AT SOME JUNCTURE, most war films recall General Sherman’s observation that “war is hell.” Saying the phrase aloud is unnecessary—redundant, even. The images alone are enough to remind audiences of war’s atrocity. But many war films also take for granted their soldiers’ lives before the war, and often those lives left to be led once the credits roll. The fear of death, the will to survive, and the desire of soldiers to return to ‘everyday life’ is all assumed. And often with fair cause, given that many such pictures take place in a bombed-out, greyscale world of diseased trenches, skeletal cities, and (to American eyes) unwelcoming foreign fields.
Leave it to Terrence Malick, though, to take nothing for granted, and to remind us that neither should we. In ‘The Thin Red Line’, we do eventually suffer through battle and pain, but first we are broken of the customary expectations that render that suffering rote and remote. Instead, we are brought slowly to life on a nameless Pacific island where we see the world anew through the eyes of the serially AWOL Pvt. Witt (Jim Caviezel): whispering through the tall island grass, gazing up from the ground at the sunshine cutting through the palm leaves, swimming in the transparent ocean, and staring long into a tribeswoman’s smiling eyes. Malick lingers in these moments, many of which have no direct bearing on the Battle of Guadalcanal, around which the film is technically based. But if we joined the men of C company, 25th Infantry just as they hustled out of their bunks, into their landing craft, and onto the South Pacific shores, then what would their experience mean to us? Little. And would the loss of their lives cause us to reflect on how we spend our own? Not likely.
On screen, many of these soldiers fulfill the expected roles within a cinematic regiment: the wide-eyed rookie to the cynical veteran, apoplectic brass to the displaced farmboys. As the aspiring Lt. Colonel Gordon Tall in charge of the attack, the explosive Nick Nolte is an especially strong catalyst for action; with his bulging neck veins and fingers spiking up sweat-soaked hair, he snaps our woozy eyes back into focus on several occasions. Sometimes that focus is on the action at hand and the brutish simplicity of armed combat in close quarters. Other times, it is on the confounding contradictions of war—how a world built of such wonder and men made as brothers, by whatever hand, can collapse in on itself with a senseless destructive momentum.
But this is not just for knowing these men and regretting their losses that this film was made. That is an end too narrow for Malick, who sees the world in a wavering water reed. ‘The Thin Red Line’ is as much a celebration of life as it is a chronicle of death, and shooting it in the vivid Pacific is just alien enough to jolt ‘first-world’ audiences out of their rut and back to an almost childlike state of wonder. And through the hushed voiceover reflections of various soldiers, we may learn again why life is worth living. These reflections are a metaphysical poetry, lending depth to the laconic interactions between the men on screen like an editor’s footnotes. Even Lt. Col. Tall, harsh and ravenous, is given a sensitive depth by one such entry, validating the manic force with which he pursues that hill and then the next, men and water be damned.
Eventually taking on the stature of rhetorical soliloquys, these outward musings cross over into the self-indulgence of art cinema (“Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth”), and our attention doe sometimes wander over the film’s nearly three-hour length. Too, as effectively as Malick tantalizes the initial approach to the central battle, he meanders a little off-pace through the film’s second half and we are left somewhat disoriented. Especially patchy is Witt’s denouement, which seems a little limp and obligatory after the gently beatific mysticism that he carried so deftly throughout the rest of the film.
But every fragment of this existential portrait is painstakingly earned. Some may find the film to be too steeped in its own drama, but Malick is no pretender and will countenance no shortcuts. ‘The Thin Red Line’ is a dense brew, as draining as it is revitalizing, worth drinking from deeply. And then again—for no such second draught of life exists.
Constructive Consumption 