#2,871. The Thin Red Line (1998) - The Films of Terrence Malick

 

It must be twenty years since I last watched Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and I had forgotten what an incredible motion picture it is. A masterfully shot war film with brilliantly staged battle scenes, The Thin Red Line is, like Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven before it, also lyrical in its approach, waxing poetic about life, love, violence, and death, yet doing so in a way that never detracts from the movie’s more intense sequences. If anything, it enhances them.

Based on James Jones’ 1962 novel of the same name, The Thin Red Line centers on the 1942 battle of Guadalcanal, when U.S. marines took on the Imperial Japanese army. With a star-studded cast, the movie takes us from the initial days of the campaign, when the marines, under the leadership of Lt. Col. Gordon Tall (Nick Nolte), found themselves outmatched and outnumbered by the Japanese. As Col. Tall, ignoring the odds against them, demanded that his troops press on, his subordinates, including Capt. James Staros (Elias Koteas), Lt. John Gaff (John Cusack), and Sgts. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn), Maynard Storm (John Savage), and Brian Keck (Woody Harrelson) were locked in the fight of their lives, losing troops by the dozens.

The marines would eventually take a vital hill as well as the airfield that was the operation’s ultimate goal, but even then, the battle was far from over.

Along with the actors already mentioned, The Thin Red Line features Jim Caviezel as Pvt. Witt, Ben Chaplin as Pvt. Bell, Adrien Brody as Cpl. Fife, Jared Leto as 2nd Lt. William Whyte, Tim Blake Nelson as Pvt. Tills, John C. Reilly as Sgt. Storm, and Nick Stahl as Pvt. Beade. Also turning up in cameos are John Travolta as Brig. Gen. Quintard and George Clooney as Capt. Bosche, with Mirando Otto appearing in several flashbacks as Pvt. Bell’s wife.

Now, that’s one hell of a cast, and if I’m being honest, it is a bit distracting each time a big star appears on-screen. But Malick balances his actors perfectly, giving each their moment to shine while also moving the story along at a brisk pace.

Some get more screen time than others. As the movie opens, Jim Caviezel’s Pvt. Witt, who has gone AWOL, is living among the Melanesian natives of the South Pacific. He is eventually found and taken into custody, at which point his direct superior, Penn’s Sgt. Welsh, removes him from combat duty and orders him to act as a stretcher bearer during the Guadalcanal campaign. Pvt. Witt and Sgt. Welsh will share several scenes together, with their differing philosophies taking center stage. Pvt. Witt is a firm believer in the afterlife, while Sgt. Welsh, who has seen his share of horrors, cannot fathom a world beyond the one he knows.

Their spiritual debates are but one of the film’s many introspective moments. Time and again, Pvt. Bell, played wonderfully by Ben Chaplin, reflects on the love he has for his wife, and the hope that they will one day be reunited. “Why should I be afraid to die?”, Bell says, narrating his own flashback, “I belong to you. If I go first, I'll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters”.

And yet, even with its meditative tone, The Thin Red Line is a highly effective war film, conveying the chaos of warfare and never shying away from the carnage. Several characters are killed over the course of the movie, and there are moments, especially during the initial battles, that are as tense as anything you’d find in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It is both a nerve-racking World War II movie and a Terrence Malick film through and through, and this duality is what makes The Thin Red Line such a rewarding experience. It is not to be missed.
Rating: 9.5 out of 10

#2,475. Days of Heaven (1978) - The Films of Terrence Malick

Directed By: Terrence Malick

Starring: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard



Tag line: "Your Eyes...Your Ears...Your Senses...Will Be Overwhelmed"

Trivia: Shortly after filming began, director Terrence Malick tossed out the script, relying instead on the improvisation of the actors







As I mentioned in my write-up of Medium Cool, I had taken several mass media courses in college, all geared towards video production (which, at that point in the early ‘90s, was where the jobs were). Yet despite its focus, the instructor dedicated three consecutive classes to discussing the art of film. The first week we watched Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and in the second we got a chance to analyze Hitchcock’s Psycho. 

Being a movie fan, I had seen both of these before, but the third week’s film, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, was new to me. 

A period piece that whisks us back to the early days of the 20th century, Days of Heaven is one of the most striking motion pictures I’ve ever seen, and it continues to rank among my all-time favorites, a position its held ever since that first viewing. 

The year is 1916. After a violent confrontation with his boss, Chicago steel mill worker Bill (Richard Gere) hops the next train out of town, taking with him his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his adolescent sister Linda (Linda Manz). The train carries the trio all the way to the Texas panhandle, where Bill and Abby get jobs (alongside hundreds of immigrants) harvesting the fields of a rich farmer (played by Sam Shepard). 

