After graduating in the first class at AFI's Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a screenwriter, Malick directed two hugely respected films -- Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) -- and then seemed to disappear for twenty years before re-emerging for this new project. (Like clockwork, articles asking "Where the hell is Terry Malick?" popped up every few years in film magazines.) His absence only magnified his reputation, so it's not surprising that, after working with relative unknowns (at the time) such as Sissy Spacek, Richard Gere, and Sam Shepard in his first two films, he is now able to attract genuine stars: Sean Penn, John Travolta, George Clooney, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, and Woody Harrelson.
For better or worse the film also arrives in the wake of Steven Spielberg's critical and commercial blockbuster Saving Private Ryan, which it resembles on the surface. Rest assured that those similarities do not extend far beneath the surface. It is hard to imagine two filmmakers with more disparate sensibilities than Malick and Spielberg. In the Seventies the pair attracted attention almost simultaneously, with estimable films that, again, were at first glance strikingly alike. Malick, older by five years, made Badlands, a couple-on-the-run film, a year before Spielberg made Sugarland Express (1974).
Although the stories had common elements, the difference in tone between the two pictures was just as noticeable as the difference between The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan. Despite being narrated by one of its protagonists, Badlands is stark, cold, and ironic, observing its characters from a distance; Spielberg's is a crowd-pleaser: light, emotionally engaging, and accessible.
The contrast is valuable not simply for what it reveals about the filmmakers in particular: Without much distortion, it can also be used as a metaphor for the battling forces that made the Seventies the richest decade in American cinema since the Thirties. On one hand there was Malick, who told stories in new ways that suggested a faith in the audience's intelligence. On the other was Spielberg, who also told stories in new ways (remember how innovative Jaws seemed in 1975?) but whose overwhelming eagerness to please suggested a lack of faith in the audience, and, perhaps, in his own talents. (To this day Spielberg's greatest fault is his insecurity. Like House Republicans, he can't resist self-defeating overkill. Until 1993's Schindler's List he never saw a lily he didn't want to gild. And even in that film he broke down near the end and pulled out precisely the sort of aesthetic sledgehammer he had so admirably eschewed for three hours.)
But the battle for the soul of American cinema wasn't merely aesthetic; questions of art and style were, and continue to be, inextricable from issues of technology and commerce. In terms of art and style Malick was the more adventuresome, progressive figure. But on the latter fronts Spielberg was the poster boy for the future, while Malick was an anachronism, washed away by a tsunami of new, more broadly effective modes of production and distribution.
We all know which side won.
It's not that Spielberg is a less-talented filmmaker or even less of an artist. He remains brilliant and dazzling, one of the greatest natural-born filmmakers in a century of cinema. In fact his talent is so wide-ranging that there are far more projects for which he makes sense than Malick.
But now, as 25 years ago, Malick has a more complex approach to the world and to storytelling. He walks a thin line that separates complexity from confusion, subtlety from opacity, and within The Thin Red Line this other line nearly disappears. Make no mistake: This is not your father's Thin Red Line, which does, in fact, exist. In 1964 Andrew Marton, best known for directing the chariot sequence in Ben-Hur, made an awkward and entirely conventional film version of the Jones book, with Jack Warden in the role now filled by Sean Penn. (How times and styles have changed!) It's not a very good film, condensing Jones's many plot threads into one. (And the new videotape reissue makes it worse. Apparently the masterminds at Simitar Video unsqueezed the CinemaScope image twice, making the actors look squat and fat, except when they lie down and suddenly become long-limbed and emaciated.) Nor is this Saving Private Ryan 2: Meanwhile, back in the Pacific ....
If it were not for the fact that the entire movie takes place among soldiers before, during, and after Guadalcanal, it would be tempting to say that this is not a war film at all, but rather a meditation on the nature of life, God, and mortality. In effect it is both, with precisely such a meditation set within the milieu of war, where these concerns are distilled to a blinding, white-hot intensity.
