FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Film by Robert Tarry The Thin Red Line There’s a thin line... oh, hell, let’s just come right out and say it – a thin red line between masterpiece and masturbation. Terrence Malick’s long-awaited three-hour return to cinema after a 20-year hiatus jumps back and forth over this line so often you feel like you’re watching some gifted idiot savant play hopscotch. Scenes of exquisite beauty and moving sentiment float by so often you think you’re in the presence of God, then they just keep on floating by with barely a tether to reality or the scene that came before or after, dissolving into the ether. Oh look, here comes another fluffy cloud. There it goes. Here comes another wrenching battle sequence. There it goes. Here comes another poetic solider guy. Oh wait, he’s wandered off. Here comes George Clooney’s 20 second-cameo. There it goes. (Did anyone give him the memo his part got cut?) The voice-over narration sounding like no soldier I’ve ever met but an awful lot like a brainy, reclusive filmmaker begins with, "Why does nature contend with itself?" (or as the surprisingly Gilligan-esque Jim Caviezel’s southern accent further obscures it, "Wha dus natchu content wit iseulf?"), and grows more baffling from there. It doesn’t help that the leads all talk the same way and all look the same under a helmet. Don’t know who’s getting shot or who’s talking? Well, look on the bright side. At least you have no idea what he’s saying. To its credit, The Thin Red Line is obscure on an equal opportunity basis. Those who come for the typical shoot-em-up "war is hell" will get, "What the hell?", and those who come for the intellectual discourse will simply puzzle why anyone still poses these profoundly dried-up, no-longer-rhetorical hippie questions anyway. Does man have a dark and good side? Is nature brutal? Does man destroy nature? Hmmm. Let’s see. Yes, yes and yes. But having said all that, go see it. Any film that challenges convention and its audience this much deserves your attention, or at least your charity. (Speaking of charity, it’s just prestige arty enough to win the Big Oscar.) Or look at it this way – at least he tried something. And he spent a big schwack of studio money in the process. Good for you, Ter. Now go watch television or something. |
| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |