The Thin Red Line Review
by "Victory A. Marasigan" (vmaras1 AT gl DOT umbc DOT edu)January 30th, 1999
THE THIN RED LINE
Review by Victory A. Marasigan
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~vmaras1/reviewsidx.htlm
War movies haven't changed much in the short history of film. Even in the best of them, the only real new wrinkle offered is the raised level of gore which the audience is allowed to focus on. Sometime-director Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, an ambitious new film about World War II's pivotal Battle of Guadalcanal, attempts to take the war movie to a fresh new level. It presents war as a 166-minute blank verse poem.
Given that Malick intended a different approach to directing his epic, it's too bad that the film itself is an overlong, pretentious head-scratcher. Malick meanders between disturbing imagery of his soldiers in battle, and glowing National Geographic-style portraits of the wildlife and regional fauna. A monotonous round-robin narrative (voiced by a handful of the film's main figures) anesthetizes his strange visuals . This sort of abstract pondering at the film's heart creates a paradoxical situation: Malick tries to convey dream-like meditation when his soldiers on-screen are operating at a more urgent fight-or-flight level of consciousness.
The director seems to have been making things up as he went along, hoping that somewhere in all of the footage he shot he might be able to paste together a movie that would do service to its source material (it was based on the book by James Joyce). This may be why so many "main" characters seem to come under the camera's scrutiny, only to eventually disappear without even a scream or a "Tell my wife I love her."
The few characters who appear long enough for us to appreciate come saddled with clearly-outlined motivating ideals. Jim Caviezel is Pvt. Witt, a wandering nature-boy who has a habit of taking breaks to enjoy the scenery. Nick Nolte's glory-hungry Lt. Col. Tall is inscrutably one-note in his selfish convictions. As the beleaguered Pvt. Bell, Ben Chaplin spends most of the film in a serene daydream of his wife, who is is single light at the end of a hellish tunnel.
Sean Penn as 1st Sgt. Welsh is billed as a main character (his screen time and dialogue are more abundant than most of the other talent), yet he like so many other players in the film doesn't leave a lasting impression. A high celebrity-cameo factor presents another problem: It's very difficult to concentrate when you're thinking about how much John Travolta and
George Clooney (yes, they're in it too) got paid for their scant minutes of screen time.
Where The Thin Red Line does succeed is in depicting tense, heart-pounding battle scenes, especially in an extended sequence in which the Americans attempt to cut through long grass to take out the Japanese enemy's bunkers. The scene is not as bloody or explicit as the similar invasion in Saving Private Ryan, but the hold-your-breath terror is just as
effective.
Malick's innovative spin in presenting this conflict is not a weakness in itself. Francis Ford Coppola was able to successfully present war as lucid dream with 1976's Apocalypse Now. With a confident hand and a less non-commital attitude towards the subject matter, Malick may have been able to make a film which is truly cerebrally-transcendent. In its present form,
The Thin Red Line fails to provoke coherent thought or connect the viewer with the stark reality of war. Malick has essentially performed the cinematic analog of a prefrontal lobotomy.
GRADE: B-
Reviewed January 12, 1999 at Loews White Marsh Theater, White Marsh, MD.
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