Terrence Malick – Movie Musings

Malick’s return from self-exposed exile is, for better or worse, a war film unlike any other

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Sean Penn (Sgt Edward Walsh), Adrien Brody (Cpl Geoffrey Fife), Jim Caviezel (Pvt Robert Witt), Ben Chaplin (Pvt Jack Bell), George Clooney (Captain Bosche), John Cusack (Capt John Gaff), Woody Harrelson (Sgt Keck), Elias Koteas (Capt James Staros), Jared Leto (Lt Whyte), Dash Mihok (Pfc Don Doll), Tim Blake Nelson (Pvt Tillis), Nick Nolte (Lt Col Gordon Tall), John C Reilly (Sgt Maynard Storm), Larry Romano (Pvt Mazzi), John Savage (Sgt McCron), John Travolta (Brig Gen Quintard)

There are war movies. And then there are Terrence Malick war movies. With The Thin Red Line Malick returned from a self-imposed twenty-year exile, during which his mystique had grown to mythical status. His return screened the same year Spielberg was widely credited as re-inventing the entire genre with Saving Private Ryan. But, while that was a visceral gut punch, The Thin Red Line makes its men-on-a-mission approach seem conventional. Malick’s film is a poem, musing on man’s place in nature, humanity, spirituality, good and evil – in fact anything except Dirty Dozen style shenanigans.

Set on the US invasion of Guadalcanal, it follows the men of a single company as they march and fight their way across the island, principally focusing its ‘plot’ on a two-day mission to capture a non-descript hill from a largely unseen enemy. In the smorgasbord of characters, Malick’s roving eye lights on a few key figures: the spiritually-minded, independent Witt (Jim Caviezel); Bell (Ben Chaplin) who day-dreams about the wife he left at home; Doll (Dash Mihok) a terrified blow-hard; stoic professional Sgt Welsh (Sean Penn) who holds the company together; feuding commanders, humanitarian Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) and ambitious Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte).

But these characters are merely a jumping off point for a film that ruminates with sometime self-indulgent luxury, and bravely dares to suggest the ‘good war’ of World War II was a pointless, inhuman brawl that served little real purpose. Few war films start with peaceful shots of nature at work, featuring a crocodile drifting lazily through the waters (the same croc is later captured by the soldiers – no escape for nature from the war), lingering shots of birds and wildlife and one of its principal characters (Caviezel’s Witt), AWOL and paddling gently across a river, among an indigenous tribe.

The Thin Red Line draws a tender portrait of these indigenous people – whose calmly life is corrupted by conflict, not in terms of destruction but how the violence of war seeps into their culture. When Witt returns later, on leave after sterling front-line service, he finds these people clashing as never before, mirroring the brutal anger of the war he has left. In the film’s frequent, mumbling, ruminative voiceover, characters ask again and again where violence comes from – does it come from the same place as goodness? If you plug into this sort of thing – and some won’t – it can have a hypnotic power.

What makes The Thin Red Line unique among war films is that its real heart is in the poetry, full of deep, open-ended questions which are either unanswerable or mystifyingly oblique. It stretches as few others do for deeper spiritual answers. Malick adapted the film from a conventional war novel, by James Jones – but during the editing he jettisoned much of its plot (much to the shock of Adrien Brody, playing the novel’s lead character but reduced to a few lines) and leaned into the mystical, spiritual questions he was asking. Malick spotted earlier than any others the messianic, martyr qualities in Jim Caviezel, who is excellent as a rebelliously minded but deeply sensitive and spiritual man who senses instinctively his bond with the world around him.

The Thin Red Line touches throughout on the possibility of some benign – or otherwise – force that runs throughout existence and ties us all together. Malick frequently finds small moments where the soldiers become fascinated and irresistibly drawn towards nature, running their hands over leaves, admiring the waves, watching a bird dance from branch to branch… What, The Thin Red Line wonders, makes us turn from being part of a symbiotic whole, to shooting lumps out of each other? And for what? All for ‘fuckin’ property’ as Welch grouches?

