The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

I've written before on my habit of finding films to watch by looking for just the right kind of negative user reviews, since people seem to get more descriptive with complaints than praise. It's how I found Kelly Reichardt's wonderful Old Joy, it helped turn my eye toward Apichatpong Weerasethakul's stunning Syndromes and a Century and, if I hadn't already declared them my very favorites, it would prompt me to rush down Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and the complete works of Abbas Kiarostami.

It would also, as indicated by its writeup, lead me to Terrence Malick's first feature, Badlands. But it really would have demanded that I watch his third, The Thin Red Line, whose user reviews are pretty much the mother lode. A small, small sample:

• "If you like 'War' movies steer clear. If instead you like to spend about 3 hours looking at beautiful landscapes watch this movie or better yet the travel channel."
• "This film is too long and too boring. If you must see it, turn the volume down and play music while you see some nice scenery from the Pacific."
• "If you decide to rent it, be prepared by having new batteries in your remote control for all the fast forwarding that you're likely to be doing."
• "I would like to punch out this director for wasting 3 hours of my life. Of my list of the 5 WORSE movies I have EVER seen this one has been right at the top, NUMBER ONE, for the past 8 years since I nearly walked out of the theater."
• "The movie is slow slow slow. I spent the entire movie asking, 'Is it over yet?'"
• "I'm a former Marine with some experience in war and this movie is a load of bull. What this movie is, is a film version of either a bad modern painting or bad beatnic poetry."
• "This movie was not only incredibly boring, it rubs your face in boredom, it enshrines it. And it just never ends!"
• "Too slow, too artsy, too boring."

I submit, on the contrary, that it is awesome, though it had the hard luck to be a World War II movie released two months after Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. In the intervening years, cinephiles have divided pretty nearly into camps on this issue: you're the Thin Red Line type, or you're the Private Ryan type. There can be no exceptions.

Though I last viewed it years ago and thus shouldn't commit to a strong opinion, I found Spielberg's film just slightly too thematically hamfisted and stealthily maudlin for comfort. (And indeed, those qualities have, with varying intensity, cursed even Spielberg's best pictures.) Where Saving Private Ryan seemed to coast on the opening D-Day landing, The Thin Red Line uses its taking of a gunner-filled Guadalcanal bunker hill more effectively as a centerpiece.

Malick's cinematic style — near-perfect pacing, striking composition, incorporation of the natural world as more than a backdrop — also brings qualities that its genre desperately needed (and, alas, still needs ten years on). I'm unsure if the same can be said about Spielberg's style; whatever its technological accomplishments, it works mostly as a reinforcer of the "see, war isn't just gritty, it's really gritty" thrust of the war movies of the past two or three decades. And Peter Travers, of all people, said it best about Malick's non-hackneyed perspective on the film's events:

Ryan offers bloody D-Day heroics, adrenal stimulation and tearful sentiment, plus assurances that although war may be hell, it's also a hell of a character builder. Spielberg tells us what we want to hear. Line, adapted by director Malick from the James Jones novel about the key American victory over the Japanese at Guadalcanal, offers raw fear, combat numbness and moral uncertainty, plus assurances that war dehumanizes the men it doesn't kill. Malick tells us what we don't want to hear — an offense to Academy members, who traditionally vote for uplift.

Malick, who lives in Texas, doesn't play those Hollywood games.

Nevertheless — and here comes the partial concession to those user reviews — The Thin Red Line has its flaws, some of them sizable. Along with his affinity for nature, Malick seems to possess an ugly tendency toward glorification of the noble savage, and it's put on display during a set of early scenes where an AWOL company member lives the sweet life among the simple natives, dancing in harmony with the environment, feasting upon the sweet bounty that falls, ripe, from the trees, etc. (The opportunity to let this sort of thing rip provided by the native-heavy setting of Malick's latest, The New World, is a reason — the reason, actually — I haven't yet seen it.)

Also, there's a Hans Zimmer score, though it's more restrained than most and actually includes a few admirable choices. (The incorporation of a clock's ticking hands in the piece that opens the grueling hill-taking works surprisingly well.) Much has also been made of how the cast is littered with bug and soon-to-be-big stars in bit parts: John Travolta, for instance, appears briefly as a brigadier general in the very beginning, while George Clooney shows up to shout at a handful of subordinates for two minutes toward the end. And John C. Reilly, John Cusack, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody, Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson all hang around as well, in varying capacities. Would that the film had been cast entirely with unknowns, but I understand that (a) a whole hell of a lot of actors wanted to work with the newly-returned-from-obscurity Malick and (b) the studio wanted to see a lot of names.

And even though the movie's runtime is one of its most bitched-about qualities — unfairly, I think, since it's not much over two and a half hours — it's patently the victim of too many cuts, not too few. The material left on the editing room's floor glares conspicuously by its absence. By this point, it no doubt, it sounds as if the film is nothing but a bundle of errors, but what Malick gets right, he gets so right that the picture rises to the top of my list of favorite war movies. It's right up there with Apocalypse Now: they're both aestheticized, but I prefer Malick's aesthetics by a hairsbreadth.