Inside Oscar 2 by Damien Bona

Author:Damien Bona
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345448002
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2002-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Nature Boy

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“Some films deal in plot truth; this one expresses emotional truth, the heart’s search for saving wisdom, in some of the most luscious imagery since Malick’s last film, the 1978 Days of Heaven,” declared Time’s Richard Corliss. J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice: “The year’s most enigmatic studio release, written and directed by one of the most puzzling figures in Hollywood, The Thin Red Line projects a sense of wounded diffidence. Terrence Malick’s hugely ambitious, austerely hallucinated adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 novel—a 500-page account of combat in Guadalcanal—is a metaphysical platoon movie in which battlefield confusion is melded with an Emersonian meditation on the nature of nature.” Hoberman concluded, “As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached, Malick’s study of men in battle materializes in our midst almost exactly a century after Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—an exercise in nineteenth-century transcendentalism, weirdly serene in the face of horror.” The Christian Science Monitor’s David Sterritt felt that, “Although the story seems disjointed at times, no other war movie has tried so valiantly to convey not only the suffering of combat but the awful fissures it leaves between humanity’s ideal oneness with itself and the world we live in.”

The Thin Red Line had no stronger advocate than Godfrey Cheshire of the New York Press. He wrote, “Once a year, if I’m very lucky, a movie comes along that changes my life by doing that magical thing: sweeping me away on its torrent of images, ideas and feelings so decisively and thoroughly that I remain lost in its spell for days afterward, rapt and wonder-struck.” Cheshire said The Thin Red Line “is one of those inebriating films that draws its power from radically rediscovering the way we view the world through cinema.” As much as he adored the film, Cheshire seemed resigned that it was not for most moviegoers: “The film recurrently dips into the memories and offhand musings of its many characters. It pauses to look at a branch, a leaf, a splash of light, a spray of clouds. This is something far beyond the superficial ‘realism’ of most war movies, because it gives us something a film’s plot can’t touch: the momentary sensation of life lived in very close proximity to death.” Finally, Cheshire said, “Its burble of voices and perspectives invoke The Waste Land and Ulysses and their countless descendants. It is Mahler versus Spielberg’s Sousa, Rimbaud and Whitman (Leaves of Grass: great title for a Malick film) versus Disney rhymesters, the impressionists versus the worthy but limited lineage of N.C. Wyeth.”

Obviously, there would be plenty of reviewers who didn’t appreciate what Malick was doing. Stuart Klawans of The Nation denigrated The Thin Red Line as “the first New Age World War II movie” and “metaphysical guff.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman snorted, “This is a war film made by a very somber flower child.” In his weekly column, Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart kvetched, “Plotlines start and vaporize. Characters blend into one another.

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