What's his Line?

Malick's return is more Thin than Red

by Peter Keough

THE THIN RED LINE. Written and directed by Terrence Malick based on the novel by James Jones. With Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Savage. A Twentieth Century Fox release. At the Opera House, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

At some time in the 20 years since he made his last movie, Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick must have tuned into the Discovery Channel. How else to account for the lushly photographed (by John Toll) jungle and ethnographic footage that permeates most of The Thin Red Line's 165 minutes? As a metaphor for the inaccessible, indifferent beauty of nature set against the confused vanity and conflict of civilization, it makes its point quickly. But it's also a metaphor for a sensibility that confuses inspiration with self-indulgence, profundity with cliché, visual poetry with padding. Although moving in many places, with combat sequences that rival Saving Private Ryan in intensity if not in graphic special effects, this belabored and fitfully brilliant adaptation of James Jones's sprawling novel of the Battle of Guadalcanal is a frustrating return to the screen of one of American film's most distinctive and challenging geniuses.

Comparisons to Spielberg's opus are as inevitable as they are warranted. Ryan asks whether in the face of heinous carnage there is any value in an individual human life. The Thin Red Line has its question voiced by the cynical Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn in one of the film's most convincing performances): can any one man make a difference in this shithole of a war? It would help if the cast offered anyone who was recognizable as a human being. Boasting some of the brightest male talent in Hollywood (there's John Travolta! there's George Clooney! is this The Longest Day?), the performances range from drab uniformity (everyone looks the same; everyone utters, in relentless, Southern-accented voiceovers, the same pseudo-philosophical apostrophes) to jarring cameos.

Line, though, is more an abstract meditation than a story or drama, and in it Malick shows even more ambition than Jones, who sought to demonstrate the process by which war reduces men to beasts. Malick's goal is no less than to determine the nature of good and evil, the secret of life and death; and in that endeavor his characters seem more allegorical spokesmen than flesh-and-blood figures. As Platoon did with its sergeants, Line embodies its philosophical positions in two soldiers: Welsh and the goodhearted, nature-loving Private Witt (Jim Caviezel). Are human beings just dirt, as Welsh affirms, or are they all part of the same spirit, as Witt comes to believe? Either way, it doesn't leave the filmmaker much room for individuality -- so maybe making all the dogfaces in Charlie Company ciphers is style mirroring substance.

Meanwhile, there's a war going on, conducted by the aging, opportunistic Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte, in a vein-pumping performance that underscores the subtle intensity of his work in the upcoming Affliction) and the conscience-stricken Captain Staros (played with pathos by Elias Koteas). The battle sequences, all-enveloping in their stunningly edited tracking shots, leap from the long passages of orotund foliage and verbiage with mocking savagery and finality. It's here that Malick rises to the occasion, dwelling on the human fate, and face, in extremis, whether it's Welsh tempted to risk his life to comfort a wounded man or Sergeant Keck (Woody Harrelson, in a cameo with heart) reacting to an errant grenade or two soldiers looking back in doubt and horror just before they advance on an enemy ridge. All the fruit bats and macaws may put the human condition in perspective, but moments like these remind one of what it means to be human.