Human, All Too Human

He's not running from anything at the film's beginning -- he embraces the brief Eden he's found with a tragic awareness, etched wonderfully in Caviezel's eyes, that such stolen moments (like the gust of straw-filled wind he remembers from his childhood, twining around himself and his father) are the only peace he'll ever know even if he lives to be a hundred. His overarching objective (for all you students of structure out there who think this film has none) is to die with courage -- and every scene between the first and the last maps the obstacles in his path, a gauntlet of war's archetypal horrors. That Witt finds such a loyal nemesis in Welsh, and that his quest is so dazzlingly mirrored in that of every man around him (particularly Bell, whose obsession with his wife back home makes him bold in battle but deludes him into believing that he can return from this war "a man unchanged"), makes The Thin Red Line a deeply moral movie.

Facing death with courage is never less than a moral enterprise, and, undertaken in groups, it can define a moral moment in history. Morality -- as Witt comprehends it, the capacity to promote the lives of others at the expense of your own if need be -- is, like war, like the languages that name beauty, a recent event in nature. Animals, even trees, vie for light and space, but only human beings have the imagination to be rapacious, to seize more than they can personally use. "This war is all about property," Welsh snarls, and the word is exact, one deliberately opposed to the animal innocence of "territory." When Witt, under arrest for going AWOL, tells Welsh, "I'm twice the man you are," it's not just macho defiance -- he's speaking to the same theme, but from a transcendent place of one who has seen two worlds and inhabits two territories. Penn's sly, silent smile in reply is particularly beautiful: Welsh knows exactly what Witt means, even if he doesn't believe what Witt sees. That generous duality is at the heart of Malick's moral argument, a living definition of what it means to be human.