THE THIN RED LINE  (1998)  ***1/2

Reviewed 1/2/99

What I look for in a movie is not necessarily perfection. Sometimes a movie has such strong ideas that despite whatever flaws it may have, I will prefer it to a better-made film that is not as thought-provoking. The Thin Red Line is flawed but it provokes. Terence Malick returned to filmmaking 20 years after Days of Heaven and produced this meditative look at war. Unlike this year's Saving Private Ryan, which dwells on war as a necessary evil and explores the moral ambiguities thereof, The Thin Red Line simply says war is waste. While that might seem obvious to some, only after experiencing the film do you realize how profound a waste it is. Saving Private Ryan has an underlying and practical acceptance that war will occur and it has a great cost. The Thin Red Line says idealistically avoid this at all costs. One message is not necessarily more correct than the other. It just depends on one's point of view.

In Malick's film, war is set in a tropical paradise, and John Toll's cinematography is beyond lush. The setting poses the question, why fight in the face of such beauty? In Saving Private Ryan, the capture of a German soldier presents the moral quandary of whether to let him go. In The Thin Red Line, the Japanese present the moral quandary of war in the first place. They are just like the Americans -- frightened and angry, grieving and praying. All that separates them is war.

The flaw in The Thin Red Line comes in the voice-overs. Unbelievable as coming from the characters and sometimes pretentious, sometimes corny, the voice-overs tell us what the images before us already do and are completely unnecessary. Dispensing with them, Malick could have achieved a Tarkovskian grandeur. Instead, he gets distracting self-consciousness.

Aside from that, Malick's direction is stunning. The tracking shots across windswept hills and around transports speeding toward shore are extraordinary. Sean Penn, Elias Koteas, and Nick Nolte give the best performances. Penn is subtle as a sergeant trying to hide his humanism, Koteas is genuine as a compassionate captain, and Nolte startling as a colonel whose blood vessels are about to burst if he cannot win his battle. John Travolta and George Clooney are the worst in cameo roles. Ultimately however, The Thin Red Line's interest is not in the characters and it is not in drama. It has been frequently criticized for its lack of dramatic structure, but Malick clearly has different things on his mind. Has no one ever thought that getting dramatic entertainment from war might be exploitative? What Malick is working with is theme, and in that, The Thin Red Line is most provoking.