As flawed as war itself

Rating: 10/10 (3 January 1999)

The best movie I've seen this year, and I've seen "Pleasantville" /and/ "Something About Mary."
If it must be compared to "Saving Private Ryan" -- and I'm not convinced it must -- then it could be said that "A Thin Red Line" is SPR without the happy ending.
The leading criticism of SPR was that its storyline was too neat, its characters too stereotypical with its squad culled from war movies past. There's a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory end -- closure, even. It's "Titanic" in mud.
Which makes it amazing, then, that SPR has been praised for its realism. I don't know what your life is like, but mine never has closure, and the characters in my life are never as carefully balanced as in SPR. And if reading "A Red Badge of Courage" three times in high school taught me anything, it's that war is never neat or tightly wrapped up in the end.
ATRL, on the other hand, is chaotic and claustrophobic, which makes me think it is the more accurate and realistic portrayal of war. The characters fold into each other, and it is sometimes difficult to discern who is talking. There is no clean objective -- find the lost private, save the bridge -- other than don't be the next poor a****** to fall. Unlike SPR, the tension doesn't end after the beach. In SPR, the question was not, "Will they find Ryan?" but "How will they find Ryan?" There was no telling what was coming next in ATRL: The tension persisted throughout.
The literary aesthetic to ATRL -- pretentiousness, if you will -- was at times overbearing, but in the end was very satisfying and made SPR resemble the Marvel comic it is. This is achieved through repeated symbols -- the sickness in the aborigines, the captured alligator, the trenches -- and flashbacks, but most effectively through point of view. One moment sticks with me: Pvt. Witt is talking to a wounded soldier in the river, telling him to go downstream to the rest of the company. Witt is talking to the soldier, but he is looking directly at the camera and he is speaking to us when he says, "Go on, you're going to be OK." Go on, he says, humanity will go on. This war will end.
SPR tries to rationalize the war by illuminating the triumph of saving one person, leaving it to the audience to magniy that by a million or ten million. ATRL has no such aspiration. It is anti-war at all costs.
Yes, it's too long. It literally felt like five hours, not three, and the last 45 minutes or so approaches redundancy. But it is a great accomplishment -- and clearly the best picture of the year.
The director originally cut this at eight hours. I hope the other five hours eventually makes it to DVD.