woman he left behind to keep him going. The fracturing of the story is ultimately a fault. It is as if an artist spent an incredible amount of time artfully sculpting tiny statues and then threw them into a box, shook the box, and poured the results onto a table. This basically creates a mess, but the stories can be discerned and enjoyed.
I'm not declaring that the film has no structure. While Saving Private Ryan used warfare to bookend the plot, Malick uses reflection and glorious shots of nature to bookend about 90 minutes of combat. The battles in The Thin Red Line are astonishing and display a mastery of filmmaking. The astounding cinematography in this film must also be given notice. This film uses color and light in such a fantastic way, that it will be sad to see it degraded when it has to bee transferred to video.
Ultimately, Malick has crafted a film that is a movie that enjoys looking through the treetops more than regarding the war that rages below them. The film is filled with nature photography and the regarding of nature. While some have said that the anti-war message and pro-nature tubthumping was juvenile, it was done with so much complexity and thought, that it cannot ever honestly be called childish.
After seeing The Thin Red Line, I was haunted by it and am quite ready to see it again.
9 out of 10
M. Armstrong
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