I can only imagine what people think when they pay to see a kick-ass, heavily publicized war flick and are greeted instead by the languid, disorienting miasma that is The Thin Red Line. Actually, I don’t have to imagine—the second the end credits rolled last Sunday at the Regal Green Hills, the groans erupted from every corner of the room. “Man, that is the worst goddamn movie I’ve ever seen,” groused a kid in a hunting jacket sitting behind me.
I’ll admit I was sometimes bored by The Thin Red Line, a three-hour drama of staggering (and sometimes stumbling) ambition. But its trance-like pace, rigorous craftsmanship, and intensity of focus are just as often hypnotic, even visionary. The audience’s discomfort, mine included, comes from the way the film strips away the dead wood we’ve been led to expect by other war movies. And that includes the sainted Saving Private Ryan, a fine but vastly different movie that shouldn’t be used as a weapon against this one.
Based on James Jones’ World War II novel, The Thin Red Line follows an Army company into bloody combat on the island of Guadalcanal, juxtaposing chaotic warfare with the serenity of the tropical paradise. Apart from a quick briefing on Guadalcanal’s overall importance—delivered by a commander (John Travolta) who’s never seen again—the movie proceeds without explanation to the island. There’s no top-secret mission at stake for the scared, weary men, no hook to hang the story upon.
Instead, for the next two-and-a-half hours, without the usual bomber-crew introductions, the men of Charlie Company—the humane commander Staros (Elias Koteas); the brave Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn), who’s really in charge; the AWOL rebel Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel)—crawl through lush green grass and sun-dappled forests. And they try not to get their heads blown off.
The Thin Red Line withholds the war movie’s usual comforts of motivation and resolution—the sense of purpose and release that would allow us to digest the movie as disposable entertainment. They’re comforts because we want to know all those men didn’t die for nothing. Saving Private Ryan may open with the horrific waste of life at Omaha Beach, but when the soul-sick old soldier wants to know if his life was worth those of his comrades, the camera gazes at his loving wife and grandkids and says, Well, sort of.
Terrence Malick, who adapted and directed The Thin Red Line, isn’t comfortable making that kind of moral judgment. His first film, Badlands, an unnerving account of the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree in the 1950s, was notable for two things: the eerie starkness of his Midwest, which seemed to have a separate consciousness of its own; and the affectless tone his young thrill-killers used to describe their actions, from a patricide to the shooting of a football. Like his teen killers and the lawmen who finally catch up with them, Malick’s soldiers act the way they do out of nature, out of a kinship with the darkness and light in everything. Whether their actions will be considered right or wrong after the crucible of the moment, the fact remains that they happen—their existence is morally neutral.
But Malick isn’t apologizing for his soldiers any more than he did for his young killers. What you felt in Sissy Spacek’s flat narration in Badlands was an absence—a void where a soul ought to be. In The Thin Red Line Malick gives us that missing voice in the form of disembodied narration: It’s delivered in Pvt. Witt’s low-key drawl, but it belongs to no one man. It’s a sort of group consciousness, looking down on all fighting men up to their elbows in blood and imminent death. This narration is kept separate from the many interior voices we hear on the soundtrack—the thoughts of men who are too busy staying alive to talk—because it’s a moral voice, an elegy. In Badlands, Malick made a moral voice conspicuous by its absence; here the voice of conscience, hovering above the action, points out the absence of morality on scorched earth soaked with blood.
Thus Malick envisions Guadalcanal as a tropical Eden, and the battle as the plundering that divides man from paradise. The movie opens with an ominous shot of a crocodile sinking slowly into murky water, a loaded symbol if ever there was one: Underneath nature’s surface, there’s always something with teeth. Yet the image also divides the movie’s setting between above and below, a line of demarcation that’s spiritual as well as physical. Above is whatever little light that can penetrate the canopies of leaves. Below is blood and mud—the world of the crocodiles. Throughout the film, when a man dies—blown apart by his own grenade or gunned down by enemies—the camera tilts upward, straining for the light.
It’s hard to talk about The Thin Red Line with much certainty, because the qualities that make it a remarkable viewing experience—its lack of narrative crutches, its density of imagery and ambition, the sense-deranging slowness of its pace—are precisely the ones that make it hard to watch. For the first 45 minutes, I felt so detached from the action I kept nodding off. On one viewing, many of the secondary characters are hard to tell apart (less so with repeated viewings), and the poetic narration is so didactic and highfalutin at times that it detracts from the power of the images.
Even so, The Thin Red Line deserves to be seen; and even if you hate it, it’s worthy of respect. The director Samuel Fuller, no slouch himself when it came to tough, unsentimental war movies, once said no movie could approximate the sensation of combat unless live rounds were fired in the theater and the guy sitting next to you got shot in the shoulder. The Thin Red Line merely leaves you feeling worn out, uncomfortable, disoriented, and deeply shaken. Live ammo in the megaplex it ain’t, but it’s closer than you or I or anyone else ever wants to get to the real thing.
