The Thin Red Line. (15.)
Directed by Terrence Malick. 1998
Starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Adrien Brody, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Dash Mihok, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, Jared Leto, John Savage, John C. Reilly and John Travolta. Out now on Blu-ray from Criterion Collection. 164 mins.
Though Badlands is his masterpiece, a flawless work of art conveying complex and profound ideas, this is the one, the Malick film to be cherished above all others, the one that justifies his genius tag, the one that keeps us holding out for him even after all the crappy films he's subjected us to over the last decade. The world is not short of war films but this and Apocalypse Now stand above them all. It's not so much that they are better than all the others, rather that they reach something beyond all the others. Coppola found in Vietnam and Conrad an intoxicating madness; in his version of James Jones account of the battle for Guadalcanal in World War 2 Malick concocted a vision of war as hell, and heaven.
The film's big idea is almost childlike simplistic. The soldiers are lost boys playing in the fields, all of them wondering why they are stuck risking their lives doing this nonsense when the world around them seems to be full of joys and pleasures. The natural environment is forefronted as much as the characters; during war scenes, we cut to shots of sunlight through the leaves, birds taking to the skies or animals watching on from the trees. It's a simple, even obvious device but so effective. Dialogue is cut down to a minimum; instead the soldiers' thoughts are expressed in a free-for-all voiceover, spoken by different actors but all seeming to speak with the same voice. Here they explore the idea that maybe the war they wage isn't an affront to nature, but an expression of a conflict that is rooted in the heart of all life. "What is this war in the heart of nature?"
The Wilderness Years.
The secret to growing a genius reputation is to plant the seed and then ignore it. Once it's taken root, everybody else will tend it for you. In the 70s heyday of New Hollywood, his first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, gave Malick a vaulted reputation both through their quality and his unusual approach. After spending two years editing Days of Heaven, the consensus landed on this being a sign of genius rather than not knowing what he was doing.
And then, for two decades, he wasn't heard from. There were rumours of uncredited script doctoring, lecturing at the Sorbonne. So when it was announced that he was directing again everybody fell over themselves to be part of it. Probably it needed twenty years away to persuade people to stump up the money for a meditative war epic. Fox produced it and one of the great pleasures of the film is imagining Rupert Murdoch watching this for the first time and his reaction to seeing the artsy-fartsy film he had paid for.
The method.
From Days of Heaven onwards his process is to write a script and then large junk it, rely on improvisation; shoot as much as he can and then try to find the film in the editing suite. I think it is telling that of the four Criterion Malick discs I've reviewed, alongside Badlands, (too low a budget for him to mess around on) this is the only one that isn't presented as an alternative cut to the one seen in cinemas. Which suggests that this time he found his film at the first time of asking.
Even so, it all feels fairly random. According to the poster for Platoon, the first casualty of war is innocence. The first casualty of a Malick film is continuity. He shoots without any great care as to matching shots. The bulk of the first half of the film is an assault on a hill. A lot of this is soldiers tracking through tall grass and looking for some shelter in this exposed terrain. Their captain Staros (Koteas) considers this frontal assault suicide but looking on from the rear Colonel Tall (Nolte) commands them to keep going. And then a day into the assault there is a scene where Staros and Tall argue it out behind a thick stretch of jungle, and you wonder where the hell that came from. There wasn't any sign of it anywhere.
And of course, there's no real chance of keeping track of the story. Malick frames the story as a conflict between the spiritually minded Witt (Caviezel), who's always deserting to hang out with the locals, and his cynical sergeant Welsh (Penn.) A few other soldiers played by Chaplin and Mihok appear regularly though only Chaplin has a clear storyline, his sense of being protected by the strength of his love for his wife. Other than them people pop up, appear to be significant and then disappear.
It should be said that though nobody would place Malick as an action director the battle scenes are visceral and compelling. Those tracking shots following soldiers through the long grass are nerve-wracking but oddly thrilling. Late on there's a horrible moment when three soldiers patrolling up a river see camouflaged Japanese soldiers merging from the jungle. One, then two then four, their number increasing exponentially and within a few seconds the three soldiers have gone from safety to facing down thirty or fourty of the enemy.
