The Travolta/Cage Project #56 The Thin Red Line (1998)
I do not think too much about my old life as a full-time professional film critic for The A.V Club and then The Dissolve because to do so would inevitably involve confronting everything that I lost when I left that career behind.
I love Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I’m proud that I’ve created a website and a world for myself out of idealism as well as necessity but every once in a while I feel a profound ache for what was and will never be again.
Cinema used to be my religion. Movie theaters used to be my church. At their transcendent best, movies aren’t just important and essential: they’re goddamn sacred.
That’s how I felt back in 1998 when I sat down with my former colleagues to watch The Thin Red Line, preeminent cinematic super genius Terence Malick’s first film in twenty years, since 1978’s Days of Heaven.
Malick was no mere filmmaker; he was something closer to a cinematic God. He was a poet, a genius, a recluse, a man of mystery who made movies that looked and felt like nothing else, that had a texture and a tone all their own.
A new Malick movie felt like an unexpected gift from the Gods of cinema. Malick didn’t just transport audiences to dreamy new worlds beyond their imagination: he took them to church, to synagogue, to a rarified spiritual realm.
I miss seeing new movies from masters like Malick but I also just plain miss being in a movie theater. My god that used to be my Happy Place, my escape, my joy. It’s been so fucking long since I have been inside a movie theater. It’s honestly driving me a little crazy.
So instead of sitting in a sacred cathedral of film like a movie theater and experiencing all one hundred and seventy overpowering minutes of The Thin Red Line at once I watched it in roughly hour-long increments over a period of days while attending to various low-level family crises.
It wasn’t quite watching The Thin Red Line on a cell phone but it was far from ideal. The Thin Red Line is a powerful mood piece even when that mood is broken regularly by having to go your son’s school to pick him up early because he has been misbehaving.
Malick’s first film as a writer and director in two decades is a beguiling paradox: a hippie WW2 movie that posits war in all of its forms as an unforgivable yet inevitable violation of the purity and tranquility of nature, as a savage betrayal of God’s plan.
To assist him in his heady, philosophical exploration of the meaning of life and the inhumanity of war, Malick harnessed the force of nature’s greatest and most powerful gift: the famous faces of big time Hollywood celebrities.
Re-watching The Thin Red Line I found myself thinking that it was a damn shame that these days Jim Caviezel is a right-wing Republican Christian first and an actor a distant second because even in The Thin Red Line, a movie as overstuffed with star-power as It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the future star of The Passion of Christ stands out for his extraordinary screen presence.
Caviezel’s character Private Witt begins the movie happily AWOL, living amongst islanders of Melanesia in a state of natural bliss. He’s left the hell of war behind for an island paradise only to be pulled back into the madness by Sean Penn’s 1st Sgt. Edward Welsh
Malick is nothing if not a collector, archivist and connoisseur of faces. He loves sad faces and lost faces and faces that silently but powerfully express the fierce inter-connectedness of all life on earth.
Because that is what The Thin Red Line is ultimately about: the universal consciousness. It’s an intimate epic that finds the divine in the eternal struggle to find meaning and purpose in the horror of war.
Who is in The Thin Red Line? Pretty much everybody. It would almost be easier to list who is not in it. There’s Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin and that’s pretty much it. If you weren’t in The Thin Red Line you probably got cut out of it, as Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas and Mickey Rouke were, or had your role drastically reduced.
Adrien Brody famously thought that he had a lead role in The Thin Red Line during filming and was horrified to discover at the film’s gala premiere that Malick had edited out an extended sequence where he broke the fourth wall and, while wearing a dreadlocked wig, “big-upped” the Kingston Massive in a comically thick Jamaican accent.
It was a test run of sorts for Brody’s infamous introduction of Sean Paul on Saturday Night Live. Brody was quite proud of it and was devastated to learn that Malick had cut it on account of it being “fucking stupid” and a “goddamn disgrace.”
Brody doesn’t have much in the way of dialogue. Instead Malick relies upon Brody’s big, soulful, impossibly expressive eyes to convey the bottomless terror his character is feeling towards the ever-present specter of violent death.
Brody may not have much in the way of screen time or dialogue but he still has more to do than John Travolta, who shows up early as a verbose high level officer with an irritatingly distracting mustache and then disappears, never to return again.
It’s a cameo, really, rather than a supporting role but Travolta nails the character’s theatricality and showy bigness. Travolta’s Brig. Gen. Quintard talks very loudly in a movie that prefers to whisper softly and soulfully.
First its first hour or so The Thin Red Line is all about mood and image and sound, about the infinite possibilities of film and life and the unsolvable mystery of existence.
Through narration, we are privy to the silent thoughts and wishes and prayers of soldiers forced to confront life’s biggest issues along with their own mortality. Working with cinematographer John Toll and composer Hans Zimmer, Malick created a war film unlike any other because it is a Terence Malick movie first and a WWII movie second.
The Thin Red Line follows the members of 25th Infantry Division as they attempt to take over Henderson Field and seize the island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese, a potential turning point in the war.
The soldiers include Pvt. Jack Bell (Ben Chaplin), a true romantic haunted by seductive images of his life with his wife as well as news of her infidelity, Capt. James Staros (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles’ Elias Koteas), a lawyer in his civilian life trying to reconcile his desire to avoid getting his men killed with a wartime ethos that insists that violent death is not only acceptable but noble and heroic and Lt. Colnel Gordon Tall (Nick Nolte), a grizzled hard-ass whose tough guy exterior masks a soft, vulnerable side.
In its second and third hours The Thin Red Line becomes more conventional in its storytelling. The dreaminess and cracked poetry of the film’s first hour makes the brutality and devastation that follows even more powerful and impactful.
The Thin Red Line is borderline miraculous, a towering masterpiece that perfectly balances Malick’s enduring thematic concerns and visual aesthetic with the demands of a star-studded epic war movie.
Today I eke out a modest living writing about stupid bullshit that no one cares about but every once in a very long while I’ll experience a movie like The Thin Red Line that makes me want to write about movies that matter, that endure, that aspire nakedly to great art and succeed instead of focussing monomaniacally on garbage that barely aspires to entertainment yet fails all the same.
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