The Rich Pageantry of Malick's "Thin Red Line"

by Ryland Walker Knight

Any time filmmaker Terrence Malick releases a work of art it becomes an event--at least for his devoted “cult” following--given how rare an occasion that is. The allure of rallying around a lavish DVD edition of one of his features, such as this week's release of The Thin Red Line by the Criterion Collection, for die-hards, is that you can now foist a superior presentation of the film on a family member or friend; and if you're a curious spectator, you can heed the rapture of a loud Malick fan like me. Just as importantly, no matter your allegiance, you don't have to wait for that perpetually pending release date of Malick's next film The Tree of Life to be reminded of his import.

The Thin Red Line, pitched as and in spurts understood as a war film, is hardly anything so simple. However, neither is it simply a poem. In his astute essay that accompanies this new Criterion edition, David Sterritt argues with credence for the film as a true action picture despite the poetry and the philosophy. True: there is war within it; there are deaths, largely ignoble, inflicted and suffered. Yet: there blooms a forest, too, up hills and at the edge of waters. The “natural world” looms even larger than the war. If Malick's The New World uses a river, and how it meets land, as its structural metaphor, The Thin Red Line no doubt find trees and grass-things that rise from the earth-as a defining framework; both branch, but rivers tumble and vegetation grows.

Even as the film's narration and monologues blend interior and diegetic (to say nothing of “natural”) spaces, you never quite know who or what is addressing you, in the audience, while watching The Thin Red Line. It seems accepted that an image's address is autocratic, says, This is something, and, Here's how to look at it. One of the great pleasures in Terrence Malick's cinema, in particular his last two films, is his willingness to layer meaning through a variety of aesthetic effects. Despite the facts that all of his films are shot in natural light on location, all are interested in physical labor of some kind, and all spend a good chunk of time looking at the world, there's never the sense that the physicality of any shot can be ascribed to any one register of meaning.

The opening is famous for its succinct portentousness: as Hans Zimmer's score amplifies a bass tone, a crocodile climbs down a mud bank, into an algae-covered river, and submerges, leaving the muck-water's swirl to dissolve into a what amounts to an establishing shot of tree roots. Danger lurks and the earth is old, fertile, an arena where violence can happen. Then the questions begin: What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself-the land contend with the sea?

All these questions are asked as a calming string of images, caught with a camera tilting or tilted upwards, often at trees and the light falling past them, succeed the threat of the first. In the first half-minute we're given a thicket of meaning to parse. In fact, it seems as though we could be asking those questions the film has posed (for us) at the outset.

There are no answers, of course, for questions such as these. They're offshoots of another question that, though seemingly simple, throws the world upside down: What's natural? Or, What's nature? This film has a few gestures towards that field of inquiry, but none of its turns-of plot, of language, of vantage-can offer any definitive position. The most natural thing in the film is this drift, which we might understand as the most natural thing about film itself: its ability to inhabit its subjects and its audience alike. I'm not talking about implicating the spectator's gaze or any such psychoanalytic phooey; I'm talking a whole other brand of gobbledygook that has to do with phenomenology. Which is a fancy, possibly flip, way of saying that Malick understands how movies help us see a world we can sense better than we can comprehend.

Sterritt's trick is to point out the ordinariness of Malick's characters (and Malick's own background). These are ordinary people, from the Midwest or the South (or the edges of our history for that matter), that have to deal with an event much larger than themselves-and that any one of them could die at any minute. By its mortal nature the story proposes a philosophical bent to questioning purpose, and naturally a character named Witt is the logical hinge of the film.

Played by Jim Caviezel as somewhere between aloof and saintly, Witt's the one with some faith in the picture. He claims to have seen another world, he believes in the light, he puts his calm trust in all his brothers in arms-even the ones who send him off to die or disparage his constitution-because that's what being a soldier is to him. Going to war isn't just fighting against the nameless and faceless at the top of a hill, it's fighting with (and for) the man beside you. And life, as it appears to Malick, is built on such trust, which amounts to faith. Because there's another thing many critics don't talk about when they talk about Terrence Malick, sage auteur of philosophy: he is a devout Episcopalian.

Granted, I do not know Mr. Malick personally. I can't vouch for his day-to-day practice. But I can say that his art evinces a strong belief not only in this world but in the importance of faith in this world. There's no preaching, nor any stake holding for any particular denomination, but there is a conviction in Witt that earns the film's admiration as truly Good. We never see him pray, nor say the word “God,” but his quiet communion with a large-leafed plant-letting water from his canteen fall down its fold-speaks to his ties to this world and enacts the central motifs in Malick in an almost too-tidy fashion. It's a throwaway moment, a simple joy at rest for this man, but it feels more weighted given how we've known Witt to be an observer. Everything he sees seems special. This construct is a flattering mirror for a director so beset on witnessing the splendor of our world and its possible, all-too-nigh corruption.

Notwithstanding that leap of logic, The Thin Red Line takes on this posture through other characters as well. Sean Penn's First Sergeant Walsh is Witt's counterpoint and they share a number of poignant tête-à-têtes about life, war, manhood, etc. Elias Koteas' Captain Starros embodies another form of Goodness in his desire to not see his men killed, to really preserve life amidst war's absurd barrage of goals and explosions. Woody Harrelson's cameo seems explicitly designed to point at one meaning of the film's title: in an unfortunate instant he pulls the pin on a grenade and blows himself up against a hill, saving his team while illustrating how easy and how stupid it is to die. Like anything smart, the film isn't interested in either/ors, so much as it's concerned with reconciling differences that make a difference.

That war is practically an antonym for reconciliation just ups the ante on the pathos of men coming to terms (or not, as it happens) with all that competes within themselves. Each man will navigate this world on his own, but the hymn of this film is that his world extends, even at the end, past his body. Starros is ordered to leave his men, but his protective mantle to defend his men is taken up in Witt's assent to his final mission; Witt's spark is extinguished but Walsh's face carries him in its lines, and his voice-over (or whoever's it is) beseeching his soul to inhabit him now, to be inside and out, to share in a vision of the world's vast and burnished cornucopia.

Images Courtesy of the Criterion Collection