Der schmale Grat

what many people do not know is that this film, directed by terence malick, is without question the reason that Shakespeare in Love won the best picture oscar over the much favored Saving Private Ryan. why am i saying this? first let's deal with the movie. long? yes. too much? sometimes. but is it good? i can not begin to describe the beauty of this film.

about the oscars, i only watched the film after its surprise nomination for best picture. i had seen the competition already, and it was time to check out the fifth nominee. i went to the theatre myself, and came out three hours later, went home, and i cried. not only because i was disturbed, but i loved every single character in the film. i wanted to be there for them, cry with them, fight their battle. many people who have watched the film have said the same thing to me.

the Thin Red Line is sometimes painful to watch, but only because of its realistic juxtaposition of humanity, philosophy, and the terror of war. the film does not delve into any historical fact about Guadalcanal, except that the battle itself was terrifying (as is any battle). the characters introduce themselves through voice-over narration, which accompanies much of the action. and speaking of action, there is not much in the film. more images. images of war and the lives these soldiers left behind. this was Terence Malick's intent, of course, and many people were insulted and thought it was his own pretentious self getting the best of him. "boy he's a genius.. must he show it??" sometimes it is a little pretentious, but the film would've been "just another WWII film" if it was out of Malick's hands.

i can not understand why Sean Penn is billed as the top actor or the main character of this film. he was there a lot, but the film is carried by Jim Caviezel as the beautiful and ethereal private Witt. words can not describe this performance. with as few lines as he had, Caviezel portrays the symbolic soul of Witt, and by the end of the film he will break your heart. also excellent performances from Nick Nolte and the understated Elias Koteas, who can stretch creepy (Crash) to sympathetic in the blink of an eye.

now.. let's consider hollywood. sure they love Spielberg, and sure Private Ryan was a masterpiece (and it really was), but nobody even expected the Thin Red Line to get seven oscar nods, especially for best picture. but Shakespeare in Love was the crowd pleaser, and the other two were epic war films. most hollywood "artsy" people are anti-war.. kind of like the Thin Red Line. Private Ryan seemed to be MUCH more patriotic "pro-america" than the other. so if we've got anti-war on one side, and patriotism on the other... open and shut. the votes were split between the two, and Shakespeare emerged victorious. too bad.

anyway... the Thin Red Line was definitely better than Shakespeare, and definitely a completely different film from Spielberg's. John Toll's cinematography and Hans Zimmer's score work together to convey the tone of Malick's lyrical and poetic direction, and both should have won oscars. this film is nothing short of breath-taking, though understandably not for the average american moviegoer.

This film is unlikely to be appreciated by audiences reared upon a diet of dumbed-down Hollywood action fare. However, if you're prepared to sit down and watch THE THIN RED LINE with no interruptions and give it the attention it deserves, you'll be rewarded with one of the most intelligent, poetic and stunningly beautiful films you're ever likely to see.

Director Terrence Malick's films are alive with a sense of pure cinema with every frame delivering such detail and richness that you could swear you were there. The only other person capable of bringing such an immediate sense of time and place and sheer nuance of film (although in a completely different way) is David Lean, another major league craftsman.

Here, again, Malick uses his customary voice-over device although this time as a means of vocalising the abstract thoughts of the various soldiers as they struggle to make some sense of the conflict. It's an interesting approach which allows the audience to identify with the characters in a far less superficial way than in, say, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (the film THE THIN RED LINE is most often and most unfairly compared to). Malick is also not afraid to take time to illustrate the continuing natural backdrop to the carnage. Mother Nature almost seems to be occupying a pivotal supporting role as a detached observer on the sidelines, calmly and inscrutably watching the chaos develop.

It's a measure of Malick's complete disinterest with the normal conventions of Hollywood that actors such as Lucas Haas, Vigo Mortensen, Jason Patric, Mickey Rourke, Martin Sheen and Billy Bob Thornton all spent months in Queensland Australia and the Solomon Islands filming roles that ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor. Blink and you'll also miss major marquee players such as John Travolta and George Clooney. The stand-out performances come from Jim Caviezel and, especially, Nick Nolte.

Nolte just seems to be getting better and better as he gets older and his portrayal of tyrant Colonel Tall is something to see. I have never seen anyone express such an impotent sense of rage, anger and fury than Nolte does here. It's a fantastic performance from a real pro and it's a mystery to me why he didn't get an Oscar.

John Toll's pristine cinematography and Hans Zimmer's wonderfully evocative (Oscar-winning) score are other strong elements. The unusual music and visuals contrast so well that Malick sometimes fades out the noise of the shouting, explosions and guns, an effect that only serves to heighten the emotional power of the experience further.