The Performances.
Famously Adrien Brody assumed that he was the star of the film (his character was the main character in the book) until he saw the film at its premiere and found out that his role had been cut to a couple of lines and hanging around looking like a scared puppy dog. Equally, Bill Pullman, Lucas Haas and Mickey Rourke believed themselves to be in the film but nothing of them made it into the completed film. (Rourke does make it into the deleted scenes, and it's a pretty good scene.) A lot of very talented actors put in a lot of hard work for not much onscreen reward. But the results are up there. Everybody is up to speed, everybody looks like they have been put through it. They may only be in the film for a second or two but you believe that they've gone through it.
The Music.
A large part of the film's enduring appeal is the soundtrack. I think it is one of Hans Zimmer's very best, perhaps second only to Inception. And I say that in the full knowledge that a lot of the music in the film isn't his. I seem to remember quite a bit of Ennio Morricone's score made it into Days of Heaven but since then it has been common practice for Malick to get his composer to bang away for months coming up with hours and hours of original music that he will then dump in favour of some favourite classical piece. Some of the best bits of the soundtrack are pieces by Gabriel Faure, Arvo Part and Charles Ives. (Plus of course the Melanesian Chants. Everybody loves those Melanesian Chants.) But it's his stuff that really makes the film work. It's ominous and foreboding certainly, but also curious and questioning and captures the tone of lives being lived by the moment. It's engaged and urgent yet detached, inviting the viewer to see beyond the immediate life and death struggle.
Extras
New audio commentary by Toll, production designer Jack Fisk, and producer Grant Hill
Directed by Terrence Malick. 1998
Starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Adrien Brody, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Dash Mihok, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, Jared Leto, John Savage, John C. Reilly and John Travolta. Out now on Blu-ray from Criterion Collection. 164 mins.
Though Badlands is his masterpiece, a flawless work of art conveying complex and profound ideas, this is the one, the Malick film to be cherished above all others, the one that justifies his genius tag, the one that keeps us holding out for him even after all the crappy films he's subjected us to over the last decade. The world is not short of war films but this and Apocalypse Now stand above them all. It's not so much that they are better than all the others, rather that they reach something beyond all the others. Coppola found in Vietnam and Conrad an intoxicating madness; in his version of James Jones account of the battle for Guadalcanal in World War 2 Malick concocted a vision of war as hell, and heaven.
The film's big idea is almost childlike simplistic. The soldiers are lost boys playing in the fields, all of them wondering why they are stuck risking their lives doing this nonsense when the world around them seems to be full of joys and pleasures. The natural environment is forefronted as much as the characters; during war scenes, we cut to shots of sunlight through the leaves, birds taking to the skies or animals watching on from the trees. It's a simple, even obvious device but so effective. Dialogue is cut down to a minimum; instead the soldiers' thoughts are expressed in a free-for-all voiceover, spoken by different actors but all seeming to speak with the same voice. Here they explore the idea that maybe the war they wage isn't an affront to nature, but an expression of a conflict that is rooted in the heart of all life. "What is this war in the heart of nature?"
The Wilderness Years.
The secret to growing a genius reputation is to plant the seed and then ignore it. Once it's taken root, everybody else will tend it for you. In the 70s heyday of New Hollywood, his first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, gave Malick a vaulted reputation both through their quality and his unusual approach. After spending two years editing Days of Heaven, the consensus landed on this being a sign of genius rather than not knowing what he was doing.
And then, for two decades, he wasn't heard from. There were rumours of uncredited script doctoring, lecturing at the Sorbonne. So when it was announced that he was directing again everybody fell over themselves to be part of it. Probably it needed twenty years away to persuade people to stump up the money for a meditative war epic. Fox produced it and one of the great pleasures of the film is imagining Rupert Murdoch watching this for the first time and his reaction to seeing the artsy-fartsy film he had paid for.
