Film Review -- The Thin Red Line

Our second Sunday-night-war-movie in a row (I promise you this wasn’t intended) is this Sunday evening’s 18:31 screening of *The Thin Red Line*—Terrance Malick’s sprawling adaptation of the James Jones novelization of the Battle of Guadalcanal. 

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Between 1973 and 1995, the famously mercurial and reclusive cinematic genius Terrance Malick had made exactly two motion pictures: the bloody and sociopathic crime-spree picture *Badlands* in 1973, and 1978’s dreamy rural-American obituary *Days of Heaven*. Both were enormously successful (both critically and commercially) and together they engendered an almost cult-like Hollywood fascination with the mystique of the man and his ongoing creative intentions. Nobody knew when the next Terrance Malick film might get made—if ever—but everyone was sure that if and when it ever happened, they wanted in.   

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Thus it was that word came down of pre-production on a new Malick film, the relevant casting office was veritably inundated with A-list acting talent hoping to secure even a few lines. “Just give me a dollar and tell me where to show up,” Sean Penn famously told Malick, before learning that he had in fact been cast for one of the film’s three principal roles. Copies of script segments were circulated to everyone from Robert De Niro to Brad Pitt to Al Pacino to Bruce Willis. Martin Sheen, Kevin Costner and Ed Norton all also expressed interest. Gary Oldman offered to do the picture for free and Bruce Willis offered to pay the airfares of the entire casting team in return for a chance to read. 

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Obviously this kind of interest would pretty-much guarantee that the cast ultimately chosen could carry just about any movie, but Malick’s embarrassment of surplus talent didn’t stop with the acting: He also enjoyed the contributions of such behind-the-lens creative titans as Hans Zimmer for the soundtrack and the great John Toll for the principal photography. All that remained now was for Malick to leverage these advantages to a genuinely superlative picture, thus fulfilling the promise of both his all-star team and the expectations of his own legacy. Not as easy it may sound, especially given the curious fit between Malick’s particular style on the one hand, and the particular demands of making a successful war epic on the other.

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It’s difficult to suggest that a director with exactly two movies to his credit at the time should be thought of as an auteur, but if anyone could justify the moniker with such a short resume it’s Terrance Malick. Faced with the cardinal choice of a tonal break or a true-to-self adaptation, Malick unflinchingly favoured his own predisposition for long, atmospheric takes and wistful narrative pacing, rather than subordinating those impulses to a back seat for the slam-bang subject matter of one of the loudest and bloodiest engagements of the Second World War.  

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Even before he’d finished the book Malick saw his opening for reconciling those two demands in the structure of the basic story: Rather than a Spielberg-like inciting incident of high-explosive mayhem, Malick opens our chronicle with a long take of a deserter enjoying minimalist island life among the indigenous peoples of the Solomons. 

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From there the messy business of meting punishments and taking hills is never far from the film’s agenda, but that business never seizes the initiative at the expense of a much deeper dive into the psyches and motivations of a cavalcade of flawed and limping soldiers, either. We come to the thing expecting “Saving Private Ryan But With Palm Trees,” and what we get instead is “Badlands But With Rice”—to our abiding self-chagrin for having not seen it coming, but also to our immense gratification all the same. 

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Critically speaking The Thin Red Line earned high marks across the board and even a few objective superlatives. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Soundtrack. In 1999 it won the Golden Bear for best picture at the Berlin International Film Festival. Martin Scorsese ranked it as his second-favorite film of the 1990s and Gene Siskel called it "the greatest contemporary war film I've yet seen."

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I hope everyone will plan to join us on Sunday evening at 18:31 for this dense and gorgeous tapestry of stunning performances and even more arresting compositions. Few pictures we’ve tried have been anything like as challenging, and few have been anything like as worth the effort.