LYCOS RETRIEVER 
The Thin Red Line
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T[R]ying to summarize Terrence Malick's film The Thin Red Line would be as futile as summarizing a poem. You could describe its plot and action in infinite detail, but you would never capture its essence. The meaning of a poem, after all, resides in its rhyme, meter, and perspective. And until you examine these components, the poem won't unfold properly. In this respect, The Thin Red Line is closer to verse than to cinema. How it approaches its story -- its camera movement, editing, and sound -- is more important than the story itself.
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The Thin Red Line is an Academy Award nominated 1998 war film which tells the story of United States forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II. It marked Terrence Malick's return to filmmaking after a twenty year absence. Malick adapted the screenplay himself from the novel of the same name by James Jones, which had previously been adapted in a 1964 film. The film features a large ensemble cast.
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Despite the presence of big stars Sean Penn, Nick Nolte and John Cusack, The Thin Red Line is not really about their characters. It is about four men, played by up-and-coming actors, among many in C-for-Charlie Company who are to take Guadalcanal Island from the Japanese in 1942/1943. The four men are: Witt, who is the Christ-like moral centre, Bell and Doll, who submerge their fears in very different private and public masks, and Dale, who has turned savage. Each man represents different possibilities of humanity; each man transcends who he is at the beginning.
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The opening sequence of The Thin Red Line finds two American soldiers AWOL among a group of South Pacific islanders. One of these soldiers, Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), supplies the movie its primary narrative voice, though the ensemble is so large and points of view alternate so frequently that nothing like a main character or "star" can truly be identified. Witt regularly rhapsodizes over the beauty of nature and the bliss of evading combat, though he is not so facile as to overlook the forces of conflict and antagonism that exist everywhere in the world, even outside the state of war. "What is this war in the heart of nature?" he apostrophizes in voice-over. "Why does nature vie with itself?"
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The Thin Red Line was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Picture, Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was awarded the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival for 1999.
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The cathartic moments of violence in The Thin Red Line ... operate as points of shock and disruption because they emphasise the experiences and significances of such different subjects/personalities. In other words, by focusing on a wide range of characters -- from the Brigadier and Lt Colonel, through captains to privates and countless unnamed faces -- The Thin Red Line goes a considerable way in destabilising conventional Hollywood (and therefore political) representations of war as an assimilation of individual subjectivities into the patriarchally constructed single body of the "army." Where Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) famously rejected individualism in favour of the representation of groups of people, The Thin Red Line critiques the notion of the homogenous group to consider the ways in which such groups are composed of individuals who nevertheless derive their subjectivity from a dynamic interaction, sometimes clash, with the dominant group– thus suggesting the complexity of any process of subject-formation. Thus even Lt. Colonel Tell (Nick Nolte), who embodies much of the macho, competitive ethos of masculinity at war, finally forcing out Capt. Styles for being "too soft," can think to himself that he has "played a role I never conceived," his voice-over thoughts emphasising the film's layering of surface and depth, subjectivity and role in the anxiety-driven crucible of war. And while more conventional film narratives have singled out individual soldiers to carry the weight of audience identification and to reinforce western notions of the primacy of the individual, such characters have functioned primarily as representative of that integrated, singularised group. This conventional soldier has an individuality that reflects the group in microcosm, because to actually produce a force of men willing and able to engage in the violent and dehumanising processes of conflict, any actual independence of thought or subjectivity is profoundly subversive. In this sense, Classical Hollywood Narrative is fundamentally and paradoxically torn between what might be argued are its two guiding principles: tracing and privileging the linear story of the individual within culture and the promotion of a model of dominant social ideology.
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The Thin Red Line