The Thin Red Line Review
by Kevin Patterson (kevinp AT Princeton DOT EDU)January 30th, 1999
Film review by Kevin Patterson
THE THIN RED LINE
Rating: *** (out of four)
R, 1998
Director: Terrence Malick
Producers: Robert Michael Geisler, Grant Hill, John Roberdeau Screenplay: Terrence Malick
Starring Cast: Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, James Caviezel, Ben Chaplin
THE THIN RED LINE is a sort of grand gesture by director Terrence Malick. It's a reach for the transcendent arising out of the most horrible circumstances, namely the brutal fight for Guadalcanal between the Americans and Japanese in World War II. And this description encapsulates why THE THIN RED LINE is a good film and also why it's a flawed film. Few films today, after all, have the courage to reach for the transcendent. Yet the problem is that it is, indeed, Malick's reach for the transcendent, and not that of his characters.
Among those characters are Capt. James Staros (Elias Koteas), Private Witt (James Caviezel), and Private Bell (Ben Chaplin). The latter two probably receive the most screen time of any of the characters. Witt is a dreamer, a soldier who has gone AWOL several times, but not, we sense, because he is afraid of battle so much as he is repulsed by it and is trying to find something more rewarding in himself and in nature. When a commanding officer (Sean Penn) lectures him prior to putting him on a squadron headed for Guadalcanal, he tells him that he'd better straighten up and learn to live with his situation because "this world is all there is." "I've seen a different world," Witt replies, and we believe him: the film opens with a scene of the AWOL Witt living a peaceful life with a tribe of Pacific Islands natives. Bell has some of Witt's innocence about him as well, though his personal philosophy is not quite as esoteric. He keeps himself sane with memories of his loving wife from home, and longs to complete his military duty and return to her.
THE THIN RED LINE features several battle sequences, all of which are generally effective in terms of suspense and drama, but what is most noticeable is the attention devoted to the physical setting of the battles.. Often, Malick's camera is aimed towards a tribal native walking past the soldiers as they march to their next assignment, or an animal, or a wide landscape. The central question of THE THIN RED LINE, often hinted at in numerous voiceovers, seems to be whether nature is inherently beautiful or ugly. The answer that Malick seems to come up with is that it's both, and that while warfare represents the ugly side, those who engage in it still have the potential to strive for the higher elements. Malick makes a pariticularly interesting choice by shooting the battle for Guadalcanal in bright sunlight, with numerous shots of the open hillside. Rather than stressing the ugly (as in, for example, the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan, which was shot in a foggy, nebulous gloom), Malick juxtaposes the beautiful and the ugly, suggesting that they are both parts of the same larger picture and that they need not be mutually exclusive for the soldiers.
The problem with THE THIN RED LINE is that it is only coherent if considered in light of the fact that it is Malick constructing this picture, over and above the thoughts and observations of the individual characters. Expressing an abstract idea is a tricky endeavor in the medium of cinema, which is at its strongest when it captures a human experience in some way. That doesn't mean that it it's impossible: this summer's PI, for example, dealt with very esoteric concepts of mathematics and theology, but it was a more successful film than THE THIN RED LINE because it managed to pull the audience into its lead character's possibly groundbreaking and possibly insane quest for knowledge. Whose experience is captured in THE THIN RED LINE? Mostly that of an outside observer, someone watching but not participating: this is a film based on a novel, but it feels more like it was based on a philosophy dissertation. I suppose that the sensibilities of Private Witt are somewhat in tune with Malick's ideas about humanity and nature, but even then, it could be argued that Witt does not know how to deal with the "ugly" side of nature, which is perhaps the reason that he runs away from it by going AWOL.
That's not to say that Malick treats his characters coldly or mean-spiritedly, just that he doesn't seem particularly interested in them as three-dimensional human beings. They're on screen whenever they're saying or thinking something that is relevant to whatever point he is trying to make, and then it's on to the next voiceover or the next close-up on an animal on the ground. It takes a while for the viewer to get all the characters straight in his or her head, as several of them look alike and the voiceovers often begin without making it clear whose voice it is. And while most of the narration and dialogue does seem to fit into Malick's meditations on human nature, some of it is just puzzling and underrealized. Captain Staros, for example, isn't developed beyond the fact that he's a kind-hearted person who genuinely cares about those under his command, and when his character exits the story, he's given a voiceover about how his men will "live on inside him" that really has nothing to do with anything else in the film.
The THE THIN RED LINE is a mild disappointment considering the hype (this is Malick's first film in twenty years), but it is still a film worth seeing. The cinematography is nothing short of excellent, and the story and its thematic elements certainly will not leave the audience bored or uninterested. Even if this reach for the transcendent doesn't quite achieve the necessary coherence, I can't help but admire Malick for trying.
More on 'The Thin Red Line'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
