Film review

  • The Thin Red Line

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Terrence Malick (1998)

    James Jones’ novel about the American soldiers fighting the Guadalcanal campaign (of whom Jones was one) was published in 1962, more than a decade after From Here to Eternity.   At five hundred pages, it’s not quite two-thirds the length of the earlier book but Terrence Malick’s film, at a hundred and seventy minutes, is almost half as long again as Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, written by Daniel Taradash.  (A 1964 movie of The Thin Red Line, directed by Andrew Marton, ran ninety-nine minutes.)   What’s more, Malick’s film is so misshapen that you feel a large amount of footage must have been cut from the version released in cinemas.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘In addition to the cast seen in the final cut of the film, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke also performed, but their scenes were eventually cut. Editor Leslie Jones was on location for five months and rarely saw Malick, who left her to her own devices.  After principal photography wrapped, she came back with a five-hour first cut and spent seven months editing … It was at this point that editor Billy Weber came on board and they spent 13 months in post-production and the last four months mixing the film …’

    The central consciousness in the story is Private Witt and the film begins with him living on a South Pacific island, where he’s gone AWOL with another soldier.  Life on the island is harmonious although there’s a natural early apprehension on the part of the natives because Witt is an American soldier.  Yet he’s a pacific, nearly a pacifist character – the islanders trust him more than does his company sergeant Welsh, Witt’s polar opposite.  Witt is picked up from the island by the company and imprisoned on a troop carrier before being given the job of stretcher-bearer.  Back on Guadalcanal, the landscapes are so beautifully lit (by John Toll) that they seem less real than aestheticised. Throughout the film, the elegiac music by Hans Zimmer comes over as an uninspired rip-off of the Barber ‘Adagio’ used in Platoon.   However, once the military action is underway, The Thin Red Line becomes, for a while, impressive.   The soldiers’ fearful unknowing of what lies ahead of them round the next corner or the over the next hill is gripping.  The main warfare sequences are marvellously edited – and well judged in that the carnage, although shocking, is never gratuitous.

    The main problem is that Terrence Malick either can’t or doesn’t want to fuse the metaphysical musing – to which the people in his films are prone – with character.  As in The Tree of Life, there’s a lot of voiceover, spreading from one soldier to another like a virus.  I was rarely sure whether the person we were seeing on screen at the time was also the one talking – because, whereas the actors can make the people they’re playing distinctive as we watch them, they’re nearly all reduced to a single voice.  The original editor Leslie Jones is quoted on Wikipedia as saying that ‘Malick removed scenes with dialogue whenever possible’:  if only he’d done the same with monologue.  Lt Colonel Tall, a bullet-headed, barking senior officer overplayed by Nick Nolte, is given too much self-exposition – not only in voiceover but also in scenes involving other people.  And when Witt’s voice on the soundtrack asks when did it all go wrong for the human race, you want to ask him what he’s talking about.  He seems to think there really was a golden age when the peoples of the world lived happily together – and spoke English, as the Melanesian woman with whom Witt has a conversation in the Edenic prologue, obligingly does.

    In spite of its philosophical pretensions, I wasn’t convinced that The Thin Red Line offered new insights into the madness of war – it certainly doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that American involvement in the Second World War wasn’t madness.  The film also features some stock characters – like the embittered Tall and Private John Bell, who dreams of being back with the wife who eventually deserts him.  The script is tiresomely schematic so that each man represents one thing:  Witt keeps flashing back to the island paradise, Bell keeps thinking about his wife (is he the only married man in the company?) etc.

    In spite of their mostly sketchy characters, the actors get a lot going.  They’re convincing as a company of fighting men who had civilian lives.  This is especially true of Sean Penn as Sergeant Welsh, who has to work harder than we first realise to appear inured and cynical.  Jim Caviezel, although he may be a limited actor, is well cast as the idealistic Witt.  His almost weirdly calm handsomeness allows him to blend into the island paradise easily – and it’s good the way that Witt works on Welsh’s nerves:  the man of the world just doesn’t get the one who can stand outside it.  Ben Chaplin does creditably as Bell and Elias Koteas is excellent as the courageously principled Captain Staros.  The remarkable cast also includes, among many others, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, John C Reilly and John Travolta.  And Adrien Brody:  his role was notoriously shorn – a fact Brody discovered when he saw the film in the cinema.  (He’s reduced to little more than looking frightened a handful of times.)   Yet the terrific line-up is almost self-defeating.   Late on in the film, when Welsh, looking pissed off as only Sean Penn can, says (in an interior monologue), ‘Here they come, one after another … ‘, you can’t help laughing – because we’ve seen so many well-known faces in the company.  The latest recruit who prompts Welsh’s remark is George Clooney (in an effective cameo as the replacement for Staros when he’s sent back to the US).

    The film appears to be on the point of ending for most of its final hour and on the point of exhaustion for much of that.  I couldn’t believe it when Malick launched another military assault late in the day – although the only purpose of this seems to be to get Witt killed and ceremonially buried by Welsh (Penn’s acting comes close to saving the scene).  Having seen The Tree of Life the week before, I’m not sure The Thin Red Line ever ended:  ‘To be continued – more than a decade later’ would really have been the thing to put on the screen above the closing credits.  Bell’s wife’s Dear John letter must be one of the most annoying ever written:  she not only tells him she’s found a new man; she also, like so many others, burbles on about the meaning of life.  Reading the letter, Bell hears her voice intoning, ‘I have no right to talk to you like this but I can’t help myself:  it’s become such a habit’.   This sounds like Terrence Malick coming clean.

