Friday, Jul 25, 2008
In that context, there isn't much the actors can do. It seems incredible that in a movie that boasts Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, George Clooney and John Travolta, among others, next to none of those performances are worth talking about. It's not the actors' fault. Most of them have parts consisting of only a few scenes (Clooney gets about 60 seconds of screen time), and many of those scenes are drowned out by another actor's voice-over. The relative puniness of many of the roles may be a result of Malick's cutting the film from his reported original six hours to its present length of 170 minutes. But even if roles were fleshed out, I'm not sure the actors would make any more of an impression. The exceptions are Elias Koteas as the captain (inexplicably changed by Malick from Jewish to Greek) who refuses a superior's orders to send his men on a suicidal attack plan. Koteas, who's always struck me as a scenery chewer, plays a decent officer concerned with the welfare of his soldiers, and his uncluttered readability is welcome in the surrounding metaphysical soup. And as the officer who orders Koteas' men on the attack, Nick Nolte delivers the movie's only full-scale performance. As usual, Nolte creates his character physically. He's massive here, and at the same time no more than sinew and muscle. Nolte's Lt. Col. Tall is a man who's been passed over for promotion and is desperate to use Guadalcanal to prove his worthiness to the superiors who are observing. When Koteas' sergeant refuses his orders, Nolte nails the outraged disbelief of a man who's not used to being refused. His rage might be the kind of thing familiar from agit-prop parodies of the military mind-set, if Nolte didn't hew so closely to Jones' view of the character. He plays this military monster as a grunt under his command might see him: a half-mad son-of-a-bitch determined to get the men under his command killed.
It's perfectly in keeping with Malick's scheme that, most of the time, the voice-overs don't sound anything like the characters from whose heads they are meant to be issuing. What do they have to say? "War doesn't ennoble men. It turns 'em into dogs"; or "Maybe all men got one big soul that everybody's a part of"; or "Love, where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us?"; or "Who are you to live in all these many forms?" This last one is directed to Nature (no fooling), but it might as well be the director talking to himself, because all the voices here really add up to only one voice: Malick's. His idea of masculine profundities is like what Hemingway might have come up with if he wrote fortune cookies. And piled on top of all this manly head-scratching is a vision of war as an evil that civilization brings to despoil the uncorrupted beauty of nature. Malick opens the movie with a prologue involving two soldiers who've gone AWOL on an island inhabited by peace-loving natives. The depiction of these people is the most simple-minded and condescending imaginable. They possess a harmony with nature that the white man has lost, yadda yadda yadda. Of course, we see them again toward the end of the film, after they've become corrupted by their encounter with man.
That clichi is a throwback to the period in American movies during and just after Vietnam. So is the whole movie. The recurrent theme of most of the reviews of "The Thin Red Line" that have appeared is a willingness to forgive the movie's flaws in order to lavish praise on Malick, who hasn't made a film since 1978's "Days of Heaven." As misguided as I think those reviews are, I understand where they're coming from. Read between the lines and you can see movie critics wondering if their job is still worth doing in a time when studio execs, not filmmakers, rule. It's as if by creating a swelling chorus of praise for Terrence Malick, they believe they can bring back the glory days of American movies of the '70s when, at good movies and bad, the constant seemed to be that audiences were treated like adults, and it wasn't assumed they would reject the unfamiliar or the unresolved. And there seems to be an unspoken fear that if "The Thin Red Line" fails without any support, the studios will use it as an excuse to quash other chancy projects and feed us more of the same pap.
In response, I wonder how many critics saw Nolte's interview with Charlie Rose on Dec. 21, two days before the movie opened. It was probably the most extraordinary interview I've ever seen from an actor ostensibly promoting a new movie. Nolte, who was marvelously witty and straightforward, told amusing stories about Malick letting his attention wander during scenes and suddenly ordering Toll to shoot the tree leaves overhead, or directing Nolte by giving him some lines of Homer to learn in Latin. At the end of the stories, Nolte announced, "I don't believe the movie's finished" (this was about 36 hours before it opened) and then went on to reveal that Zimmer had been adding music the week before -- and that members of the production team had, a few weeks before that, sat Malick down and told him he couldn't make any more changes. ("I don't know what those critics saw," Nolte said, referring to the unfinished work print screened for critics in New York and Los Angeles in the first weeks of December; the version reviewed here is the finished one now playing in theaters.)
Now, I know that most studio execs can't tell self-indulgence from brilliance. But it seems to me that a filmmaker whose methods are as preening and undisciplined as Malick's are frequently reported to be, and whose finished product has such disregard for audiences, does more harm than good to the chances of other filmmakers hoping to do something more than a retread of last season's blockbuster hit that was lousy to begin with. And though Malick is now being made to stand for the originality and daring of '70s American movies, even in that era, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" showed the same mixture of distanced estheticism and woozy philosophical imponderables. Next to the work of Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma and Mazursky from that period, they're pallid jokes. The '70s aren't coming back, certainly not by turning Malick into a demigod and preparing the altar and lighting the incense for his second coming. There are plenty of directors working to stretch themselves or the medium who continue to need critical support in the face of studio incomprehension and audience indifference. In 1998 that group included filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh ("Out of Sight"), George Miller ("Babe: Pig in the City"), Sam Raimi ("A Simple Plan") and John Boorman ("The General"). The return-to-paradise fantasy that opens "The Thin Red Line" has turned out to be a potent one for some of the critics praising it. But a dream of a recovered golden age is no reason to follow this tin-pot Kurtz into exile. There are too many signs of life on the mainland.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
