The Thin Red Line

Is this movie flawed enough that it manages to sabotage what it's trying to do? I don't think so. Terence Malick, whose last film, to give you adults out there some major age spasms, came out before I was born, has taken all the time it took me to go through childhood, adolescence, the zit years, and finally the first rash flowering of my writing career to give us "The Thin Red Line," a movie taking place during a World War 2 battle which is not primarily, in my opinion, a war movie, an engrossing yet at times hysterically boring movie, a relentlessly beautiful movie about the ugliest activity man can engage in, a movie filled not with the usual stereotypes but with people we simply do not know. This is another movie with a point, but it takes its sweet time (3 hours) making it, and makes it both more and less forcefully for its obscene length. It is a confused movie, it is a cold, distant movie, and it yet is probably the most emotionally affecting movie I have seen in a long time.

This ostensible WWII film opens with its black-and-white title and then five minutes of nature shots, with the "In paradisium" from Gabriel Faure's Requiem in the background. (I only mention it because the ethereal music took on a tone of deadly irony when I heard it; we are in paradise, according to Malick, but a requiem mass is of course given to honor someone who has died.) In fact, this movie does not get around to the actual war for a seemingly interminable time, interminable at least to those of us who (like me) were expecting gunshots aplenty and wave after wave of marauding Japanese for our brave soliders to mow down. Even during the war, it is only man who suffers. The men who are being shot or shooting rush upwards through liquid-looking fields of tall tropical grass, shot in perfect silence so that one can hear it swishing as the men are on their initial reconnaissance. And Malick never lets us forget the natural beauty that surrounds these men: shots of parrots, owls, orchids, other tropical beauties, and seemingly endless variations on a clear acid blue sky punctuate all scenes, battle and non-battle alike.

Nature, in fact, is the only character in this movie we get to know really well. Malick seems to take delight in plowing big name actors across the camera for useless cameos (John Travolta, George Clooney) and the characters we see a lot are basically unknown to us, even though their behavior is that of men and not of invulnerable G.I. Joes standing up to the Jap menace. This is not the ragtag bunch of ethnically-correct misfits that seems to populate other war movies; these are all white men, predominantly southern, and we see a lot of them but we do not know them. They pass from us; Malick allows them to speak in fragments and then moves on to the next man. Of course, as seemingly everyone has noted, sometimes they speak through pseudo-lyrical internal-monologue voiceovers. I am not exactly opposed to this technique, but I do think that sometimes there are more graceful things to do than to use it. I would like to note that Malick does not use it nearly as much as the reviews I have seen would lead you to believe; you can basically put the narration out of your mind when it's not there, and it's never embarrassingly useless.

Still, it does bespeak a certain lack of subtlety. It would be excusable if Malick were trying to save the viewer time, I suppose, except that this movie clocks at almost three hours, which had my butt bitchin', believe you me. This includes long seemingly useless conversations and the aforementioned endless nature scenes, with which the movie begins and ends. The acting is good, but it doesn't really need to be. And, yes, some of the voiceovers are pretty bad poetry, only convincing because they are spoken by a completely convinced actor while the moviegoer gazes at beautiful imagery.

But this too speaks to what I think the point of this movie is. Malick obsesses over nature to put a context around the men, shows its essential unchangedness to show what they have ultimately accomplished in their battling. He gives us silence in vast quantities to provide context to words. He makes no man significant in this movie to prove that no one man is significant "in this world" at all, in a favorite phrasing. What Malick has made a movie about is not war at all, but the essential insignificance of man and his works. We move through life, making trails in grasses, exploding holes in mountains, performing deeds other men call heroic, and the world moves aside to allow us like tall grass bending under the footsteps of man. But when the campaign has been fought, the world swallows us up, and all traces of ourselves. Sands shift to accomodate our tread and then return to an undifferentiated state moments later. All God's other creatures gaze on our strivings unperturbed. And when we are gone from the world, like the man whose wife back home falls in love with another man, we lose even its glowing memory. This movie ultimately does succeed in delivering its very powerful message: From dust we arise, and to dust we shall return. Or, as one of Malick's characters puts it in the heat of battle, on his knees with earth streaming through his bloodied hands, "We dirt. We just dirt."

Attractive Man Count: 4.

Attractive Woman Count: 1.

Overall Grade: A.

Man, do I ever need to watch a stupid movie now Lindemann

I think, four years later (2003), I would not be as affected by this film as I was in my relative film-viewing youth. But there are some fine things about it. I still recall the reading of the line that closes this review with what seems to me like stunning clarity.

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