The Thin Red Line

SHOW ME THE PREVIEWS (sorry, I needed a new way to bring them up):

Entrapment–The new Sean Connery flick. Connery, big budget action AND Catherine Zeta-Jones. What more can you ask for? Looks pretty cool, if formulaic.

Midsummer Night’s Dream–This one looks really cool. Lot’s of great actors (and Calista “Can-I-Eat-Now?” Flockhart) and special effects. Pretty strange for Shakespeare, huh? You know, I acted in this play once. Well, sort of. Just some little middle school class thing. Not even on stage. My teacher’s response to my one line? “At least we could hear him!” What rave reviews.

Inspector Gadget–I actually saw this one on a tv at the concession stand. It looks like it could be fun. I watched the cartoon all the time and still remember quite a bit about them. If anyone were to bring Gadget to life I think it would have to be Matthew Broderick. No one else can be as dorky/cool as him. I was surprised by the number of sexual innuendoes that are apparently in this Disney movie. Then I thought about the recent scandal with The Rescuers. Question answered.

There were others, but now I can’t remember what they were. Oh well. If I remember I’ll…remember them, I guess.

Now for the movie at hand:

This was definitely the prettiest war film I’ve ever seen. (If that’s not a backhanded compliment, I don’t know what is.) The cinematography was absolutely stunning. The images of the beautiful Asian countryside meshed perfectly as the backdrop for the horrors of the war. If this movie is worth anything it’s seeing these images.

There is no real plot to the film, just like all of Terrence Malick’s films. (And when I say “all” I mean both–Badlands and Days Of Heaven–both very good and should be seen by anybody who loves film.) Basically, it’s about the men who helped take Guadalcanal during WWII. Sean Penn is Sgt. Edward Welsh, who tries very hard to watch out for all of them, but he has serious doubts as to whether it’s all worth it. Nick Nolte is Lt. Col. Gordon Tall, who wants to take the hill no matter how many men it costs the lives of. Elias Koteas is Capt. James Staros, who leads the men, but only as far as he thinks is humanly possible. Ben Chaplin (The Truth About Cats And Dogs, Washington Square) is Pvt. Bell, a man who misses his wife, who we see in multiple flashbacks. John Savage is Sgt. McCron, a man who is on the edge of his mind. John Cusack is Capt. John Gaff, a young man that Lt. Col. Tall has taken under his wing and wants to push to go farther than maybe he wants to go.

There are a lot of other people who drift in and out of the film (George Clooney, John Travolta, Jared Leto, Nick Stahl, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson), some of which seem to only be in there so that they can say that they were in a Malick film. I was rather disappointed in some of the 90 second parts, but I guess it would be hard to make the film longer than it already is.

The characters had numerous voice-overs that told us exactly what they were thinking at that point in the story. After I got out of the theatre I felt like I had just witnessed a very long poetry reading. This is not really a bad thing. The thing is, I really don’t think that all of the thoughts were really those of the characters. There were times that I really didn’t know who was doing the voice-overs. This kind of bugged me until I realized that it really didn’t matter. They might not even be thinking these things. It’s more of what was going on in the mind of Malick than anything else. Some fit the characters. Some didn’t. Either way, they were very poetic and very real. They spoke truths about war and the waste of it all. This movie could never have been made twenty years ago. (Although there was a filming of the book it was based on in 1964. I doubt that it was this existential, though.) The thoughts of the filmmaker are not exactly glorifying the act of war, which is what WWII movies have always done in the past, rather they condemned the act and the men who made the act happen. Why should the young men fight the wars that the old men make up. It’s all about property. Is it really worth it? Probably not. If it is, how many lives is it worth?

The performances are amazing. Sean Penn may get an Oscar nomination out of this one (if he doesn’t for Hurlyburly–I’ve heard he’s very good in that one, too–then again, when isn’t he?). Nick Nolte was doing a very good John Wayne impression near the beginning of the movie. He then slipped into the “Nolte Bad Guy” character that we all know and love. The character, however, rose above it’s usual limits. Very good performance. John Savage did a pretty good Brando impression throughout the film. Not sure where that one came from.

And now, the inevitable question: The Thin Red Line or Saving Private Ryan. And to this I would have to say…Saving Private Ryan. Malick’s film is flawed in ways that don’t make it bad, but make it not quite as affecting. I, personally, didn’t really get into any of the characters. I cared a little bit about Ben Chaplin’s character because of the flashbacks to his wife, but there were three actors (including him) who looked very similar. I thought that one of the character’s death scenes was actually another’s, which brought a different meaning to the death that wasn’t really there. Maybe I’m just not very observant. Then again, maybe I’m a little too observant. I can find very small things that remind me of someone else and, from then on, I get the two people confused. Like Robert Plant and Robert Palmer.

Anyway, there were some very effective scenes in this film. One involved an old native man who walked right by the soldiers without even really noticing their presence. These two cultures clashed so much that the soldiers became a normal part of the natives’ lives. The soldiers were dumbfounded by this old man, though. The audience laughed, but I think the deeper meaning hit a few of us. Other scenes involving a soldier who constantly went AWOL and the natives that he stayed with were also very effective.

Then there’s the treatment of the enemy. If you thought that the Germans were faceless in SPR, for the first half of this film, the Japanese are much like the Zombie Shooting Gallery scenes at the end of all zombie flicks. They just walk in, kill a few people and die. They could have been played by caucasians for all I know. Then, suddenly, we start to see their side of it. We even hear one of the dead bodies thoughts (?!?!). We see them hold each other with fright. They are just like us after all! Then, just as suddenly, they become just The Enemy again. No more faces. Just shoot them and be done with it. At least when SPR showed the face of The Enemy there was one guy who kept popping up and they pretty much kept to one view of them. It’s strange to be made to feel sorry for people and then be forced to go back to thinking of them as faceless people again. How does that work? Is that what he wanted us to do? Only Malick knows.

Another comparison: Where SPR was a very visceral film about the tangible horrors of war and what it can do to a man, TTRL was more about the intangibles. We saw into the minds of these men and saw HOW the became shell-shocked. We saw what kind of men they were (to some extent) and why they felt the way they did. Even if we didn’t know enough about the character to really care about him, we understood how he could be driven from reality and become like Savage’s character. We understood exactly where post-traumatic-stress-syndrome comes from. (Let’s just call it what it is–SHELLSHOCK!! As George Carlin says, if it were still called that, our Vietnam vets probably would be getting the treatment they need. Funny how comedians can make serious points look so easy.)

This film was more about the feelings of these men. It was slower and more of a drama than SPR. (Not that SPR wasn’t dramatic, but if I were to classify them I would call that one a real War movie whereas this one would be a War Drama.) It was poetic in every sense of the word, from the dialogue to the visuals. Nothing was wasted and everything was important. A very good movie, even with it’s flaws (just like Malick’s other films).

I do have one question, though: Were all soldiers on the Eastern front from the Deep South? geovisit();