What a slap in the face...

Rating: 5/10 (21 April 2004)

Why must filmmakers of the last twenty-five years paint the fighting soldier, particularly the American fighting soldier, using a angst-filled, vile, butchering brush? Did the home front experience of the Vietnam War so scar these men that now make movies about those who actually went over there and did the fighting? The argument as to whether the Vietnam War was a just war is for another time and place, but in attempting to broaden that argument to cover all war in general, director Terence Malick has committed something akin to blasphemy in The Thin Red Line. By choosing to move such metaphysical musings to the heads of the soldiers fighting the World War II battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, he has distorted history, insulted veterans and completely misrepresented the values and beliefs of the American GI's who fought that crucial battle.
Malick doesn't deserve all the blame, I suppose, as this film is based on James Jones' somewhat autobiographical novel from the early 1960s, a time when all of the free-love, no-man-is-right-over-another philosophy was beginning to gel amongst the intelligentsia of the world's youth. The book may be fantastic, but I can't say as I haven't had the pleasure of reading it. Whatever the quality of the source material, however, Malick has taken it and made a complete and utter mess of it. Sure, this film was his celebrated return to filmmaking after a twenty-year absence, and it received a Best Picture Oscar nomination, most likely just due to the awe in which Academy voters hold Malick. But this wasn't worth the wait.

The plot (such as it is) follows four men, I think, as they struggle with finding meaning in the carnage of the Pacific War against the Japanese. I say that I think it was four men because two of them, played by Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, look so remarkably alike that at times I couldn't tell them apart. One (Caviezel) plays the part of the Conscientious Objector, a chronic deserter who, after being picked up by the Army while living amongst island natives, is assigned to stretcher-bearer duty at the film's outset. By the end of the film, Malick shows the character's selfishness to be misplaced, but for certainly less-than-patriotic reasons. Another (Chaplin) is the one who was taken away from his young bride, and lives only to return to her. Again, Malick shows us the foolishness of such devotion by the film's end.
The other two are thankfully a bit more discernible from one another. Sean Penn is a company sergeant who makes it his mission to show Caviezel's character the error of his ways, but by film's end, he finds more sympathy with the deserter than he would've imagined possible. Lastly is the battalion colonel (Nick Nolte), who drives his men relentlessly to take a well-defended Japanese position, one that his underlings believe impossible to take. While Malick shows the Colonel to be right, we're to understand that it is more for the colonel's fear of missing out on his share of military glory than for the higher cause of victory, because he flat-out tells his subordinates so! How ridiculous a notion.
Other characters drift in and out of our vision, played by A-list stars like Woody Harrelson and John Travolta and John Savage, mumbling about vines consuming trees and soldiers being like children to their Captain-fathers, none of whom ever make any mark with us save as examples of the Hell of War. Their voice-overs almost overlap, allowing us to eavesdrop on their confusion, their fear and their cowardice.
The imagery of this movie is breathtaking. Don't let it be said that I didn't acknowledge that. Malick has not lost his visual touch during his extended vacation, but he has obviously not advanced beyond his mid-70s thinking. Whatever things the Vietnam War may have been, World War II was almost none of them. That war was a just war, and the soldiers fighting it knew it. American men were lining up in droves to volunteer to go and crush an evil power that had attacked us and swore to destroy us, and only a microscopic few had any problems with self-doubt or introspection about `why nature must contend with itself' or finding the `evil inherent in all men' that the wretched souls in this film have. I shudder to think of what my veteran grandfather, God rest his soul, would've said about these pansies.
The film is so without a logical structure that I suppose it's possible Malick himself didn't know exactly what he wanted to say. He worked on this material so long that he might have simply drifted away from the novel's original intent. I doubt this, though. Say what you want about the politics of filmmakers, their skill is rarely debatable, and filmmakers of Malick's caliber put on the screen exactly what they intend. It's just so puzzling and disappointing that what he intended here was such a slap in the face to so noble a struggle.