Terrence Malick's 'The Thin Red Line' - Underrated War Masterpieces (1)

Whatever talk surrounds the 1998 Academy Awards often centres around the supposed snub of Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar, and the 'undeserved' win of Shakespeare in Love. Now I've never been all that fussed about SPR not winning, first and foremost because I don't think it's the flawless, definitive WWII masterpiece lots of people consider it to be. The D-Day setpiece is brilliantly done, the performances of the cast are mostly solid, the death scene of Wade (Giovani Ribisi) is one of Speilberg's highlights of his great 1990's run. But it's also a bit too 'Murican and schmaltzy in tone. The bookend scenes are problematic, and the overly sentimental tone becomes a bit overbearing after awhile. It's a very effective film, but best film of 1998? In a year where the eventual winner was in my opinion, fully deserving (I really like Shakespeare in Love, I think it's a delightful and very clever film, even if it is a bit slight), and The Big Lebowski wasn't even nominated, I hesitate to even agree that it was a shoo-in for a nomination.

Also, there was another war film released in 1998 that was also nominated for Best Picture: Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Malick's return to filmmaking after a two-decade long hiatus after Days of Heaven had a great deal of anticipation behind it by critics, as he had opted to adapt a notoriously complex source material - a semi-autobiographical novel by James Jones centered on the soldiers 'C Company', a battalion taking part in the battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific Theater. In constrast to the small-scale, small budget, small-town films Badlands and Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line was a war epic on a far grander scale than anything he'd done before, with a $50+ million budget, on-location filming in Australia and the Solomon Islands, and a huge cast involving everyone from Sean Penn to George Clooney to John C. Reilly to Nick Nolte to John Cusack to Woody Harrelson to...pretty much every Hollywood A-lister at the time.

In fact, Malick's cast was so loaded, his screenplay adaptation so huge, and he had filmed so much material (nearly 5-hours of it!!), that some big names who'd filmed scenes for the film had to be cut out - including Gary Oldman, Mickey Rourke, and Billy Bob Thornton, to name but a few. Of those that remained, some had their roles cut down to near-cameos - most notably Adrien Brody, who originally had a very significant role which was cut down to two lines and a few reaction shots (though he does do a lot within those limits).

A reservation one may take towards the film is that this ambitious, risky approach by Malick to take on a sprawling novel with so many characters, means that in his adaptation, and subsequent editing of the material, the film is not as narrative-driven as something like Saving Private Ryan. Well this actually fits in perfectly with the ambition of Malick as he seeks not to convey merely a story about a particular war, or mission, or battle, he instead portrays war through the stream of consciousness of many different characters, some more major, some more minor, but all with equal importance to the story. The way the film flits around so many different perspectives regarding the nature of war, human nature, the brutality of death and the beauty of life, and in Private Witt's (Jim Caviezel) the place in between where the 'calm' exists.

Calm, soothing, utterly rapturous is how The Thin Red Line begins, with Witt having gone AWOL amongst Melanesian natives. He's soon captured, and his conversation with his commanding sergeant Welsh (an unmannered and naturalistic Sean Penn) pretty much sets, in a way, two tones for the film: the transcendent, dreamlike state of Witt and the earthly, cynical tone of Welsh. Though to diminish either character, or the film itself, with such sweeping statements is to neglect the fine lines of complexities in between, but it's an interesting way to see how the takes these two threads and strings them along the thin red line of war's veering conflict between compassion and brutality.

The way the film sometimes quite suddenly introduces characters and then leaves them with us with little introduction, context or backstory, shouldn't work with my usual approach to watching films. But here it does. Boy, it does. The 'stunt casting' nature of some of the big names pays off entirely because it sometimes adds to the overall scene (having John Cusack as a particularly brave and righteous soldier feels particularly apt). The scenes involving his character, Gaff, leading an assault on a flanking mission to a bunker, disproves Malick dissenters who say the man could never film a more straightforward sort of action war scene. The scenes in here certainly carry more of the vibe of your standard WWII film, just that it's also directed, acted, captured to ultimate technical perfection. The scenes involving shell shock, soldiers fearing for their lives, are all captured with utter sincerity, showing that opposed to seeing human as mere tools for his craft, Malick does have humanity.

The stunt casting also helps effectively one-scene wonders stand out incredibly well. Jared Leto and Adrien Brody have only a handful of scenes and miniscule amount of lines, but make so much out of a few sparse reaction shots. Woody Harrelson's one big scene is EXTREMELY harrowing and effective (SPOILERS).

