We are back at war this week, this time with the Terrence Malick-helmed epic “The Thin Red Line.” The film, Malick’s first after a twenty-year hiatus and released in 1998, offers the director’s version of World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign. There is nothing current, nothing contemporary about this subject matter. It is not Coppola’s “rock ‘n’ roll war,” drenched in psychedelic phasmagoria, nor is it the drone-powered video-game violence of “The Hurt Locker.” But where other films of this ilk (“Saving Private Ryan,” released the same year, or maybe something more recently released, say, “Dunkirk”) might slather themselves in the patina of nostalgia, Malick’s film often seems estranged from the very idea of time itself.
Writes Bersani: “There are several battle scenes, but they don’t make much for a story.” This feels apt; though Malick had written a script (with, apparently, Adrien Brody’s character as the lead), this was only ever to satisfy the studio — he had always planned to ditch any carefully-laid plans in favor of whatever inspiration struck on location. With “The Thin Red Line,” Malick, like Bigelow, has opted to de-narrativize the course of conflict. By all narrative conventions, the film’s middle chunk, in which the a ragtag gang of soldiers volunteer to attempt to “take the hill” and advance on a Japanese encampment, should function as climax, should provide a (however carefully conceited) window into the psychological states of each character. But Malick had abandoned narrative convention long ago — the characters barely have names, and if they do, there is very little onus on the viewer to remember them. Untethered from any particular perspective, there is something entirely unorthodox about the film’s pivotal battle scenes — which Malick, disinterested in action sequences of any sort, reportedly did not want to film. Recalls actor Ben Chaplin: “He never expected it to be this big thing with loads of men and machines. He had written this film about people and nature, and he got here and there was this war going on.”
This war is going on! Each soldier collapses into one another, a million Adrian Brodies, these brown-haired, dust-caked young men crawling towards the Japanese encampment like a swarming colony of nameless, faceless, hopeless ants, our only sense of narrative propulsion a constant, wraithlike voiceover, dipping in and out of temporal logic until we feel less like we’ve just watched a major Hollywood production — and more like we’ve read a very long poem.
