Visionary

“The Thin Red Line”, A Flawed Visionary

Film

Nick Noite

calls The Thin Red Line “a gigantic anti-war film,” and whether it is coinci dence or fate, the $55 mil lion 20th Century Fox epic with John Travolta, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn, and John Savage was released shortly after America again went to war.

“Red” is based on the 1962 novel by James Jones, the infantryman stationed at Schofield Barracks during Japan’s sneak attack on Oahu.

Jones went on to write “From Here To Eternity”; the 1953 film adaptation became the

only movie shot in Hawaii to win the Best Picture Oscar.

After Pearl Harboun^^^ Jones shipped to Guadalcanal in 1942. and "Red" is based on his combat ex peri ences at the first isle of WWll's island hop- IB ping campaign in the IS Pacific Theatre.

"Red" follows the har rowing exploits of C-for- Charlie Company, as the Army Rifle Company invades the Japanese stronghold in the Solomon Islands, where JFK’s PT 109 incident took place.

What differentiates Jones from most WWII writers is his psycho logical emphasis on war’s impact on human beings.

In the recent Merchant-Ivory film “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries”, V based on the novel by Jones’ daughter 1 Kaylie, Kris Kristofferson as James Jones ' argues with a movie producer, who objects to a scene portraying an infantryman mess ing himself before going into battle.

Kristofferson/Jones argues this is what war is really like - not glorious heroics.

Terrence Malick’s directorial comeback after 20 years is notable for depicting the effect warfare has on not only combatants (American and Japanese soldiers are por trayed in the novel), but on the Solomon

By Ed Rampell

Islanders, as well.

Usually, movie Melanesians are shown as Haole-wood head-hunters, hea thens, and black cannibals, as in Buster

Keaton’s 1924 “The Navigator”, 1933’s “King Kong”, and 1980’s “Blue Lagoon”.

America’s racist attitudes towards blacks (think of the would-be “buck” rapists of 1915’s “Birth of a Nation” and 1939’s “Gone With the Wind”) permeated

Hollywood’s depiction of

Melanesians, the black Pacific Islanders of Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomons, Oceania’s largest racial group. WWII flicks repre sent Melanesians in two ways: in 1958’s “South Pacific”, set in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu),

Idlers; in 1964’s ican-American ders aiding US fWII works set ives are, to use rm, “invisible in their own ;n in Richard lalcanal Diary” film version id in the 1964 ed”. ook, Solomon >pear as “native on page 407 of

►ell paperback

Not so in the 5 of “Red”: lick’s mesians are minent.

xording to

mstralian pro ducer Grant Hill, a second unit spent ur weeks, and main unit shot on location in Guadalcanal, where $2.5 million was spent. Faux villages were constructed and Native non-actors were cast in neo-realist style. Some Solomon Islanders were also flown to Queensland, Australia, site of principal photography. Dash Mihok (PFC Doll) says: “The terrain is just rough, but absolutely spectacularly beautiful. I loved

it there.” Regarding the Solomon Islanders, Mihok adds, “I was just blown away by the people. They’re just so warm and so really much more enlightened than we are, in a lot of ways... They speak pidgin, which is like broken English... It was amazing.

Those kids are so beautiful. I have home video footage of these children with blonde hair and dark skin and who were singing and purest of souls.”

Readers with a jones for

Jones may also be

troubled by undeveloped

plot points

Mihok has a recurring dream about Jack, seen in the film and coming attrac tions as the first person the Gls encounter after their unopposed landing in a curious moment of culture clash.

Jim Caviezel, who plays Private Witt, describes Melanesians as “godly people, they’re actually far in advance of most Americans, as far as their spiritual side.

They may not have a college degree, but they understand their land... the value of family, the community of church...”

Phoenix Pictures’ Mike Medavoy says “this picture starts in paradise... kids play ing and people happy... and it descends into hell”. In “Red’s” idyllic prelude, Kentuckyian Witt (an extension of Montgomery Clift’s bugler/boxer Prewitt in “Eternity”) goes AWOL in a Melanesian village. Witt (racist in the novel) frolics with the indigenous people, depicted as innocent children of nature living an Edenic existence - until after the battle.