As such it’s fitting the combat almost exclusively revolves a scuffle for Hill 210, a grassy pile that Malick never considers important enough to place in context or give us a clear view of. We are frequently mystified about how far up this lump of earth the soldiers have made, what is on the other side, or how it’s conquest will affect the war effort. Instead, this beautiful countryside surrounding – and Malick doesn’t stint on showing how gorgeous Guadalcanal is – serves to flag up even more the violence happening in it. The stunningly luscious photography by John Toll, becomes almost part of the point, hammering home the vicious inhumanity war brings into the natural world.

Instead, war focuses on brutal and trivial ends, that so often betray us into death. The hill’s main importance for Colonel Toll – a charismatically fierce performance of frustrated bitterness by Nick Nolte – is as a pathway to career advancement in a war he has waited his whole life for. Just as its essential pointlessness – it can be bypassed and taken in a slower flanking approach – means Koteas’ (a wonderfully measured performance) captain is unwilling to order his men into a suicidal attack. The phone clash between these two – a furious Nolte and a pressured Koteas trying to remain calm – is Malick’s most accessible narrative beat, expertly delivered.

In fact, the action and the epic sweep of the combat is a reminder that Malick may long to be a poet but he is also an astute and gifted narrative storyteller (when he chooses to be). For all the excitement of John Cusack’s Captain Gaff leading a charge up the hill, the film’s heart is the strange balance every character walks between the martial and mystical, between the call of nature and the grinding duty of killing. Qualities that can be seen fighting in Sean Penn’s fiercely professional sergeant who can weep at the tragedies around him, and fiercely attack the shallowness of the war they are wrapped up in. In fact, much of Thin Red Line feels like a Malick Art Project, a sort of rarefied air that you need to prep to make an expedition towards.

Of course, with all this to admire, it’s also hard not to deny that The Thin Red Line can also be long (and feel very long) and that it’s air of self-importance does, at times, wear the viewer down. It’s deliberately obscure and oblique narrative – not to mention that its voiceover is frequently rather hard to match to particular characters – can whiff somewhat of overindulgence. You could argue the essential message of the film – we’d all be better off if mankind could accept its place as part of a larger Gaia-like whole – is hardly re-inventing philosophy.

But it’s the undefinable, mystical whimsy of the film that makes it stand out – for good or ill. Since many – and, I’ll be honest, me as well sometimes – will find the films muttered whimsy carrying more than an air of self-important pontificating. Despite this, you can see why so many Hollywood stars were desperate to work on it – Travolta and Clooney have tiny cameos, several others hit the cutting room floor. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in Hollywood making a war film anything like this, to have the artistry to mix gunshots and birdsong and give equal weight to both. There are few films quite like it. So thank God for Malick, an artist who has a distinctive voice, the courage to commit to it and the skill to pull it off. The Thin Red Line has moments that few other Hollywood film makers have matched in their whole career – and that alone makes it a film to hold tight and cherish.

Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek are killers on the run in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece Badlands

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Martin Sheen (Kit Carruthers), Sissy Spacek (Holly), Warren Oates (Father), Ramon Bieri (Cato), Alan Vint (Deputy), Gary Littlejohn (Sheriff), John Carter (Rich man)

If American cinema has a poet, it’s Terrence Malick. His career is the most elliptical of any major American filmmaker. Shunning interviews or any discussion of his work, his mystique is built upon Kubrickian isolation (he took a 20-year gap between his second and third films) and the powerful mystique of his first film – and still his masterpiece – Badlands. A luscious, beautifully filmed, profound piece of film-making, perfectly paced and told with a poetic sensibility, it’s powerful and brilliant. Nothing Malick has done since has reached the same beautiful balance between story, profundity, poetry and realism.

Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is an aimless young man, recently fired from his job as a garbage collector in South Dakota. His imagination is captured by a teenage girl, Holly (Sissy Spacek), freshly arrived from Texas. He romances the young girl – who is naively swept up in the possibility of Kit’s poetic soul – but her father (Warren Oates) disapproves. So, in a casual confrontation at their home, Kit kills the father, burns down the house and he and Holly head out on the run. Travelling across the country, Kit kills with a casual lack of maliciousness, all the time building in his head his self-image as a James Dean-like hero in his own movie, a poet turned outlaw. Holly narrates the film, her guileless, innocent and often unreliable narrative revealing her own naivety. Sheen is outstanding as Kit, idealistic but empty, while Spacek gives Holly a sublime blankness that makes us never sure how much she understands the situation she is in.

