War as nihilism

Rating: 7/10 (16 December 2000)

I rented this and noticed that the previous viewer had given up after about a tenth of an inch of tape, not having rewound it. I could see why. This begins as an arty war movie that is not doing either the arty or the war part right. I would have given up on it myself except that it had been nominated for a number of awards, and I knew there had to be something I was missing. So I occasionally rewound the tape and listened and watched carefully. Gradually something began to build. The impressionistic and stream of consciousness techniques began to pull me in and to mesh with the flashbacks and poetic voice-overs to make a meaningful contrast with the jungle and carnage. The studied camera work with the long takes on the faces of the soldiers, interspersed with panoramic vistas of jungle and mountain and naturalistic shots of tropical island animals, lead me to believe that in making this, Director Terrence Malick had taken Shakespeare as his muse, in particular the celebrated words from MacBeth: "...(Life) is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing."
As other critics have pointed out, Malick's movie does indeed signify nothing, and perhaps that is the point. But I am somewhat troubled by such an interpretation of our involvement in World War II. I would feel more comfortable had such a point of view and attendant techniques been employed in depicting our involvement in Vietnam or even in World War I. But to imply that the sacrifices made by our soldiers at Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the South Pacific were for nothing is entirely off base. Almost any war fought anywhere is a monumental waste; but if there is one exception is it without doubt World War II. We had no choice but to oppose European fascism and the expansionist policies of Imperial Japan. I shudder to think what the world would be like now, had we not. Imagine being surrounded by totalitarian regimes with their gas ovens and their slave labor, their policies of racial and cultural genocide. By comparison, such a reality would make George Orwell's "1984" nightmare seem a benign fantasy.
I am also wondering how James Jones himself would feel about this impressionistic interpretation of his realistic novel. He was one of a generation of writers, including Norman Mailer and James Michener, who found their inspiration in the war in the Pacific. He is also the author of From Here To Eternity (1951), made a couple of years later into an academy-award winning movie starring Burt Lancaster (an excellent movie, by the way). I suspect that Jones would have to feel some ambiguity toward Director Terrence Malick's production of this sequel. Jones certainly did not feel that our participation and experience in World War II was meaningless. Nor was his personal experience meaningless. Furthermore to make his novel into a revisionist impression of war as nihilistic hell misses not only the spirit of his novel but the entire point of our involvement in World War II.
I wonder how those who survived the horrific experience of Guadalcanal and similar battles feel about this movie. I wonder if they think it was accurate and fair and expressed their sense of experience.
The performances by James Caviezel as Pvt. Witt and Sean Penn as First Sergeant Welsh were excellent. Nick Nolte as Col. Gordon Tall was also good, although he occasionally reminded me of George C. Scott doing General Patton. Perhaps the best sequence in the movie was the recollection in flashback by Pvt. Jack Bell (Ben Chaplin) of his sensual wife back in the states and the agony of being separated from her, and then the brutal knife of her letter telling him she had fallen in love with another man. The inclusion of a third element, that of the Pacific Islanders themselves amid the strife as innocents watching the gladiators, was valuable as perspective. However what might have been added was the brutality and enslavement they experienced at the hands of the Japanese military. Malick gave us none of that perhaps because such a view might have detracted from his purpose, that of depicting war as an expression of our nihilistic nature. Incidentally some have said that this treatment owes something to Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried," or even to the spirit of the Thomas Hardy poem, "The Man He Killed." Certainly there is an intentional allusion to Carl Sandberg's poem "Grass" when one of the soldiers holds up some grass and says something like, "This is us." O'Brien's short story was an intense focus on the artifacts carried by soldiers and what the bare artifacts implied. Yes, I believe Malick was influenced by O'Brien, certainly in the sense that this is a strongly visual film. It's what our eyes see that counts, and not so much the story or what is said.
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