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