Malick based the film on the killing spree of Charles Starkweather, who carried out a murderous journey across several states in the mid-West with his underage girlfriend in the late 50s. But what Malick found in this story was a fascinating insight into how people can become absorbed by the romanticism of the American pioneer spirit, to try and turn their own lives into something with meaning and depth. So, Kit can be little more than a not particularly bright casual killer, but he builds his own self-image as something part-way between movie star and philosopher poet.

What the film does quite brilliantly is balance the ruthlessness of Kit with this dreamlike poeticism. Much as you shouldn’t, you end up caring a little for Kit and Holly, while deploring their brutality. Perhaps it’s because both of them feel so young. After the murder of her father, they build a cabin in the woods and live off the land, with all the enthusiasm of kids. There is something very vulnerable about both of them, their abilities to really understand the situations they are in and the moral implications of their actions non-existent. In a way they are playing – but with real guns.

Their life has been so filtered through the Hollywood celebrity culture growing around them, that they see their actions like part of a film. Death is as unreal and without impact as it is in Hollywood. Kit twice, early in the film, prods dead animals with nerveless curiosity – the same blankness and lack of reaction that he will later treat dead people with. Holly is briefly shocked by the death of her father, but then builds all Kit’s actions into a narrative of romantic drama.

Kit and Holly build their own narrative the whole time – but with a shallow emptiness that reveals their own pretensions. Both of them are collectors of odds-and-ends – Kit picks up mementos and strange souvenirs from where they have been, treating these as near religious icons that future generations will use to mark his presence. Objects from lamps to paintings to rocks are invested with artistic value by the pair. Kit’s shallowness is clear: early in the film he picks up a large rock from under the tree where they first made love, determined to keep it forever as a memento. After walking a few metres, he drops it and decides to take a lighter rock. Later, when Kit is finally cornered by the police, his main concern is to build a small cairn to mark the location where he was caught.

Kit wants to be more than he is. He is delighted when his physical resemblance to James Dean is noted by the police (his appearance is carefully studied to cultivate this). At a rich man’s house, he decides to record messages for posterity – words so bland, predictable and lacking in depth they reveal the total lack of imagination and original thought in Kit. He is polite, generally kind to his victims (before killing them) and thinks of himself as a sort of poet of the wilderness. Neither he nor Holly understands the horrific finality of death. The couple have a fatally corrupted innocence, a childlike, romantic understanding of the world that becomes a sort of fairy-tale. And you can totally see why a naïve young girl like Holly might see Kit as a romantic figure who can set her free.

Malick’s film wraps this up in a film of dreamlike beauty. In later films, Malick became so obsessed with beautiful images, and increasingly pretentious in his themes, that they became self-important artefacts. But Badlands balances these instincts beautifully with a fascinating and revealing story.

The shooting of the film offers up one beautiful image after another, reflecting the poetic longings of the couple at its heart, while underpinning sharply their blandness. Malick captures the awesome grandness of the Badlands themselves, a dusty stretch of emptiness that goes on forever. Malick shoots moments, like the house-fire, with such grace and perfection that they take on deep psychological meaning (what else is that house fire but the death of Holly’s early life?). Shots of nature – the sort of wildlife photography that would go too far in later films – place the couple in exactly the sort of tranquil independence, free from the burdens of the real world, that they long for. It’s an American dream, the celebration of the pioneer spirit deeply and darkly inverted.

The film is an enigma that avoids ever casting easy judgements on its characters. Their actions may be awful, but how much have they been bent and twisted by the world around them? The film’s eclectic musical choices – Carl Orff to Nat King Cole – bring the film a sense of magic, again a dreamlike mysticism. It’s fitting for a young couple who are living in a dream, with no consequences and no morals. This impressionistic masterpiece, which mixes in moments of shocking realism and casual violence, reflects the inner life of its leads, both yearning to be more than they are, and directing these longings into disastrous ends. Badlands is one of the greatest debut films in history, and still the perfect fusing of Malick’s poetic leanings with narrative film-making.