The Thin Red Line - Is it "For" You? [part1] [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.) ==================================================== Isn't The Thin Red Line a film for the artistic, the critics, the cognoscenti and the literati who know, or think they know more about everything than the rest of us?
No.
It is a movie for anyone who has ever loved deeply, lost love or loved ones, feared dying or Death's power, struggled to comprehend how the world and rituals of childhood could be so deeply betrayed by life, and how the truths that seemed so clear as children could turn so murky and horrific -- has ever been struck mute with wonder at the beauty of sunset gleaming on a broken bottle, or mute with horror that rape could happen on a day that the world is silver-pure with snow --who has tried and failed and tried again to make some sense of what is happening within and without, in the world at large and in the secret heart -- who has asked questions that have no answers, or has gotten answers that failed to heal--who has learned terrible truths about the past, about Dachau and Katyn Forest and Prague Spring and Andersonville, and about the present as well --who has known love of family and friends and welcome and happiness, and has seen all these things fade -- who has tried to explain or sought explanation from one's peers, and received only blank incomprending stares in answer . . . who has been beaten down by the certainty of evil, and yet refused to give up utterly that spark of hope that there is meaning, there is love, there is truth in these things still --
-- Is it for you? I don't know.
It is an uncompromising movie -- relentlessly so, in many ways. We are used to movies that tell us "what to think," that cue us as definitely as though we were actors as to how we should react -- what emotion, what attitude, what judgment for each and every instant, each character, each event. We are used to "infodumps" -- explanatory sections wherein the main characters explain to each other things they would already know, explain how the technology works, what the bad guys' plans are, and how we will counteract them so that when things begin to get hot, we won't be left trying to puzzle out what is going on. This is utterly implausible, of course, for if these characters were, say, commandos, they would not have to explain to each other what their various weapons did or the strategic value of holding the high ground; sometimes this is overcome by the forcible placing of a symbolic "newbie" who stands in for us, (as the interpreter in Saving Private Ryan) and is told the information which is thus vicariously relayed to us with a semblance of plausibility. The classic example of the infodump is the James Bond movie, which begins with a bang, and then pauses the action long enough to explain to us, along with 007, the nature of the mission, the problems and all the components of the story which we will then watch unfold and fall together as inevitably as a Rube Goldberg machine's many parts. There is a real delight in watching a Rube Goldberg machine work out its routine (as with the beloved device at Logan Airport in Boston) and the infodump is the only practical way of conveying such necessary aspects to the audience on screen or stage -- unlike the printed page, where the authorial voice may explain anything in any way to the audience in the course of telling the story. (This is why Hunt for Red October the book was so much more suspenseful and satisfying than Hunt for Red October, the film: Clancy was free to give us all the needed setup of the blind groping chase of deadly monsters in a deadly darkness, so that when the final anticlimactic smash comes it is both a surprise and utterly perfectly in place.) However, there is no reality whatsoever in the style of film which tells us who to cheer for, who to boo at, who will die and when and where, and why, and what principles we all ought embrace -- or rather assumes them, assumes overpoweringly that we hold them and carries us along with image and music as though being dragged along by a loud and charismatic friend before we have time to decide if we want to go or not. But ironically enough, we are so used to it that we almost cannot deal with a film that does not explain and reveal its whole plot, ahead of time, and again and again throughout, repeating the basic notes so that we will not have time to forget anything important. Ronin is a good example of that: the plot was indeed tight and complex, the characters well-drawn -- but it was so unlike any contemporary "spy movie" that few moviegoers felt that this was so. (It was, in fact, an _espionage_ movie, in the line of that classic, The Third Man or a John LeCarre novel.) Thin Red Line is thus uncompromisng: from the moment that the title sequence darkens -- itself a clear reminder that this is a work of art with its swirling imagery of fire and immortality -- to open again on the sinister yet impressive image of a primordial monster, eye level to Leviathan in the impenetrable jungle, there is nothing which breaks the integrity of the story except the fact that it is, indeed, on-screen. All but two brief instants are shot from eye-level -- yet one does not notice this at all; it is simply that one is thrust into this world of horror and weird beauty to make ones way through it, figuring out who these people are that we are with, what their relations are to each other, to themselves, what is going on about them -- forced sometimes to revise our estimations, even as the world around them is rushing past without consideration for their individual troubles and conditions.
[to be continued...]