Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
`That was one of the worst, most homophobic pieces of inane, boring rubbish I have ever seen,” or words to that effect spouted one of my colleagues, a leading movie critic. I don’t agree about Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Overseas critics have also been divided about the film, with some claiming it’s the best of the year while others say incoherent plotting and bad casting ruin the day. I thought it an awesome technical achievement that doesn’t dwell on gung-ho- ness but more on spirituality and the human cost of war. Another colleague accurately remarked, “It’s the first Buddhist war flick.”
Until the advent of the Vietnam War, most Americans, and certainly Hollywood, perceived the nation’s military as an all-conquering and unfailing force determined to defend good in the world. The image of the USas the supreme “good-natured” conquering force began with George Washington’s victory over the British in the revolution and reached unparalleled heights with the huge successes in World War II. Even if the war in Korea was “a long business” and an undistinguished conquest, the public, journalists and film- makers blamed politicians for the gaffes and kept their high regard for their forces.
With the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the escalation of the Vietnam War the tide turned and the defeat in Vietnam left the old military image in despair. The result was that for the next few decades Hollywood started churning out films that realistically showed the pain, uselessness, waste and personal agonies of war.
An exception to the rule has to be John Wayne’s noxious 1968 battle movie The Green Berets, which virtually implied the Americans won the Vietnam War. Wayne has been referred to by critics and movie academics as the supreme US movie icon of World War II. Instead of defending homesteads or stagecoaches, he was defending the nation, if not the whole “free world”.
His most famous appearance in military fatigues was as the tough Sergeant Stryker in Allan Dwan’s The Sands of Iwo Jima, where he moulded a group of young soldiers into an invincible fighting force. He became a massive symbol of the US’s quintessential fighting man.
But real war is not a Republican flag-waving John Wayne movie and that comes through very clearly in The Thin Red Line. It’s the director’s first film in 20 years. He made his debut in 1974 with Badlands, the elegiac road movie that had Sissy Spaceck and Martin Sheen as lovers on a killing spree, couched in Tak Fujimoto’s luminous photography and Carl Orff’s folk-like music.
His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), had Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard caught up in a fatal love triangle while working as harvesters after World War I. Held together by a voice-over from the young Linda Manz, it had a profound romantic style which treated lovers and insects alike – at the climax there’s a plague of locusts as the lovers flee the farmstead. Then Malick took two decades off, earning a lucrative living with uncredited screenwriting, including helping out Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on their Oscar-winning script for Good Will Hunting.
As for The Thin Red Line, the story rights were bought from author James Jones’s widow in 1988 and it has been released 11 years later on the back of seven Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and two for Malick as director and screenwriter of adapted material.
It’s not the first time a movie has been made from Jones’s 1962 autobiographical novel about the World War II battle at Guadalcanal. Stunt co-ordinator Andrew Marton turned director in 1964 for a version which starred Keir Dulleau. Running at 99 minutes and made strictly as a gung-ho war pic, the film shares very little semblance with Malick’s, apart from the title.
In Malick’s movie we follow a group of soldiers who land on the island and attempt to break a Japanese stronghold on a giant hill. There are five main characters and loads of secondary ones – in fact, John Travolta and George Clooney have about two minutes of screen time in all, while Woody Harrelson has about five. The commanding officer of the battalion is Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Tall (Nick Nolte seeming to impersonate George C Scott’s bombastic performance in Patton) who wants all the glory no matter how many young soldiers go to the slaughter.
Captain James Staros (a convincing performance by Elias Koteas) is known for his compassion to his men and at one point refuses a direct order from Tall when he realises it’s a suicide mission. Sergeant Edward Welsh (an underused Sean Penn) is hard and cold but risks his life to get painkillers to a wounded soldier. Then there’s James Caviezel as a private who goes AWOL, is nearly court-martialed but later distinguishes himself in combat, and another private (Ben Chaplin) who is brave even while he dreams of his beautiful wife back home.
The film brilliantly reconstructs the horror and disorder of war, but where it most succeeds is balancing the physical and psychological conflict by pitting the natural landscape against these men blasting the hell out of each other.
The movie engages both on a visceral and cerebral level. Images of a crocodile sliding through water, a wounded baby bird flapping its wings, a flurry of bats looking down at a mortally wounded soldier, burbling streams, soaring trees seen from their roots in startling low wide-angle shots, the lush tropical rolling hills with their grass waving in the wind – all these and some of the philosophies of the characters stop this film from being gung-ho, “we’ve gotta win” material.
Some of the technical achievements of the movie are dazzlingly accomplished – long tracking shots through the grass; the high- contrast lighting in the beginning; the long pauses in dialogue that indicate the calm before the storm; and the lyrical memory scenes of the one man’s love.
Malick is a consummate lyricist even when dealing with grisly combat. As one character remarks, “This great evil, where does it come from? What root did it grow from?” In the same year and Oscar line-up as Saving Private Ryan, this is a far more intelligent and intellectual film. As one critic remarked, “If you’re in the mood for a war movie combined with Kierkegaard, this film might be your prescribed trip, as long as you don’t forget to bring your weed, beret and `thinker’ glasses.”
I loved it. Welcome back, Malick.