Human, All Too Human

Photo by Merie W. WallaceFew films have been awaited with greater intensity than The Thin Red Line, and few have ever been greeted with ruder disappointment. To my mind, Terrence Malick's first film in 20 years is the finest he's made, as mature and ample a product of his sustained inspiration as one could hope for -- and I'm dumbfounded to hear it damned with such faint praise, denounced with such incomprehension or dismissed as metaphysical hooey by certain critics who at least comprehend that something metaphysical was being attempted. Even the favorable reviews tend to be vague, tossing around words like philosophical without quite saying what philosophy is being advanced. The film's wittier attackers (Stuart Klawans in The Nation, Anthony Lane in The New Yorker) attend to Malick's intentions but retreat from his operatic directness in spiritual matters, judging all those ghostly voice-overs and God-like landscape views to be little more than a giant ego trip.

I've seen the film three times. The audiences I've observed have been held fast in their seats by the spell the film casts. Sounds and images are exquisitely mated. A mighty theme -- one treating the very nature of courage -- is steadily enlarged from the first scene to the last. Malick plainly forges a strong bond with his audience at an unconscious level, and yet a lot of what you can overhear in the conversational flow to the exits after it's all done echoes the film's sharpest critics: "There's no structure." "Malick never saw a leaf he didn't like." "They could've cut an hour." Three times running I've listened to these and other comments with a sinking heart. The only complaint that makes sense to me is that too many of the soldiers look alike, that there are too many guys with pale skin, black hair and hard blue eyes -- including the hero -- to the point where it becomes damn near impossible to tell who's speaking, who's dying and who's married to that cute blond in the flashbacks. As one friend put it, "I was watching hundreds of men die, and I didn't care about any of them." For me, the point is that you're supposed to care about every death; individuality doesn't matter in the divine union Malick conjures between his people and the all-devouring universe of jungle and stars towering over them.

This, if anything, is the artistic justification for the layered similarities between faces and voices. The confusion is deliberate, a form of narrative cubism in which individual spirits blend into one another, disembodied by violence and death's proximity. We seem to see these lives from the slippery viewpoint of God, the afterlife or those already dead. Cathedral-like shots of tree-top canopies, sunlight shafting through from the literal heavens beyond, are one thing -- the film abounds in those -- but there is a God-like, disembodied presence in even the most down-to-earth moments. The camera prowls ahead of the soldiers when they crawl; when one soldier prays by candlelight, we are so close, and tilted at such an angle, that we are both in- and outside him. Who's watching at these moments? The question outlives the movie.

Sean Penn's character, Welsh, is a diehard nonbeliever, a matter that requires some high dedication on his part. "There's no other world out there," he murmurs to himself time and again. "Just one, this rock." The only person to whom he can share these thoughts is Witt (Jim Caviezel), a buck private with a Christ-like thousand-yard stare. Their confrontations and conversations form the spine of the movie, in concert with those of Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) and Captain Staros (Elias Koteas), two officers who differ over the use and value of a suicide mission.

In an interesting paradox, the enlisted men speak of giant abstractions -- God, no God -- while the officers deal with life and death in chillingly practical terms. These are characters who seem to have stepped out of a Russian novel -- they face each other with uncommon directness and speak, without mincing words, the truth of their souls. The proximity of so much death understandably erodes all mediation. There's no time to waste in lying, unless it's to yourself. There may even be an angelic use in lying (at least to yourself) if the object is to send men to their deaths in a maneuver of absolute necessity. The funniest and most terrifying scenes in The Thin Red Line are Colonel Tall's apoplectic arias of self-justification when he's forcing his men to push ahead despite their exhaustion. As Nolte creates him, Tall is a gorgeous monster of deranged pride. He keeps reading the inscrutable face of his listener, Gaff (John Cusack), not sure if he's getting across or not, pathetically shifting his tack when his psychological bat-radar fails to bring back those little blips of approval he so madly craves.

The deeper mysteries are witnessed, and borne, by Witt alone -- he's the first man we see in the story, and his is the last voice we hear. When we first meet him, he has deserted his outfit and is loafing in a South Pacific paradise -- and this is a sore point for some. One friend of mine, a man who survived being strafed by Nazi warplanes as he and his parents fled France in 1940, recoiled, "Why should I like this guy, or care what happens to him? That was no war to be AWOL in. He comes off a coward." But to label Witt a coward or, as another friend suggested, a pacifist, misses a larger point: Witt is preparing to die. He remembers his mother's death (images that luminously catch the fugitive power of such a memory) and wonders if he'll face his own end with the same calm.