by Rich Elias, Feb 4, 1999

• 170 Minutes
• Rated R
• 3 Stars

Malick's screenplay tracks an infantry company from their landing on Guadalcanal through two battles with the Japanese. A few name actors get uniforms, like John Travolta with a cameo as a general (he's all wrong) or George Clooney who gets to play colonel for one chew-nails speech. More substantial are Sean Penn as a company sergeant who knows he runs the outfit, no matter what the officers think. More important, Penn's character represents one pole in a philosophical dialogue about the nature of war that Malick conducts through his characters. Also noteworthy is Woody Harrelson in a brief but memorable role.

That philosophical dialogue pits Sgt. Welsh (Penn) against Corporal Fife (Adrien Brody), a man with the face of a redneck Jesus. Fife went AWOL on a Pacific island where happy natives live in harmony with nature, plucking coconuts from the trees and spearing contented fish in quiet tidal pools. Every time Fife looks at them his eyes glow with transcendence. Beauty and harmony make him meditate on a higher power and purpose that we can glimpse but never capture. Then he's captured and Sgt. Welsh gives him one more chance, explaining cynically that war is meaningless and life is meaningless and the army is definitely meaningless. All you've got is your rifle and, you hope, enough ammo.

Another angle is presented in the conflict between Lt. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte, in a brilliant portrayal) and Capt. Starros (Elias Koteas) who disobeys Tall's order to send his men on a suicidal assault. This conflict echoes, on a personal level, the theme presented via Fife and Welsh, namely, what war reveals about the meaning or meaninglessness of human life.

Malick's movie works best in moments, in scenes that get inside your head because you are watching the war through someone else's head. To do this, Malick uses a technique that worked for him in "Days of Heaven" and "Badlands," the two movies that brought him to fame decades ago, after which he abandoned moviemaking until now. That technique is the voiceover: you watch the character while his voice on the sound track tells you what he's thinking. Fife, the nature lover, gets the most voice time. Like the young girl with the scratchy voice in "Days of Heaven," Fife has an Appalachian twang that makes his airy thoughts sound more real, more authentic. Using voiceovers is sometimes the sign of sloppy filmmaking, After all, we don't want to hear what a character thinks; those thoughts ought to be apparent in what the character does. But in "Thin Red Line," you couldn't imagine soldiers in the midst of battle stopping to debate the meaning of life. They're too busy trying to destroy Japanese life. Voiceovers get around that problem.

Malick also seems aware of the "grammar," you could say, of the war movie. The windup before the assault on Guadalcanal makes us expect a bloody fight on the beach when the troop carriers hit the sound (like Omaha Beach in "Saving Private Ryan"). But "Thin Red Line" postpones such big scenes, and when they come, they are more focused and personal than in Spielberg's movie. Yet Malick doesn't flesh out his characters. Casting no-name actors reinforces the sense that we don't know these men except through Malick's words and his camera. We don't think "Hey! Isn't that Ted Danson?" as we did in "Saving Private Ryan" -- except for a few cameo roles plugged in for marquee value. One result is that soldiers here can be heroic without coming across as heroes. Once again, "Thin Red Line" plays against the conventions of the war movie.

Setting the action in the Pacific, where novelist Jones fought, helps Malick elevate his movie above history. The campaign in the Pacific was as bloody as the assault on Europe commemorated in Spielberg's movie. But fifty years after World War II, that campaign seems harder to understand. "Island hopping" to root the Japanese from \ Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima or Bataan cost thousands of lives. But unlike the D-Day assault, much of the Pacific campaign took place in the early years of the war and seems inconclusive except as sheer slaughter. When we "won" an island, what did we win? Just the chance to ship troops to another island to fight another battle. The Normandy landing, on the other hand, announced the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. I don't want to be misunderstood on this point. I am not saying that D-Day was more important or heroic than Guadalcanal. What I'm saying is that our historical memory of D-Day is stronger because, first, it's a battle we won, and, second, it was a battle for a piece of real estate we regard as much closer to our heritage than an atoll we would be hard pressed to find on a map.

I think this is what attracted Malick to Jones' story. You could say that "The Thin Red Line" is a movie about World War II made by a filmmaker who came of age in the Vietnam era. Its central conflict about the meaning of war is carried out through characters who embody ideas the director wants to explore, much as the two sergeants do in Oliver Stone's "Platoon". They live or die to help Malick make a point. And siting the movie in the Pacific helps to free Malick from the burden of history, unlike Spielberg's movie which, for all its brilliance, willfully aligns its sympathies with those we acquired in our high school history classes.

I'd be more receptive to Malick's movie if its ambition and visual brilliance weren't matched by its creator's towering egotism. All of his ploys in "Thin Red Line" showcase his talent and vision, not the characters or the story or historical reality. His techniques remind me that he's used them before just as effectively but with the same result: the filmmaker takes the foreground. (Casting no-name actors too: when Malick made "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," Martin Sheen and Richard Gere were unknowns.) Offsetting the horrors of war with the beauties of nature creates some splendid scenes, but makes me wonder if Malick signed Marty Stouffer, host of the PBS "Nature" show, as a consultant. Maybe we don't recognize the actors, but I've seen those birds before.