Lessons of Darkness

The Thin Red Line (1998): A

Over every grassy hilltop and around a jungle stream’s every bend, The Thin Red Line poses open-ended questions: Is there goodness and truth? Are we noble or savage? Do love and hate define us equally? Are those qualities bestowed upon us by a higher power, or are they our inheritance from our animal ancestors? Can we protect life at the same time that we destroy it? Is madness the only way to fundamentally reconcile the dualities inherent in human nature? Terrence Malick’s return to filmmaking after a twenty-year layoff is in certain respects a different beast than his prior Badlands and Days of Heaven, operating on an epic action-oriented, multi-character scale that dwarfs that of his two ‘70s masterpieces. Yet in its inquisitive rumination on the light and dark in men and women’s souls, the role of God in our thoughts and behavior, and the irreconcilable incongruities that govern not only warfare but our emotions, Malick’s film (based, extremely loosely, on James Jones’ famed novel) is of a piece with his preceding work. Utilizing contrapuntal voiceover narration from numerous characters, sunlight-dappled memory-filtered flashbacks, and gentle cutaways to the vine-strangled trees, swaying tall grass and submerged alligators of his island setting, Malick eschews traditional narrative structure and momentum, as well as characterizations of his many subjects, to craft a mood of poignantly detached poeticism.

An arresting panorama of sacrifice, brutality, compassion, altruism, hope and despondence, the auteur’s tale centers on the American military’s WWII siege of Guadalcanal in 1942. Despite myriad peripheral players, that saga often narrows its gaze onto a few specific figures: Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), attempting to reconcile war’s viciousness with his AWOL experiences amidst a tranquil South Pacific Melanesian community; emotionally numb First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), engaged in a running dialogue with Witt over people’s individual ability to affect the world; Private Bell (Ben Chaplin), attempting to survive by clinging to the memory of his wife (Miranda Otto); and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) and his conflict with Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) over the degree to which disregard for life (that of one’s enemies, and own men) is necessary for warfare success. As in Days of Heaven, dialogue is frequently drowned out by environmental chaos, and performances and meaning are illuminated by a free-flowing, expressive editorial structure that gracefully comingles with John Toll’s rapturous cinematography. That aesthetic marriage emboldens Malick’s dreamlike tapestry of survival, death and renewal, one that’s ultimately concerned less with specific tactical maneuvers or combat suffering than with the grand contradictions of life, which not only become manifest via striking visual and aural juxtapositions, but also exist, simultaneously, in Malick’s terrifyingly beautiful imagery.

Badlands (1973): A

Awash in reveries of outlaw fame, tabloid romance, and futures that either never could or would be, Badlands exists in a hypnotic dream-state of young love and murder. When garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) meets teenage baton-twirler Holly (Sissy Spacek), it’s an instantaneous marriage of likeminded deluded souls. With Kit driven by psychopathic notions of Bonnie and Clyde-style lawbreaking, and Holly guided by unhinged fantasies of amour-fou, their bond is epitomized by an early sequence in which she reflects, with bemused apathy, on killing her catfish while writer/director Terrence Malick depicts not only that indifferent murder but also Kit kicking and walking on top of a dead cow. Based loosely on real-life criminals Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, Malick’s 1973 debut about Kit and Holly’s 1950s rampage through the Dakota badlands remains a disturbingly lyrical character study of pitiless bandits, one infused with an unreal atmosphere of desire, derangement and ruthlessness. As Kit guns down virtually everyone he encounters and Holly tags along with apparent indifference to his crimes – even the unjustifiable execution of her dog-shooting father (Warren Oates) – Malick’s film, full of striking cutaways to the burning-sun horizon and the harsh landscape’s solitary creatures, comes to operate at an overpoweringly chilling remove. That hallucinatory detachment lends the proceedings a sense of gazing at reckless, dangerous kids as if through a microscope, their actions those of overgrown children existing in a Saturday matinee fairy tale – as when they build and reside in a forest treehouse – and sleepwalking their way to the electric chair and points beyond. From the unsettling use of Carl Orff’s classical Schulwerk to the haunting contrapuntal narration, Malick’s control of his material is masterful, while Sheen’s pitiless Kit – emboldened by physical comparisons to James Dean – proves a precursor to our sensationalistic celebrity age and Spacek’s Holly proves to be something even more disquieting: a vision of cold, alluring, pubescent amorality.

Thor (2011): C+

Marvel second-stringer Thor gets his own summer-blockbuster vehicle with the unimaginatively titled Thor (what, he couldn’t even get a preceding “The Mighty”?), a merely adequate introductory saga coated in hammy regality by director Kenneth Branagh. Visualizing the god-realm of Asgard as a metropolis of golden-glittering towers, spires and rainbow bridges – the last of these affording inter-dimensional travel to, among other places, Earth – Branagh goes hard for Shakespearean grandeur in his depiction of warmongering prodigal son Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) exile from his homeland by king-father Odin (Anthony Hopkins, acting with his white beard and string-less eye patch). That banishment opens the door for jealous, mischievous younger brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to further sow the seeds of Thor’s destruction, which in turn helps facilitate his own rise to power. Cast out of heaven, Thor lands in a New Mexico town that resembles a cardboard-walled set built out in the middle of the desert, a fact that lends cheesiness to his ensuing efforts to reclaim his powerful hammer Mjollnir with the aid of astrophysicist love interest Jane (Natalie Portman). The CG effects in Asgard have a chintzy opulence that suits the cartoon-divinity of Marvel’s mythologically inclined hero, whom Hemsworth embodies with bland muscularity. And Branagh’s infatuation with Dutch angles – though eventually so persistent that one is inclined to tilt his or her own head to straighten out the images – is in keeping with the material’s comic book roots. Still, only Loki manages to make an impact throughout this saga of betrayal, redemption and Frost Giants, with Hiddleston exuding treacherous envy and hatred with a mightiness that dwarfs the rest of Thor’s superpowered action.