“The next time you see ‘em, they’ve been totally decimated, they’re fighting with each other, they’re arguing, the kid doesn’t say 'hello’,” Medavoy says about this paradise, lost due to WWII.

Nolte says the Solomons became “a culture that fascinated” the director.

Producer Hill states the Melanesians “were one of the elements that attracted Terry... He felt that... the war takes place in an environment that most of us would view, to some extent, as pristine, with a people who obviously had their own dis putes, but certainly were not subject to this mass carnage... Probably, Terry felt that their role, and the role of people like them, had been somewhat undervalued in the past.” To some extent, Malick appropriates another South Seas celluloid stereotype,

usually reserved for Polynesians - brown Pacific Islanders often portrayed as “noble savages”, who have inhabited natural Native nirvanas since pseudo-documentar ian Robert Flaherty’s Samoa in 1926’s “Moana of the South Seas” and Bora Bora in 1931 ’s “Tabu”.

Malick’s trite tropical trope neglects that before Japan invaded, the Solomons was an English colony, and near Guadal, a British High Commissioner was assassi nated. As Solomon shields and war canoe prows in the recent Hawaii Pacific University “War in the Pacific” exhibit indicate, warfare occurred in pre-contact Solomons. And throughout the 19905, a PNG secessionist war at Bougainville, near the Solomons (independent since 1978), has been one of Oceania’s bloodiest con flicts.

The director of the 1970 s cult classics “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven” has adapted a work of prose into the movie medium - using a poetic style.

For Jones purists, something may be lost in Malick’s translation. According to Kaylie Jones, the novel’s gays in the mili tary theme was never in Malick’s script, which Stevens, Jr. says is due to time con siderations. Army anti-semitism is also AWOL: Waspy Lt. Col. Tall (Nolte’s ambi tious officer) clashes with mutinous Capt.

Staros - Stein in the novel. Executive pro ducer George Stevens, Jr. says Malick’s reason for switching the captain’s ethnicity is because he was played by Elias Koteas, an actor of Greek heritage, and the director sought greater realism.

Malick’s trite tropical

trope neglects that before

Japan invaded, the

Solomons was an English

colony, and near Guadal,

a British High

Commissioner was

assassinated.

Readers with a Jones for Jones may also

be troubled by undeveloped plot points,

such as the novel’s tense opening, with C- Company sitting ducks aboard a ship dur ing an air raid. In this sequence, PFC Doll (Mihok) steals a pistol - Jones’ expression of class struggle (officers had pistols, enlisted men didn’t), an important element of his writing influenced by 1930 s “prole

tarian literature”. Both events are merely alluded to in Malick’s nearly three hour movie. But the 1998 version of “Red” is most successful in conveying the spirit, if not the letter, of Jones’ novel. “A movie can never be the book,” says Kaylie Jones, a writer in her own right who thinks “Red” is her father’s masterpiece.

“It’s very different from the book. [To make a film] you’ve got to get rid of the b00k... So, it’s not what you expect. Terry Malick is trying to be true to my father’s notion - that there is no true war film.

They’re phoney - really ugly,” Kaylie asserts, referring to John Wayne-type com

bat pictures.

Kaylie says “I was so deeply moved by the film,” which she describes as “spectac ular... poetic, lyrical.” And of reclusive Terrence Malick, who came out of retire ment to direct “The Thin Red Line”, she says: “I love him, absolutely adore him.

Terry’s modest, humble, kind, well-read, one of the most brilliant people I ever met.”

It was “Ryan” versus “Line” for the New York Film Critics Circle awards - “Saving Private Ryan” won for best pic ture, while “The Thin Red Line” won for best director and best cinematography (by “Braveheart’”s John Toll). As a new mil lennium looms and combat endures, both movies remind us: war is hell. ■