The Thin Red Line - Is it "For" You? [part 2] [no spoilers]

Rating: 10/10 (28 February 1999)

Note: This post should be taken as a public-service announcement. It's intended as a guideline for any who have heard such mixed or negative things that they aren't sure, or who are afraid of finding it too disturbing. It was a movie _for me_ -- but then my tastes differ from many people's, so I'm not simply going to say "See it" because I don't think that's any more helpful than saying "It sux--" (If it isn't for you, this will help you decide that too; but this is not a put-down.) ===================================================> But isn't it a "hard" movie to follow?
No. --But you must let it lead you, trustingly, as though blindfolded . ..
It allows none of the conventional framing devices of caption, dateline, or scrolling histories, or the omniscient narratorial voice that we associate with historical dramas. The only voices are those of the characters, who speak to each other and to themselves, reflecting with depth or utter shallowness on the situations they find themselves in, posturing to each other in dominance struggles or nakedly revealing their souls to trusted friends. The only visual violations of "reality" are the mental images that they see in the mind's eye, which break in -- without any of the conventional cues -- upon the world that they are physically seeing, even as such images intrude upon us -- memories, fancies, dreams -- without so much as a by-your-leave or an invitation. And more challengingly, we are left to work out whose visions each are, whose minds' eye we are seeing through -- be it the eyes of a village child of an occupied island, a wistful wife looking out over the same sea that washes her West Coast beachfront as the bloody shores of the Slot, a man remembering a personal tragedy as a surreal drama, or a man whose concrete reality has become a surreal drama of slowed time and meaningless sound as every sense, every sensation is ravaged in a contradiction of known reality in what is so blandly-termed "shell- shock" Nor is there for us, any more than for the people who were there, a convenient deus-ex- machina to place before us on the air the translation of our enemies' words; this fact, the absence of subtitles, seems to elicit more baffled irritation from viewers than it would deserve -- especially considering that it is a truism that "Americans won't watch movies with subtitles"! It is amusing that we expect that foreigners' words will be translated for us on screen, as natural and realistic -- even though if white words were to appear in public at such an occasion, surely the most sober journals would speedily resemble the Inquirer and Star! So this is not an easy movie to watch, in some ways -- it does not cue us in any of the conventional ways we have subconsciously come to expect. It is also challenging, uncompromising, in terms of dramatic structure: like a Shakespeare play, each line is simultaneously important in the momentary context, and in terms of the wider story that so carefully unfolds from a single, unified beginning. The first time I saw it I missed four minutes in the middle -- and missed a scene which then both explained and was explained by other scenes later on. But the first time I saw it, I thought for the first two thirds of it that it was a series of lyrically-brutal vignettes, poignant images as in a stage-play, and I simply appreciated it as that . .. and then suddenly, horrifically, I realized that all that had come before was now working to a fulfillment -- that everything that had been said or done or shown was leading with an inexorability -- not the logic of the Rube Goldberg machine, but the logic of a murder after twenty-years' hate, or the logic of a marriage after long unspoken devotion -- to some terrible and magnificent conclusion that I dared not anticipate. (And so it was, and proved to be better than I could have hoped for, without disappointment in the trivializing of it.)
It is also an audacious play in that it utterly defies all movie conventions, all modern and many classical dramatic traditions of portrayal and structure by showing us characters who are at once sharply drawn and shadowy, like a swiftly-sketched charcoal portrait by a master hand. We are not told who these people are, even as they must work out for themselves who each one is, who he or she chooses to be, so we too must work it out with them. They have histories, they have personalities, they have places in their souls and lives that are hidden even to themselves; they change and flux in relation to their situations and the people around them. They are not carved in stone, and placed in front of us with little defining labels, to remain one thing for the whole story -- for they are as complex, contradictory, and unique as any of us, our friends or enemies. And as in the real world, they each view things differently, from the facts of a personal relationship to the nature of the universe. But far worse than that is the fact that none of these people is a "type" -- not one fits into the niche which drama has prepared us to look for, whether it be Evil Overlord or Rebel Hero, Impudent Child or Spunky Heroine, Bumbling Sidekick or Pathetic Little Person, Mysterious Prophet or Obtuse Authority Figure, Suave Cad or Sneering Beauty, or the Stupid and Obnoxious Person Who Must Die Horribly To Cue Us To The Danger That Lies Ahead. Some of them are smart, some shallow and clever, some solidly- conventional, others utterly oblivious to the rules of society. They are scared when any reasonable, sane human being would be scared utterly out of his mind; when they are heroic, they stammer and stumble over words, instead of declaiming them ringingly; they repeat themselves; they die as easily as any other man -- or as hard and painfully. Just deserts and poetic justice do not happen to them, any more than they happen to us in everyday life (usually) and random dumb luck plays a part in things, but so does deliberate malice and the kindness of not-total-strangers as well as friends. Some of them think a lot; others of them hardly think at all. Those who think also do, and those who do without thinking may come to regret it. Friendship is there, but the friendship and enmity of those who have known each other so long that relations are assumed more than talked about, and we who are outsiders must figure out what is not being said...
[to be continued]