The Thin Red Line (1999)

another beautiful film by Terrence Malick

Directed by Terrence Malick

 

Starring Sean Penn,  Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Jared Leto, Nick Nolte, John Travolta, John Savage, John C. Reilly, among others.

 

20 years after Malick directed the visually magnificent Days of Heaven (Nestor Almendros won the Oscar that year for Best Cinematography), he returned with this poetic film (this time filmed by the incomparable John Toll) about war. What??  War is beautiful??  Not really, but the way he expresses it on film, is beautiful.  In the middle of the battle, the camera looks at the waving grass and the blue sky. One soldier visualizes his beautiful wife, lovely long dresses or him, gently bathing her in a bathtub.  Some soldiers are just plain terrified. Some are on their own power trips. Malick even gives a human face to the Japanese POWs, who look equally as scared as the Yanks.

 

There is not an obsession with blood, although there are some harrowing battle scenes. The initial artillery barrage on a distant hill is visually breathtaking. The camera crane shots with the camera seemingly skimming just above the tops of the grass are equally

 

The music is quite lyrical and a typical of what one normally hears in a war film. The movie opens with In Paradisum from the Fauré Requiem.  It accompanies a scene in which two American soldiers who are AWOL are in a Melanesian village in which some of the young boys are swimming while the camera is underwater.  Hans Zimmer wrote the original music which alternates from foreboding to lyricism.  One of the most amazing points in the music is when The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives is heard. (The question of the title is a quiet enigmatic phrase intoned by a lone trumpet.)

 

This film needs to be seen. The last shot is amazing and enigmatic. It will leave you asking what it all means.