When Spielberg tries to go beyond that, to "grow up" in effect, he can't seem to do it. The Color Purple is an embarrassing depiction of the black experience. Empire of the Sun is a Boy's Adventure adaptation of JG Ballard, one of the most perverse writers ever. Schindler's List has wonderful texture—gritty and grim—but is basically a simplistic view: the Jews are saints ready to float up to heaven (to the accompaniment of composer John Williams’ choral music), and the Nazis are bastards ready to plunge straight to hell (except for Ralph Fiennes, who’s a sympathetic bastard).
The most shocking thing about Saving Private Ryan—and this because it plays to Spielberg's strengths—is that he treats war as a game. Spielberg turns the Omaha landing into a vast game of patintero, where the beach—a place traditionally reserved for fun and leisure—is desecrated by blood and violent death. Soldiers sidestep and dart forward; when caught their guts splatter all over the sand. The huge landing barriers resemble jumping jacks left by some titan child. The film’s final battle, with tanks rumbling forth like armorplated Jurassic creatures, is a gigantic game of hide-and-seek—the tanks seeking out and killing desperately hidden soldiers.
But the drama in the middle of the film lacks bite. Spielberg doesn't have the conviction of Martin Scorsese or Francis Coppola, and the Nazi and American who start out cowardly and later become murderous seems more like a belated attempt to complicate matters.
Doesn’t help to cast Tom Hanks in the role of the tight-lipped Captain Miller. Hanks’ wholesomeness simplifies his character’s silence; you know impure thoughts have never dwelled behind those baby blues. Hanks looks like the Hollywood personification of Spielberg’s sensibility—no matter how many heads are blown off, no matter how much intestine spill on bloody sand, human decency and compassion will always win out in the end.
The Thin Red Line shows what an adult is capable of when dealing with the Second World War. Less gore in all of Thin Red than in the first twenty minutes of Ryan, but what blood there is startles with its brightness and viscosity, especially splattered against deep green grass. A quick shot of a mutilated soldier speaks far more eloquently of the cruelty of Japanese soldiers than all the bullets fired by the German military. And Malick knows how to use silence: when soldiers approach a Japanese bunker you sense hearts beating triple-time. When the camera captures a man’s face in giant close-up, his huge eyes—deep within his cowled shadowed face—communicates a fear as wordless and primal as the nightmare you had last night.
The Thin Red Line is unlike most other Hollywood movies made recently—maybe because the filmmaker hasn’t made any Hollywood movies recently. Malick’s last feature was Days of Heaven, twenty years ago, and before that Badlands; Thin Red brings the total number in his filmography to date to three. Nick Nolte, who plays a major role, probably said it best: Malick is an artist because he hasn’t made a film in twenty years, never made a living making films, does so for reasons that have little to do with money.
Or with pleasing an audience. Half the film is Hans Zimmer’s haunting New Age music; the other half is half-whispered voiceovers by men in combat about life, about death, about Nature, love, good and evil. Half the time you can’t tell which soldier is having what interior monologue; half the time, you can’t even tell characters apart. Only the superior officers are familiar with John Travolta as a general, Nick Nolte a colonel, George Clooney and John Cusack captains, Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson sergeants—all the other soldiers from corporal downward are complete unknowns. This may be the only concession Malick makes to the boxoffice, and even then he’s perfectly perverse about it: Clooney is onscreen for maybe a minute, while Harrelson is recognizable only when he’s about to die. All the other familiar stars have equally brief screen times, despite which Nolte and Penn manage to stand out. Malick concentrates on the more anonymous corporals and privates, and the result is a blurring of characters, a melding of faces into one composite military face, staring wide-eyed at the screen, at you.
Actually, the film's real star is Malick. It’s his vision up there on screen, you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s if you tried. He lights the jungle canopy as if it were the inside of an emerald, and for contrast has these hunched twisted men—darkened by dirt and gunpowder—crawling underneath. A backlit leaf has all the aura of St. Bernadette in a religious epic; bodies swim crystalline waters with dreamy slow-motion grace, with all the time in the world before coming up for air. Malick has been criticized for making what is essentially a war picture in Discovery Channel mode—but I’ve never seen a Discovery feature that devoted this much exaltation over grass and leaf, snake and beetle.
Malick is more than just a photographer of gorgeous images he's a mindscaper. Like the Kubrick of films like 2001 and The Shining, Malick likes to create totally imagined environments—the cinematic equivalent of a world that reflects his sensibilities. With The Thin Red Line, Malick has turned Guadalcanal into a vast tabletop miniature of his own mind—mysterious and silent (except for the occasional burst of choral music), with the light from the outside world filtered through a million leaves. It’s not (I suspect) the James Jones novel that you read, but I don’t think Malick’s changes diminish the work. If anything, he expands it, makes it bigger in our head the more we think about it; Ryan, a conventional film told conventionally, can only shrink in comparison.
I don't think Thin Red Line is perfect; there are flaws, and the philosophizing is part of it. Thought Malick should have let the film be a largely wordless experience, and allow us to supply it our own pretentiousness. Zimmer’s music and John Toll’s glorious cinematography prime you up for some really profound thinking, and all you get are Zen statements like “maybe all men got one big soul that everybody's a part of.” The far more potent visual poetry outstrips the verbal, ultimately saves the picture—making it the only 1999 Oscar nominee I can actually respect.
Excerpt from an article first published in Menzone Magazine 3.22.99
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