[3.7]
There’s a masterpiece here, buried under the debris of excessive artistry and indulged pretensions, and it’s a shame that Terrence Malick and his team of editors couldn’t salvage it completely. Much has been written about how the final product of this film differs completely from the script and original stated intentions for the story, most notably the shift away from Adrien Brody’s character (the main protagonist of the book, here left as a wide-eyed mute bystander) to the typically-handsome Jim Caviezel as Pvt. Witt, with his blue-eyes and hopeful spiritualism acting as the embodiment of American idealism and heroism. Sympathetic critics like to point to Malick as a spiritual artist, concerned more with the holy aura of humanity than individual characters, but out of his first five films, he’s more of a dabbler in Americana than a worldly new-age philosopher. His films rely heavily on the White experience, almost relishing in it. Yes, he works in Hollywood, so he is inclined to cast gorgeous faces, but the way that his camera lovingly dotes on slow-motion images of 1950’s beauty (here and THE TREE OF LIFE, most obviously) is laughably earnest and naive. Every blue and green eye of the anonymous soldiers in the hills of Guadalcanal pop with color, as if lit by a divinity within. Malick shows us a few instances of ‘evil’ inclination within these men, but by and large he is intent on depicting them as wide-eyed innocence, sheeps to the slaughter. It reminds me of Bresson’s ‘humanism’, where to suffer is to be made holy.
Malick has a lot of interesting ideas and intentions, but he can’t quite bring it all together, his excesses never reigned in. He seems to want to give us a war film with nondescript characters, with only a hint of backstory; to show us the opposite of Spielberg’s “Band of Brothers”, to depict a group of strangers who may rely and comfort each other in the moment, but are just as easily split, their selfish instincts kicking in. There are moments of voiceover that work effectively: hearing Nick Nolte’s tired and pitying voice pondering his life’s disappointments while seeing him puff out his chest and act out the asshole Colonel he feels he must be; the longing philosophical musings of Witt, who dreams of a better world, the one he imagines he was a part of on an isolated tropical island filled with idyllic ‘others’. But too often, the voiceovers are half sentences trailing off into nothing, with the audience attempting to figure out which voice belongs with which character. Does it even matter? The most egregious VO might be Jack’s wife, who we see only in eye-rolling flashbacks of them in bed together or playing on a swing-set, whose voice cuts randomly onto the soundtrack to whisper some nonsense about love and then implores, “come to me”. We hear her voice only once more, with her narrating the letter she wrote to Jack asking for a divorce. Again, I understand the sentiment of wanting to have all of these different voices be heard, to get into the variety of headspaces of these soldiers in war, but the writing gives every character almost the same faux-poetic musings, ironically diluting the individualistic intention so that everyone just sounds the same. It seems as if Malick may have taken his full narrative VO (which was originally recorded entirely by Billy Bob Thornton) and just chopped it up at random and given it to different actors to read. There’s a kernel of beauty to the VO, but it’s marred by the rest of the schmaltz.
Malick also attempts to comment on the unreliability of our dreams and desires, again with conflicted results. The movie opens with a lengthy depiction of tropical paradise, beautiful images worthy of National Geographic: indigenous women playing with children, chiseled men out on fishing boats, artful religious ceremonies, and what looks like a minimalist, happy existence. This goes on for maybe fifteen minutes before we see a giant army ship cruise by, and we learn that Witt has gone AWOL on this island. We only see this island once more, in the second half of the movie, as Witt’s hopeful zen has been broken down by the realities of seeing men gunned down on a hill, for some vaguely worthless mission. He now thinks back on the island, and can visualize the darker side of his dream. He sees the men fighting viciously, women and children afraid and cold-hearted, covered with infectious blisters and pussing wounds. “Paradise Lost”, indeed. These contrasting scenes perfectly embody the conflict within these men (the war they think they will fight, before arriving, and the dirty messy realities of battle on a tropical island). But Malick also wants to convey the dreams of men who can only think of returning home. This story is the romantic angle of the film, and falls so flat. Jack is a character with no personality, and I can’t stand his fantasies of his perfectly coiffed fiancé. And when she coldly writes him the Dear John letter, I don’t feel sympathy, but annoyance. I appreciate that Malick wants to capture the variety of experiences of war, but, again, the sheer volume of character snippets almost work against this goal, as we fail to connect with any of the fleeting moments, especially as Malick tends to want them to be as obtuse as possible. The random cutaways to nature and animals, likewise, works at times, but ends up feeling like filler and loses a lot of its impact.
The masterpiece segment of this film is the breathtaking, epic battle to capture a key hill which the Japanese hold. It seems like a senseless and arbitrary place to battle, a random hill on a random island in the Pacific; of all the Japanese-occupied territories, why here? But the American leaders are determined to take it, to get a ‘win’, and they have no qualms with sacrificing soldiers. Malick films these scenes with a terrifying visceralism; we feel the dirt and brush, we hear the bombs and gunfire all around us, we see the smoke and rush forward with the soldiers, even though we don’t know where we are going. Just up, and up, praying that we avoid the death that can strike at any time. No character is too important to die, no star immune: Woody Harrelson goes down by jumping on a grenade he accidently ignites, Jared Leto gets shot, Adrien Brody and John Cusack barely survive. While people praise SAVING PRIVATE RYAN for its shaky camera ‘storming the Normandy beach’ realism, it’s the unpredictable stop-and-go of battle on this hill that is more purely cinema. War in the sunshine. Confusion and chaos, men appearing and disappearing from view. Malick achieves so much in these action-packed scenes, it’s too bad he has to bookend it with meandering character bits, and continue the film for a half-hour longer than it needs to be.
burning retina 