You won't see a more beautiful film about the horrors of war. Movies like this make the task of trawling through the weekly diet of dumb formulaic junk served up by Hollywood almost seem worthwhile.

One of the most visually stunning and philosophically daring war films ever made. In 1978, Terrence Malick made the hit classic 'Days of Heaven', for 20 years after its release, Malick didn't create a single film, that was until the release of 1998's World War II epic 'The Thin Red Line; my God was the wait worth it. 'The Thin Red Line' is a complex and moving depiction of war that happens to act as one of the most realistic portrayals of WWII ever displayed, both visually and psychologically. Literally Malick emerged from hiding to create this gem of a classic that portrays the chaos of war. Despite being the same release year as the much more successful 'Saving Private Ryan', Malick's war flick will go down in Hollywood history as a truly special masterpiece.

I used to hate this movie a lot (And I mean, a lot) but nowadays I have started to see its good qualities.

Terrence Malick's films are not everyone's cup of tea, and this is not only not the exception, but probably the most extreme example of that at display: There are many qualities from this movie that are frankly admirable (Particularly its brilliant cinematography and performances) but it is also the kind of movie that is quite tedious to watch at moments.

And it's already a pretty long film, it feels even longer than it actually is.

If you are about to watch this, don't expect something like "Saving Private Ryan". Expect something more akin to Apocalypse Now Redux: A brilliant, but also tedious movie that is both beautiful and both tiring at moments.

I met Malick in 68-69 at MIT where I was taking a degree in philosophy. MIT had the decade before gone through a soul-searching re-evaluation of the type of scientist it was producing, and concluded that they could do much better in working toward well-rounded citizens. So by the end of the 60's they had collected - for a few years only - perhaps the strongest collection of newly emergent thinkers in the humanities. And it was quite a rich stew of ideas for a young person, the most exciting place in the world for the humanities for perhaps five years.

Malick came in with this pack, concerned with newly emerging ideas about meaning and language. The philosophy establishment was forming a new split (US and Continentals) largely characterized by how to reinvent Wittgenstein's insights but with a more friendly rationale. Chomsky was shaking one world, formal abstraction for computers another. Exciting --- moreso than today. But Malick was not a verbal communicator, nor a logician, nor an academic (all sides of the same thing). So he dove into practical visual semiotics.

He is not a brilliant man, merely a journalist. But he does seem to be particularly honest and understands some damned good, solid, human ideas compared to other filmmakers. One can really see this early MIT exposure in 'Red Line.'

We can thankfully forget plot -- there is not meant to be any story. In fact, the war is only used here as a canvas of motion, abstractions of 'regular' life, colliding and sometimes adhering to souls, sometimes destroying them. The device is to build the film around the sounds: narrative voiceovers (current and remembered), natural sounds, haunting music. The images are attached to the sounds, which are derived from abstractions. This is exactly the reverse of Spielberg, which is why there cannot be any comparison to 'Private Ryan,' or any other film that is 'about' something. It is why Malick can never 'explain' his films.

The execution is hypnotic. I wonder what the six-hour version is like. The editing (and particularly of the sound) is unusual, so transports us beyond the strangeness of tropics, war, history. That editing is much like Van Morrison's music: it establishes the rhythm only as a reference to dance around, peeking in and out. The relationship of the rhythm within the shots to the rhythm of the shots is very bluesy.

Having no story opens new possibilities and creates unfamiliar problems. An opportunity is that the film can have many centers: the meditator in the midst of the attack on the camp; the squabble of the villagers; the transport of the ship; the need to look at our own dogtags. The challenge is how to end. When you stick to a formula like Spielberg, you just turn the crank and the climax lifts and comes down, and the story finishes. No story, no formula, so Malick brackets with the transport to and from the island, by the aging of the southern rookie, and by the exit from and re-entry to a world of unfamiliar characters. That they are played by familiar actors (Travolta, Clooney) oddly emphasizes the point.

It must have been educational to work on this film, which is why every intelligent actor (or an actor with an intelligent agent) wanted to participate: one can see direct influence in Penn's 'The Pledge' and Cusack's 'High Fidelity,' both highly abstract.

Penn knew exactly what he was doing here. He moves in the action, as an actor must. But he places his character offscreen in the abstract voiceovers. That's the 'real' Welsh, and the film's image only an abstraction. He truly understands presenting many dimensions simultaneously. Harrelson doesn't, but that's the point with Keck. I wonder why Depp didn't make the cut?