The Thin Red Line (1998)

USA, 170 minutes

Director: Terrence Malick

Writers: James Jones, Terrence Malick

Photography: John Toll

Music: Hans Zimmer

Editors: Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, Billy Weber

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, John Savage, Jared Leto, Dash Mihok, Tim Blake Nelson, Adrien Brody, John Travolta, George Clooney, John C. Reilly

In 1998 the director and screenwriter of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick, had not made a movie in 20 years. To that point, he had made only two feature-length pictures (Badlands in 1973 and Days of Heaven in 1978). But they are well-made and had shown some cult appeal, so it was manifestly not hard for him to cast this World War II picture with all eager stars of the 1990s all up and down the line. At the time Malick was 55, which is pretty amazing all things considered, but what might impress even more about his career is that, in the past 10 years, into his 70s, he has made five more: The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life. (Of them, I have only seen The Tree of Life and Song to Song, neither of which I liked.)

So this movie is already kind of a strange project even before you have seen a frame. It's based on a James Jones novel, but there is a lot of Malick in it too. All his familiar filmmaking tics are here: the brooding voiceovers, the attention to the natural world, the stately pace, the tone all but exalted. It affects me in the peculiar way so many of his pictures before 2011 have. I didn't like The Thin Red Line the first time I saw it, but I have liked it more every time since. This has unfortunately not worked as well for me with The Tree of Life, or even the intervening picture from 2005, The New World, part of why I've given up on the rest.

To be clear, I still love Badlands—Malick's best, I think—and I still like The Thin Red Line quite a bit. It's a war picture, and it doesn't shy away from bloody scenes of war, but even in battle it hits unexpected elegiac highs, striking a somber mood of life and death as it observes the foolishness of human strife spilling across the world God gave us, in Malick's view. He has grown increasingly bold in the course of his career about his religious themes. I take them as sincere but too often they came to feel intrusive to me, didactic, pushing the point. You can see a little of it in The Thin Red Line but it's much more subdued.

With its sprawling story and cast it is reminiscent of another World War II picture from another era, 1970's Catch-22, with which it shares the sense of how absurd war is, particularly in a paradise. One of these soldiers, Witt (Jim Caviezel), has an unusually good grasp of it. He keeps going AWOL in this South Seas Pacific theater of the war, landing on islands of happy aborigines and living with them the way we were meant to live, before getting corralled back into action by MPs sent by his immediate superior, Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn).

The main action here is taking an island away from Japanese control in order to gain access to a strategic airfield. Whether deliberately or not, the picture plays on expectations from Saving Private Ryan, released the year before, whose opening 30 minutes offered a new and more intensely vivid view of battles from inside them. The mission in The Thin Red Line is enormously difficult—I'm in agreement with many of these soldiers that it looks impossible. It's driven to completion almost purely through the will of Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte), who demonstrates in practical terms the calculations of war. Men are going to have to die, possibly even most of them, in order to achieve the objective. He is a strutting warlord on the battlefield.

A lot of people in this movie are more dreamy, insular, and within themselves, but Nolte's Tall is a raging beast, lumbering across the landscape like a dangerous ape. The performances, particularly of the stars, are often impressive. John Travolta and George Clooney as upper-class brass don't get much screen time but do a lot to enlarge Jones's everyman vision of the military. We see more of Sean Penn, who is approximately at his peak here. He can put an amazing amount over just with small, studied gestures. They set off Nolte's roaring show well, underscoring how his rage is what is ruining his life, because he is regarded by the bureaucracy as a failing middle-aged man. But his rage is also what enables him to win this impossible battle.

The WWII Pacific theater makes a lot more sense than the European for Malick's distanced view of war. The Thin Red Line is by no means pro-war but it's not particularly antiwar either. Like many of us end up ruefully taking it, with resignation, war is accepted implicitly as endemic of human life. Certainly Malick agrees with Jones on the absurdity of human efforts to manage bureaucracy and reward human behavior, as a lot of dialogue goes to discussions of this or that person getting or being nominated for Silver Stars, Purple Hearts, etc. It all sounds a lot like trading favors.

Which reminds me that, in movies as in all life, where the stars gather their self-regarding awards soon follow. They gathered in the first place in this case out of respect for filmmaker Malick and his two precious movies of the '70s. It was exciting to hear he was working again and with such stars and a budget. And they made a great movie. It got them seven Oscar nominations in a lot of the high-visibility categories, though no wins: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Music. It's not only worth seeing, it's worth seeing twice at least.