A really good film ruined by the excessive of the director. Terrence Malick is given so much latitude that he jumps ship and decides to provide us with a tormented and lubricous travelogue of heaven and hell replete with nature scenes and war footage. See, in Malick's world, Malaysia is heaven (scantily clad natives, beaches, palm trees, cute dark-skinned babies, animals and insects) while hell is represented by the cruelty and ugliness of war. Wow! Thanks for the newsflash. I didn't know war was hell. 

I shouldn't be so hard on the piece, after all, it is quite pretty to look at and chock full of wonderful actors. But only Nick Nolte is given any kind of character or screen time to make him work. The list of Hollywood big shots in the film is staggering but none of them, not a one, adds anything to the film other than Nolte. John Travolta (5 minutes), George Clooney (30 seconds), Ben Chaplin (what does he look like again?), Woody Harrelson (10 minutes), John Cusack, Elias Koteas, Jared Leto (where?), John C. Reily (did he age 30 years?), John Savage (awesome for 10 minutes), Paul Gleason (where?), Nick Stahl (15 seconds), Gary Oldman (where?), Sam Rockwell (I read his name in the credits, I know he's in there), Mickey Rourke (where?). Then there are the lesser-knowns who also fall by the wayside: Adrian Brophy, Dash Mihok (at least he's cute), Thomas Jane, James Caviezel, Shawn Hatosy. And finally there are the actors who had their scenes deleted in Malick's exuberant lunacy to present this epic in 3 hours: Lukas Haas, Bill Pullman. Doesn't matter. With the steel helmets and the 50's haircuts, we don't recognize them anyway. Where's Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Tom Hanks, Matthew McCounaghy. Nope. Only Nolte shines here, or is allowed to. And shine he does - in a blinding performance that may be "dazzling," but also conveys the majority of what Malick is trying to put forth here. See, using recognizable faces would be wise here. There is such a cornucopia of characters that we have a hard time keeping up with all of them. We need familiar faces to keep the plot straight, what little of it there is. Instead we end up guessing half the time who is who and that distracts us from any meaning here. One guy (Mihok) looks kinda like Jake Busey but isn't. Reily looks like Tim Robbins. Koteas looks kinda 
like Kevin Pollack.

The film is based on a novel by James Jones, but that does not explain why the film is so deconstructed. The source material is probably quite straight-forward but why Mallick disassembles it here to become something more the source is anyone's guess. Regardless, Malick doesn't truly want to put forth a "film" here but rather an artistic "payback" at a industry that broke and ignored him for 20 years. The man is obviously unstable and, unfortunately, this does not help him compose a involving film.

Malick has a typical point to convey: Humankind has taken the gift God hath gave us (life, the Earth), and spoiled it and made it into a hell. There. That's the message. Now, watch a Discovery Channel documentary on Malaysia and you don't have to go see the film.

Note: Malick wrote the script. Music by Hans Zimmer. Filmed on location in Malaysia.

Notes on the novel

I'll admit it. I was thinking that James Joyce wrote "The Thin Red Line," not James JONES. I bought the novel because I wondered if Malick's film could be artsy because the novel was so lyrical and grandiose. It is, of course, not.

In fact, the novel is probably the opposite of lyrical in many respects. Jones often bores the reader to tears with technical and geographical descriptions that seem to be endless. Jones' story of the men, the soldiers who come to Guadalcanal is often bogged down in the mud of these specifics. Jones also peoples the novel with characters who have impossible fictional character's names. Almost all of the soldiers have one syllable last names like Witt, Welsh, Doll, Queen and the like. One recruit is named Fife simply because the name implies the sort of high-pitched, skinny character he is.

But Jones also includes much of the emotion and humanity that surely attracted Malick to the piece. The novel may have realistic war segments but these are further highlighted by the realistic manner in which Jones portrays the feelings of his characters. Many of these feelings are sexual in nature. There are at least two specific incidents of homosexuality, as well as a character who yearns for the sexual relationship he shared with his wife back home and one description of how a soldier likeness combat to a sexual adventure, even so much as to prompt him to erection. Jones' candor is a revelation in a novel published so soon after WWII, in a time when this country was experiencing a sort of backlash to reality and sexual freedom. That Jones mentions homosexuality is amazing, but to include characters who engage in it or fantasize about it is even more exceptional. But it is these passages that make us care about the characters. This makes us think of the men in the piece as real and human, made of flesh and blood. When their blood spills, it is all the more troubling.

"The Thin Red Line," the novel, is flawed like the film  adaptation is, but in various different ways. At 500+ pages, it took me almost 3 months to read the book. Not once did I come to a section which made me incapable of putting the novel down. By 1999 standards, it is dull, limping, stalling and drab. The film merely vaguely draws upon the novel loosely - as it should, picking here and there from what it would like to tap. And produces no more illumination from doing this. Malick could have at least evolved the film into the themes of the sort of sexual wonderment, longing and anxiety that war produces. Or something.

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