A beautiful, sumptuous travelogue, Terrence
Malick's 20+ year absence from film may be National Geographic's
biggest boon. Concurrently, the Thin Red Line may be the
strongest argument in some time for the return of silent films.
Ostensibly about Charlie Company and a
particular offensive of the Guadalcanal campaign during WWII, the
film follows Privates Bell and Witt as they are deposited on an
island (with Charlie) to take an enemy airbase deep inland. They
are accompanied along the way by Private John Savage, Sergeants
Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly, Lieutenant John
Cusack, Captains Elias Koteas and George Clooney, Colonel Nick
Nolte, and general John Travolta. We know only of insight to
Koteas and Nolte (Koteas is a lawyer; Nolte is an angry military
man who has been passed over). Everyone else is just there,
without exposition.
Only Koteas and Cusack register, the former as
a conscientuous captain who cannot accept the slaughter of his
men for a greater good, and the latter as a brave underling who
shows true leadership in a grave hour. Nolte is standard spit and
scream, Penn, Harrellson, Clooney, and Travolta are cardboard,
and Reilly is given a short, hackneyed paragraph on how he has
become hardened by the war. I believe Kurt Mondaugen beat me to
this observation, but it bears repeating: Savage is really,
really bad as a soldier who has cracked under the strain of
combat. His role as Tom Hagen's priest son was sliced to ribbons
when the studio made Francis Ford Coppola cut The Godfather III.
Coppola, it appears, got lucky.
The film is lush. At times, it is visually
riveting. Malick often makes wonderful choices, from the image of
the bow of the ship cutting through the Pacific prior to
disembarkment of its armed cargo (filmed directly down from the
prow), to the stark image of a dismembered mine team, alone among
the peacefully covered foliage (the first carnage the company
witnesses) to the killing of two men by a Japanese sniper - they
fall poignantly in the tall grass before a vista of the mountain.
If I were to see it again, I could name more such images
I won't see it again. The pretty pictures can
only distract you from the onerous dialogue for so long. Witt
ruminates in voice-over about the nature of evil and violence, an
exercise that begins as audacious and ends as leaden pop
philosophy (Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts" will
come guiltily to mind). Bell goes on and on and on and on about
his wife and the nature of love. Bell's subject matter is more
annoying than that of Witt, and he is cruelly transformed into a
doltish chump in the end.
The inner thoughts of the characters are meant
to be thought provoking, but, together, they can essentially be
boiled down to "Why is there so much madness in this world
when there is so much beauty, here and elsewhere?" Thus,
Malick transposes the violence with the verve of the Pacific, and
Rockwellian flashbacks to a beautiful wife, her smooth skin and
her cotton dress. After Malick shows soldiers in crisis, and then
a fruit bat, or a bird, or light streaming through the foliage, I
was reminded of Peter Weir, who employs the same technique, but
he usually just cuts to a knowing aborigine.
Malick has some of the milieu of the WWII
soldier down, from the placement of cigarettes in noses to ward
off the stench of rotting bodies to the theft of a sidearm by a
private and/or a sergeant (sidearms were standard issue only for
officers in WWII - if you wanted one, you needed to buy your
own).
Malick does make some fundamental errors that,
I'm sure, seem niggling in the light of his ambitious theme. For
example, Witt and Bell look alike and they kind of sound alike
and when two men are running around in battle and doing voice
overs, that becomes problematic. The cameo factor is annoying
because you get that sense of actors trying to make their mark in
the short time allotted. As such, Travolta is weird as an
ambitious general, Clooney is given a few lines at the end that
is distracting (in fact, you are exhausted by the end of the
film, you still haven't seen Clooney, and you fear that he may be
pivotal and require more time) and John Savage, as stated, is not
only atrocious as a private who has freaked out (be spits, he
exhibits facial tics, the whole nine yards), but he is much too
old to have been a line soldier in WWII.
Another gripe: Witt is chronically AWOL and the
beginning of the film has him picked up by a Navy transport
whilst he lives among pleasant, harmonious natives. His company
is on the transport and they go quite a long way away to the
island that serves as the setting for the film. Regardless, Witt
manages to return to the natives for a visit by way of a long
walk. A walk I calculate at about 320 miles.
Finally, even in a war picture, 4 death scenes
are too much.
In the end, you can't call it a complete mess,
because it is so visually accomplished. But it is a narrative
mess, overly long, overly self-important, and devoid of linear
construct.