    24 July 2011

  • The Tenant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le locataire

    Roman Polanski (1976)

    Polanski had already illustrated in Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby the risks to one’s sanity of living in an apartment.  This third variation on the theme (based on a 1964 novel by Roland Topor called Le locataire chimérique, adapted by the director and Gérard Brach) is, from the start, freighted with inevitability and anxiety.  When Trelkovsky (Polanksi) first arrives at the Paris apartment block to rent rooms, he’s vague about how he was put onto the place but you sense it’s his destiny.  The concierge’s yappy dog immediately bites him.  As she shows Trelkovsky the top floor apartment, the concierge explains the unhappy end to its previous tenancy:  Simone Choule, the young woman who rented the place, jumped out of the window, crashed through a glass roof below, and now lies in hospital with no hope of recovery.  Your natural expectation is that fateful history will repeat itself.  Even without these forebodings, the film’s title serves as a reminder that all of us are in possession of the place that houses us only temporarily; it soon becomes clear that a main theme of The Tenant is the vulnerability of personal identity.

    For no better reason than that it’s essential to the plot, Trelkovsky visits Simone Choule in hospital, where he literally bumps into Simone’s friend Stella.   Simone, who was an Egyptologist, has the appearance of a mummy.  Swathed in bandages, she’s reduced to eyes and a mouth which, although it’s unable to speak, lets out a horrifying cry before she dies.   Trelkovksy’s visit seems to finish her off.  Later, in a rare moment of relative relaxation, lying in bed with Stella, an inebriated Trelkovsky refects on losing different parts of his body but remaining himself.   (These musings culminate in ‘… if they cut off my head, what could I say then?  Myself and my body, or myself and my head?  By what right does the head, which isn’t even a member like an arm or a leg, claim the title of “myself”?’)   These two strands of the material – history repeating itself and the loss of selfhood – converge:  Trelkovksy becomes, or falls prey to a paranoid delusion that he’s becoming, Simone Choule.

    Some elements of this process are disturbing because they’re presented in a matter-of-fact or understated way.  The patron and the garçon in the café-bar where Trelkovksy goes each morning offer him hot chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes because these are what Simone liked.   There’s an implication  that Stella and Simone had a lesbian relationship, and that this is why Stella goes to bed with Trelkovksy.  Other aspects of his new identity are more garishly superficial:   Trelkovsky eventually buys a woman’s wig and, with Simone’s clothes and cosmetics still in the apartment, dresses and makes himself up as her.  The protagonist’s existential horror is also developed through a mixture of the insidious and the melodramatic.   Trelkovksy, who looks to have an anonymous office job, has friends from work round for a flat-warming.  They make a racket; from this point onwards, the determinedly inoffensive tenant is repeatedly accused by his landlord of disturbing the peace of the block late at night.   When Trelkovksy attends Simone’s funeral service in a church, the priest turns from conventional sentiments to vindictive invective (both are very badly read by the dubbed-into-English voice on the soundtrack) about the corpse-eating worms that the deceased richly deserves.  Trelkovksy listens in sweaty terror, knowing that the priest is really referring to him.  You know that Simone’s terrible dying scream sound will be reprised through the dark void of Trelkovksky’s gaping mouth at the end of the film and so it is – although the effect is still undeniably powerful and frightening.  Yet Polanski lays on the ominousness so indiscriminately that he sometimes dilutes its effect.  Trelkovksy’s work colleagues are photographed in close-up to emphasise their big, going-on-grotesque faces.  Since there’s no indication that he feels threatened by them, their minatory quality seems merely imposed.

    Yet The Tenant is absorbing and Polanski is the reason why.   Apart from his momentary appearance in Repulsion and his cameo in Chinatown, I don’t recall seeing him act before.  As Trelkovksy, he’s nothing special when he’s seriously emoting but the quieter parts of his characterisation are impressive.  One of the strongest sequences in the film occurs when Trelkovsky shows sympathy towards a man who secretly loved Simone Choule.  (Polanksi and Rufus, as the other man, play this episode beautifully – and it has a retrospective power in the sense that, if Trelkovksy is Simone, then the kindness he shows to her admirer is a fulfilment of the latter’s hopes.)   The integrity of Polanski’s acting makes Trelkovksy’s manifold hallucinations more upsetting because you believe in the person that’s experiencing them.  I felt this tenant’s fate consuming him more powerfully than I felt the walls of her London flat closing in on Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion.

    There are too elements of Polanski’s biography that I couldn’t help feeling increased the impact of the story and his presence in the film:   his concentration camp experiences;  his sense of being regarded with suspicion as a Pole in France;  the psychological residue of Sharon Tate’s murder.   Although the dubbing is awful (especially with four or five voices at once), after a while it actually adds to Trelkovksy’s sense of alienation and imprisonment, and the post-recorded sound of American voices speaking the words of the French actors in The Tenant seems weirdly to anticipate Polanski’s asylum in Europe that began a year after this movie was made.   Some of the actors do speak in their own, distinctive voices:  Polanski himself, Melvyn Douglas (as the landlord), Shelley Winters (the concierge), Jo Van Fleet (the most viciously persecutive resident of the block of flats), and Lila Kedrova (the woman on the receiving end of the persecution).  These first-rate actors, Kedrova especially, bring considerable force to their characters, although Van Fleet is very stagy.  I’m not sure if Isabelle Adjani, as Stella, spoke her own lines in English but their reading wrecks her performance.  The dark-toned but rich cinematography is by Sven Nykvist.  Philippe Sarde’s excellent score is mysterious and melancholy.

    23 January 2013

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