To avoid any controversy, Bill and Abby pretend to be brother and sister, a lie that works to their advantage when the Farmer, who Bill learns is dying of an unknown illness, falls in love with Abby. Hoping to get his hands on the farmer’s wealth when he passes away, Bill convinces Abby to marry the farmer, thus setting herself up to be his sole heir. 

But as the months drag on, the farmer’s health seems to improve, and Bill finds himself on the outside looking in when Abby begins to develop feelings for her new husband. 

Most movies, especially those as visually stunning as Days of Heaven, have no need of a narrator; the images speak for themselves. Yet the narration provided by young star Linda Manz is one of this film’s best features. Along with sharing a few of her thoughts on its various characters, Manz’s Linda is often as observant as Malick’s camera, commenting on things that don’t forward the plot, but add to the film’s reflective tone (“Nobody’s perfect”, Linda says at one point in her thick New York accent. “There was never a perfect person around. You just have half-angel and half-devil in you”). 

Yet what truly makes Days of Heaven such a noteworthy motion picture is its gorgeous cinematography (handled by both Nestor Almendros and an uncredited Haskell Wexler) as well as Malick’s keen sense of what makes a particular image so interesting (in one of the documentaries presented on the Blu-Ray, we’re told that Malick didn’t really follow a shot plan, choosing instead to film whatever caught his eye). 

Days of Heaven does feature a few memorable moments, such as the locust infestation that threatens to ruin the farmer’s crop; and the fire that spreads out of control when he and the workers try to drive these pesky insects away. But the movie is at its best when - as with the narration - the visuals don’t necessarily serve the story (some extended shots of the workers toiling in the fields are absolutely beautiful). 

With its emphasis on imagery over plot, Days of Heaven may seem overly pretentious to some viewers. For me, the visuals were more than enough to hold my attention; you could lift just about any frame from this film and hang it on your wall. Days of Heaven is arthouse cinema at its most breathtaking.

#616. Badlands (1973) - The Films of Terrence Malick

Directed By: Terrence Malick

Starring: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates




Tag line: "He was 25 years old. He combed his hair like James Dean. She was 15. She took music lessons and could twirl a baton. For a while they lived together in a tree house. In 1959, she watched while he killed a lot of people"

Trivia: Don Johnson auditioned for the part of Kit

Through the unlikely combination of poetry and random violence, Terrence Malick’s Badlands weaves a singular tale of two young lovers who, as one of the film's tag lines states, set out to kill a little time, and end up killing innocent people instead. 

Based on the 1958 Starkweather murders and set against the backdrop of the American Midwest, Badlands introduces us to Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen), a 25-year-old drifter who bears a striking resemblance to James Dean. One day, Kit meets Holly (Sissy Spacek), a baton-twirling teenager, with whom he falls instantly in love. When Holly’s widowed father (Warren Oates) objects to the relationship, Kit shoots him dead, then sets the house on fire. 

At first horrified by Kit’s actions, Holly nonetheless agrees to go with him, and the two set off on a cross-country killing spree, leaving a string of corpses in their wake. 

At the outset of Badlands, Kit and Holly appear to be kindred spirits. He is a loner who had trouble holding onto a job, while she isn’t very popular in school. “Our time together was limited”, Holly says in her dual role as the film's narrator, “and each lived for the precious hours when he or she could be with the other, away from all the cares of the world”. 

Yet what these initial days of their affair also made painfully clear was that Kit and Holly had little in common. They played cards and took walks, but hardly spoke a word to each other while doing so, and even their first sexual encounter was less than fulfilling. It isn’t until Kit guns down Holly’s father that their relationship finally comes alive. Excitement and danger became their constant companions the moment Kit pulled that trigger, and all at once, their life together seemed a lot more promising. 

I can’t say I was immediately impressed the first time I saw Badlands, and the reason why was the narration. To me, it felt out of place, colliding rather abruptly - even clumsily - with the story at hand. At one point, as she and Kit are hiding out in in the woods, Holly fills her days by waxing poetic about the surrounding wilderness. “I grew to love the forest, “ she says, “the cooin’ of the doves and the hum of dragonflies in the air made it always lonesome, like everybody’s dead and gone”. Certainly not the reflections you'd expect to hear from a girl on the run, let alone one in the company of a murderer. 

These asides of Holly's felt too detached to me, yet the more I saw the movie (as well as Malick's equally impressive Days of Heaven, which features similar narration), the more I appreciated this detachment, which, in reality, gives Badlands it’s center; creating a world where violence and beauty exist in perfect unison. Through bloodshed, Kit was leaving his mark on the world, while Holly, by way of her observations, created the utopia in which they both would live, if not physically, then spiritually. 

Kit and Holly spent most of their lives as outsiders, looking for a place to call home. In the end, they found that place in each other.