The method.
From Days of Heaven onwards his process is to write a script and then large junk it, rely on improvisation; shoot as much as he can and then try to find the film in the editing suite. I think it is telling that of the four Criterion Malick discs I've reviewed, alongside Badlands, (too low a budget for him to mess around on) this is the only one that isn't presented as an alternative cut to the one seen in cinemas. Which suggests that this time he found his film at the first time of asking.
Even so, it all feels fairly random. According to the poster for Platoon, the first casualty of war is innocence. The first casualty of a Malick film is continuity. He shoots without any great care as to matching shots. The bulk of the first half of the film is an assault on a hill. A lot of this is soldiers tracking through tall grass and looking for some shelter in this exposed terrain. Their captain Staros (Koteas) considers this frontal assault suicide but looking on from the rear Colonel Tall (Nolte) commands them to keep going. And then a day into the assault there is a scene where Staros and Tall argue it out behind a thick stretch of jungle, and you wonder where the hell that came from. There wasn't any sign of it anywhere.
And of course, there's no real chance of keeping track of the story. Malick frames the story as a conflict between the spiritually minded Witt (Caviezel), who's always deserting to hang out with the locals, and his cynical sergeant Welsh (Penn.) A few other soldiers played by Chaplin and Mihok appear regularly though only Chaplin has a clear storyline, his sense of being protected by the strength of his love for his wife. Other than them people pop up, appear to be significant and then disappear.
It should be said that though nobody would place Malick as an action director the battle scenes are visceral and compelling. Those tracking shots following soldiers through the long grass are nerve-wracking but oddly thrilling. Late on there's a horrible moment when three soldiers patrolling up a river see camouflaged Japanese soldiers merging from the jungle. One, then two then four, their number increasing exponentially and within a few seconds the three soldiers have gone from safety to facing down thirty or fourty of the enemy.
The Performances.
Famously Adrien Brody assumed that he was the star of the film (his character was the main character in the book) until he saw the film at its premiere and found out that his role had been cut to a couple of lines and hanging around looking like a scared puppy dog. Equally, Bill Pullman, Lucas Haas and Mickey Rourke believed themselves to be in the film but nothing of them made it into the completed film. (Rourke does make it into the deleted scenes, and it's a pretty good scene.) A lot of very talented actors put in a lot of hard work for not much onscreen reward. But the results are up there. Everybody is up to speed, everybody looks like they have been put through it. They may only be in the film for a second or two but you believe that they've gone through it.
The Music.
A large part of the film's enduring appeal is the soundtrack. I think it is one of Hans Zimmer's very best, perhaps second only to Inception. And I say that in the full knowledge that a lot of the music in the film isn't his. I seem to remember quite a bit of Ennio Morricone's score made it into Days of Heaven but since then it has been common practice for Malick to get his composer to bang away for months coming up with hours and hours of original music that he will then dump in favour of some favourite classical piece. Some of the best bits of the soundtrack are pieces by Gabriel Faure, Arvo Part and Charles Ives. (Plus of course the Melanesian Chants. Everybody loves those Melanesian Chants.) But it's his stuff that really makes the film work. It's ominous and foreboding certainly, but also curious and questioning and captures the tone of lives being lived by the moment. It's engaged and urgent yet detached, inviting the viewer to see beyond the immediate life and death struggle.
Extras
New audio commentary by Toll, production designer Jack Fisk, and producer Grant Hill
- Interviews with several of the film’s actors, including Kirk Acevedo, Jim Caviezel, Thomas Jane, Elias Koteas, Dash Mihok, and Sean Penn; composer Hans Zimmer; editors Billy Weber, Leslie Jones, and Saar Klein; and writer James Jones’s daughter Kaylie Jones
- New interview with casting director Dianne Crittenden, featuring archival audition footage
- Fourteen minutes of outtakes from the film
- World War II newsreels from Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands
- Melanesian chants
- Original theatrical trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film critic David Sterritt and a 1963 reprint by James Jones
