The Thin Red Line

The Thin Red Line (1998)
Director: Terrence Malick
Actors: Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte

Synopsis: The lives and innermost musings of a range of soldiers during the Guadalcanal conflict of the Second World War.

Review: Contender for one of the most ennobling films ever made, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line will always have a place in my heart as perhaps the work that first opened my undergrad eyes to the transcendent and emotional possibilities of cinema.

Malick’s experiential, sensory lure enraptures from the off with a quite staggering discord of sound and image whereby epic harmonic chords rise over the presence of that most ancient and forboding of creatures – the crocodile – positioning itself stealthily in some Guadalcanal swampland. The tenor then shifts to uplifting choral music and a more benign spiritual image of a tree twisting its way up towards a heavenly light. Quite what these phenomena signify is not entirely conclusive, although there’s the sense that Malick is suggesting nature will always endure and has its own avenging source. And is the carnage wrought by mankind an inevitable, cyclical facet of ‘nature’ anyway?

Malick then moves into the slightly more concrete by introducing the film’s first – and key – player, Witt, the AWOL army private. Acting as the audience proxy and moral pivot for the film, and, in a sense, the control through which the chaos of the war is refracted, Witt is both a remarkably poignant characterisation and concept by Malick, and he is majestically incarnated by Jim Caviezel. Caviezel being an actor who must have one of the most soulful pair of eyes in cinematic history, and whose de facto messiah character here and overall photogenetic gracefulness made him a shoe-in when Mel Gibson came to cast his literal Jesus for The Passion of the Christ a few years later.

This feeling of religiosity is rife across the film, in its imagery, to its themes and characterisations. It communicates itself most beautifully in perhaps the film’s most important detour and parable: Witt movingly recounting the death of his mother and the lesson of divinity and grace he absorbed from that experience. It sears through the screen with its poignancy and truthfulness – not just in Malick’s beautiful words and Caviezel’s moving rendition, but also in the free-associative imagery used to depict the immense emotional experience of death. There is an old, frail hand caressing a young, perfect one; a primal image of a child listening to a beating parent’s heart; and the idea of death as liberation – the bedroom is roofless and projects out over a limitless sky. The genius of the scene is that it transcends sheer aestheticisation and has real dramaturgical purpose. Witt is establishing a spiritual code for when he is to be confronted with his own mortality in the film’s closing moments.

Equally spellbinding about Witt are his mesmeric tête à têtes with his initially cynical army sergeant Welsh, played by Sean Penn. They function as the philosophical battleground of the film, playing out as quarterly commentaries on the action, and it is one of the film’s most moving strands to witness Welsh’s guard of callous, self-preservation slowly begin to erode amid the example of Witt’s capacity for hope and humanity in the middle of such an awful conflict.

If nitpicking, the only slight issue with the film is its liberal and sometimes clunky and demonstrative use of voiceover. At its best – as in Witt’s ‘mother dying’ reminiscence or Bell’s romantic reveries – it has a soaring, lyrical quality complimented by the visuals, but, at its worst, the voiceover projects as inelegant ventriloquism. A clear example is in the opening naval scene where the main commanders and their stakes are introduced. Almost immediately, there is Nick Nolte’s rather gruff Lt. Col. Tall portentously pondering on “what I would have given for love’s sake” or “the closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear.” Now for Witt, as the example of transcendence, the voiceover is relevant, but for a philistine, repressed, cipher of a character like Tall, the lending of an emotional inner-voice is prosaic and redundant. Voiceover in Malick’s films works best, as in Badlands or Days of Heaven, when it has a certain ironic distance from the action and only takes the perspective of a single character. Malick’s attempts to convey the myriad relativism of war would not have been hindered in the slightest by limiting the quantity of voiceover, and, dare I say, its sometimes mawkishness.

Pretty much everything else about the film is on much surer footing though. The power struggle between Nolte’s Tall and Elias Koteas’ Staros is a compelling parable of the conscience. And in fact, it’s this central thread of moral conviction running through The Thin Red Line that makes is so much more compelling and powerful than most of the other (even seemingly liberal) war films in its genre. Never at any point is glory or catharsis allowed to mitigate the soldiers’ sufferings. War is depoliticised and shown to be uniformly evil, perverse and unnatural, an anathema to mankind’s craving for existential sanctity. (March 2016)