Kirk Avocado and Nick Stahl have particularly moving moments of humanity, John Savage brilliantly plays the disillusioned nature of Sgt. Jack McCron. Malick's films sometimes use actors as mere props, and here while the ensemble nature of the film does build characters up into poles which support the overarching themes espoused in the voiceovers of characters, and their reactions to war, no one feels like a mere plot device. Maybe because there is no real clear plot, that's true, maybe the nature of the editing makes this scattershot scope work. I don't care, it works entirely for me, and that's all that matters.

The film is simply beautiful to look at. It never feels like a random arrangement of images, so whether it's a portrayal of the simple beauty of the Melanesian peoples' lives or the horrors of warfare, Malick never leaves a scene feeling just serviceable. Each scene feels so lived in through the colour scheme, lighting, choice of setting, the way the sound reverberates with the dialogue (interior or exterior), music, and cinematography fitting together perfectly. Malick's often surreal, unorthodox approach, angling the camera at peculiar but extremely effective angles, juxtaposing blue, green, read, white, all manner of colours with varying degrees of focus, is difficult to explain but almost impossible not to at least marvel at. I loved the cinematography on The Revenant but if you though that was impressive, well watch this, you haven't seen the best nature has to offer onscreen.

The best scene in the film from a spectacle level is definitely the attack on the Japanese stronghold. The buildup to the bloodshed is both incredibly beautiful, and incredibly intense, and pays off in a way I would like to call marvellous, but can't bring myself to do so because it's also so unsparingly disturbing and brutal. Where some directors would opt to emphasize the heroism of soldiers and leave the enemies as blank slates, obscured by gunfire, Malick instead focuses in greater detail the malnourished state of the Japanese soldiers, the fact that some are so disillusioned they've commited seppuku, and some just sit there praying, seemingly at peace amongst all this hate. Witt even engages in discourse with one of the dead enemy soldiers: 'Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too'. The sheer horror of the situation on both sides is harrowing. 'How'd we lose the good that was given to us?' Good and evil is not defined in Malick's universe; there is no morality in a world beset by war. Like Witt says, the only hope for peace is in the beyond, the hereafter.

The great thing about The Thin Red Line is that there's no real right or wrong. The enemies are just serving their country; they're humans like the American soldiers, as Dash Mihok's Pfc. Doll learns all too harshly. The central conflict of the film, between the career soldier looking for promotion and pride at any cost Lieutenant Colonel Tall (an excellent Nick Nolte), and his compassionate company commander Captain James Staros (an utterly brilliant Elias Koteas). Nolte gets the loud, fantastic scenes in which he brutally shows the dedication and drive to the man's method in madness, but with a great final reaction to suggest the humanity within him. Koteas' Staros is a true being of beauty. We learn very little about his backstory, as is the same with most of these characters, but his relationship with the men under his command, whom he sees as his sons, is one of the most moving portrayals of love ever put onscreen. You really feel, despite only seeing these characters for brief stretches at each time, you've gotten to know these men very well.

 The two most enigmatic characters, Private Bell and Witt, are played by two of the most relative unknowns in the cast, Ben Chaplin and Jim Caviezel. Chaplin's voiceover might possibly be my choice for MVP voiceover for the film, as he manages to create a character almost wholly through a series of rather surreal, beautiful dream sequences where he recalls back to better days spent with his wife, who soon sends him a Dear John letter. Chaplin's performance is perhaps the most underrated of the film, few people talk about him, but his wonderful voice fits perfectly with the scenes Malick films in the dreamlike past, which manage to create a few minutes where we, like Bell, are truly transported into another dimension.

As for Caviezel, he's my MVP of the film. His character meets his end, it's no spoiler really, even he nots from the outset that he's destined for it, he's just waiting for the moment. He does not seek death, he loves life, but he simply knows that for him there's another world waiting. It's no surprise that Caviezel was chosen by Mel Gibson to play Jesus Christ since he delivers such an otherwordly quality to his performance here. He's the closest the film has to a lead, and a wise decision on Malick's behalf. The ending of the film carries so much power because of how well built up Witt's character as an embodiment of the film's themes has been, and how it leads to the final musings of the film. I don't even mind the distracting cameo by George Clooney at the end (who is perfectly fine, by the way, I have no complaints), because the emotional overflow I felt at its close made me ruminate over the wide expanse, both literally and figuratively, of Malick's masterpiece.

Also, just to reiterate how great the soundtrack is:

Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man.

We. We together. One being. Flow together like water. Till I can't tell you from me. I drink you. Now. Now.

Also, my Malick ranking:

1. The Thin Red Line (5/5)
2. Badlands (5/5)
3. Days of Heaven (4/5)
4. The New World (4/5)
5. The Tree of Life (3.5/5)