'The Thin Red Line' at 25: War at the Heart of Nature

Terrence Malick's World War II epic remains a masterpiece.

Loosely based on James Jones’ autobiographical World War II novel (which is technically a sequel to From Here to Eternity), The Thin Red Line follows a company of American soldiers as they combat the Japanese in Guadalcanal. It has a ridiculously stacked cast of much-admired actors, and its sparse plot is fairly generic. On paper, it seems like something you’ve seen a thousand times before and since, the kind of traditional war film Steven Spielberg perfected with Saving Private Ryan and Ben Stiller rendered irrelevant with Tropic Thunder.

Except The Thin Red Line was written and directed by Terrence Malick. And of all the adjectives you could use to describe Malick’s work, “traditional” is not one of them.

When The Thin Red Line was initially released on December 23, 1998, Malick was already a mythological figure in cinema history. A Rhodes Scholar who had translated Heidegger while still attending Harvard, Malick grew up to be part of the legendary 1970s New Hollywood, the movement that established a bevy of great American filmmakers, including [deep breath] Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, George Lucas, Hal Ashby, William Friedkin, and Peter Bogdanovich. But after making two of that era’s most acclaimed (if not most profitable) films, Badlands (1974) and Days of Heaven (1978), Malick inexplicably walked away from the movie business for twenty years. Even when he came out of retirement to make The Thin Red Line, he shunned publicity, granting no interviews and posing for only a single photo on the set. The movie received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay; Malick didn’t attend the ceremony. He made Stanley Kubrick looks press-friendly and prolific by comparison.

In fact, Malick and Kubrick were compared often that year, both because of their reclusive natures and deliberate working paces, and because they were both unveiling new films for the first time in decades (Kubrick completed Eyes Wide Shut and promptly passed away just months after The Thin Red Line was released). The two don’t actually have very much in common beyond those superficial details - Kubrick is a Jew from the Bronx who was born in the ‘20s, Malick is a Catholic from Texas who was born in the ‘40s; Kubrick barely finished high school, Malick is an ivy league grad; Kubrick was known for being a perfectionist who made cynical, emotionally chilly films, Malick creates lyrical, inquisitive cinematic poems that he often seems to be making up as he goes along. The story you heard from actors who worked with Kubrick was, “He made me do 200 takes of walking through a door and saying ‘Good morning.’” The story you heard from actors who worked with Malick was, “When I got to set he told me to forget all the dialogue and just pantomime the scene, and then halfway through the day he diverted the crew to go film some rare bird that only chirps once every five hours.”

But despite these differences, there is another similarity between them: their work aims to take advantage of all the ways cinema is a unique medium in the service of conveying challenging, complex concepts that ultimately transcend language.

The Thin Red Line is a $52 million art film, a three-hour-long war picture that doesn’t even hint at combat for the first 40 minutes, and a meditation on metaphysical questions it can’t possibly hope to answer, a masterpiece that no less a cinematic deity than Martin Scorsese has declared to be the second-best film of the entire 1990s.

It lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love.

The most facile reading of The Thin Red Line would be “War is corruptive.” At the beginning of the film, Private Witt (a then-unknown Jim Caviezel) goes AWOL and lives among the indigenous people of Guadalcanal, who inhabit this seemingly-utopian community in complete harmony; then, when he revisits the village later, after the fighting has begun, the Edenic atmosphere has been unbalanced, and the people are seen quarreling amongst themselves.

But while that is part of the point Malick is making, it is only part of the point. Malick is not just making the simplistic, idealistic argument that war shouldn’t exist - a true philosopher, he is asking IF war MUST exist, and if so, WHY. The very first words we hear in The Thin Red Line, spoken by a disembodied narrator, asks these philosophical questions bluntly: “What’s this war at the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea?”

That violence and aggression are parts of nature is expressed through dialogue, as when one characters says to another, “Look at this jungle. Look at the vines, they way they twine around the trees, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel.” But it is also expressed visually, by repeatedly utilizing the very concept of military camouflage to make the soldiers a literal part of the landscape. To extend the idea further, Malick opens the film with a shot of a crocodile slowly submerging into algae-filled water, using its own natural camouflage to hunt and survive; furthermore, battle scenes include frequent cutaways illustrating the indifference Guadalcanal’s beautiful wildlife feels towards the ugly death and destruction unfolding all around it.

The paradox that make The Thin Red Line so rich is that while Malick acknowledges that fighting is “natural,” he also acknowledges that it is corrosive. The Americans frequently relate using familial language (“my brothers,” “my people,” “my sons,” etc.), but given a week’s R&R, they drink and fight amongst themselves. The crocodile from the first shot is later captured, bound, and mistreated, the predator rendered prey, the scary made sad. The Japanese are literally faceless, never shown on screen until after they are defeated, at which point it becomes clear that they’re feeling the same range of traumatized emotions as the Americans. Perhaps most importantly, each character in the film is externally fighting a battle they don’t want to fight, while internally fighting a battle between elements of themselves.

There’s the aforementioned Private Witt who sees no “glory” in death, yet unhesitatingly puts himself between danger and his fellow soldiers; Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), who puts on a big show about being a hard-ass but repeatedly demonstrates incredible sympathy for his men; Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), who has a natural talent for soldiering even as he longs to get home to his wife (Miranda Otto); Private Doll (Dash Mihok), who talks tough, is actually scared shitless, and still finds the fortitude to do what he must; Captain Staros (Elias Koteas), who refuses a direct order from a superior officer because he believes it will needlessly get his men killed, even though he knows doing so could land him a court martial; Private Dale (Arie Verveen), a sadist ultimately overcome with guilt and regret about his inhumane deeds; and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte), who knows what his career ambitions have cost him, yet continues to prioritize those ambitions over the lives of other human beings. These men are all at war in more ways than one.

Late in the film, a character suggests via voiceover that “darkness and light, strife and love” are “the workings of one mind, the features of the same face.” Malick isn’t judgmental, and he’s certainly not simple-minded. Drama often argues for one specific ideal over another - but Malick acknowledges that two things can be true at once. Humanity - nature - the very cosmos - contains multitudes.

But no yeah Shakespeare in Love. GREAT movie, right?