The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Terrence Malick · a film · 1998 · 170 minutes
Mode
War film dissolved into metaphysical reverie; combat narrative, chorus of inner voices and nature study in one drift
Mythos
Eden and the fall — a man in a village of the unfallen is taken back into the war, and the village is found fallen too; two kinds of man in one company; the one soul divided against itself
Phase
A village, a landing, a hill taken over two days, a camp overrun, the village returned to and found changed, a patrol upriver and one death, the company leaving; voiceovers float above the action and belong to no one scene
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 170 minutes; John Toll’s photography of grass and canopy, Hans Zimmer’s long tonal score, a Melanesian choir and Charles Ives; a large cast cut to cameos, some performers removed entirely
Register
From children swimming in green water to a man pulling gold teeth from the dead; a sergeant’s contempt and a private’s calm
Scale
One company on one island in 1942, with the whole of nature as its witness
Governing Proposition
An American rifle company lands on Guadalcanal in 1942 and is sent up a grass hill against a Japanese bunker. The film follows the taking of the hill, the overrunning of the camp behind it and a last patrol, but it attends as closely to the light in the canopy, the birds, a crocodile, the wounded and the dying of both sides, and to the questions its soldiers ask themselves in voiceover and never aloud. The wager is that a war film can be dissolved into a reverie on whether nature is at war with itself, and that a private who has seen another world can hold the centre against a sergeant who insists there is only this one. It is a wager on elevation, taken at the cost of drive.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a crocodile sliding into green water, and a voice asking what this war is in the heart of nature. Then a Melanesian village: children swimming, a canoe, women singing in a church, and among them an American soldier, Private Witt, played by Jim Caviezel, absent without leave with another man. He watches the children and remembers his mother’s death, and in his voice he says he has looked for the calm she had. A patrol boat finds him. In the brig First Sergeant Welsh, played by Sean Penn, tells him the war is all there is and that a man alone has nothing to do but look after himself; Witt answers that he has seen another world. Welsh makes him a stretcher-bearer instead of sending him to the stockade.
On the troopship Lieutenant Colonel Tall, played by Nick Nolte, listens to a general, played by John Travolta, talk of the island’s importance and of Tall’s long wait for a war of his own; Tall’s voice tells us the rest, the years passed over, the family set aside. Private Bell, played by Ben Chaplin, remembers his wife, played by Miranda Otto, in blue light, in water, on a swing. The men of C Company wait below in the heat for a landing they expect to die in. The boats go in, and the beach is empty. They march inland through tall grass, and a native man passes them going the other way without a glance, as if they were not there.
The screenplay is Terrence Malick’s, from James Jones’s novel of 1962. Malick had not made a film since Days of Heaven (1978), and the twenty-year absence became part of what the film was received as. John Toll photographed it, Hans Zimmer wrote the music, Jack Fisk designed it, and it was shot largely in Queensland, with some work in the Solomon Islands; Twentieth Century Fox released it in December 1998. The opening settles the method. There will be a battle, and it will be shown, but the film will keep looking past it at water and light, and the voices will ask questions that nobody in the company says aloud.
Movement II
The company is sent against a grass hill with a Japanese bunker at the top, and the first day is the climb. Toll’s camera lies in the grass with the men as it moves in the wind, and the first shots come from nowhere. Sergeant Keck, played by Woody Harrelson, reaching for a grenade, pulls the pin and leaves the grenade on his belt; he dies in the grass, talking, while the men hold him. Private Tella, played by Kirk Acevedo, lies wounded in the open calling for morphine, and it is Welsh, the man who has just told a private to look after himself alone, who runs out to him under fire with the morphine and afterwards refuses the medal for it.
Captain Staros, played by Elias Koteas, who prays for his men at night, is ordered by Tall over the field telephone to take the bunker by frontal assault, whatever it costs. He refuses. Nolte plays the colonel in a fury that is also a man watching the one chance of his life slip; Koteas plays the captain in the voice of someone who has decided that his men are not a price. Tall comes up the hill himself, and the dispute between them is the film’s one scene of plain dramatic argument. The company spends the night on the slope, and the voices over the dark ask whether there is one power in nature or two.
The film cuts, through all of this, to what is not fighting: a bird in the grass, light through leaves, the men’s faces turned up, Bell’s wife in a doorway. These are not pauses in the battle. The film treats the dying man and the leaf as parts of one event, and Zimmer’s long rising figure runs under both without distinguishing them. The hill is held on screen long enough that the viewer tires with the men, and the exhaustion is the point: the film wants the body to know what the voices are asking.
Movement III
On the second day Tall sends a small party around the flank: Captain Gaff, played by John Cusack, with Witt, Bell, Doll, played by Dash Mihok, and a few others, seven men in all. They crawl up through the grass to the ridge, and the taking of the bunker is shown in dust, slow steps and sudden shots, the Japanese inside firing until they are killed, the Americans going in with grenades. It is the film’s one passage of conventional combat, and it is done with full craft and no exhilaration. Bell, who scouted the bunker alone, is praised for it and thinks only of his wife.
Then the company goes down into the Japanese camp beyond the hill, and the film shows what a rout is. The Japanese are starving, sick, praying; some run, some fight, some sit and wait to be killed. The Americans shoot them, kick them, strip them; Dale, played by Arie Verveen, pulls gold teeth from the dead and torments a dying man, telling him what the birds will do to him. A Japanese soldier, half buried, his face in the earth, speaks in a voice only the film hears, telling Witt that he too was loved and asking whether Witt imagines his own suffering will be less. The camera gives the enemy faces, in prayer and in death, and holds them. Witt walks through it all with the stillness that has made him the film’s centre, and the stillness is now hard to bear.
Tall relieves Staros of his command, gently, with a recommendation for a medal and the advice that he is too soft for this. Koteas plays the farewell to the men in a few words, and the men’s faces say the rest. Tall, alone, speaks of the years he has waited, and of the hill as the one thing that was his. The film has by now made the colonel as fully a man as the private, and has refused to make either its hero.
Movement IV
The company is given a week’s rest, and the men get drunk, swim, box and read mail. Bell receives a letter from his wife: she has met an Air Force captain and wants a divorce. Chaplin plays the reading with almost nothing on his face, and the film’s blue memories of her, the swing, the water, the curtain, are now what they were all along, a man’s wish rather than a fact. The marriage that had been the one whole thing in the film was not whole either. Harrelson is gone, Cusack has had his minutes; the film is thinning its stars as the company is thinning.
Witt goes back to the village. It is not the place he left. The children will not look at him, two men quarrel, there is sickness, and skulls hang in a hut; the people have been touched by the war, or were never what he saw. He walks away without comment, and his voice does not explain what he has seen. The first world has been shown to have the division in it already, and the film’s question, where the evil comes from, loses its easy answer. Witt returns to the company and talks again with Welsh, who tells him that caring about anything in this world is a mistake and asks him how he keeps his calm. Witt looks at him with something like love.
Private Fife, played by Adrien Brody, who in the novel is a central figure, is in the film a face in the ranks with a handful of lines; Brody’s part, like others’, was cut to almost nothing in the editing, and performers whose work was removed entirely, Billy Bob Thornton’s narration among them, are not in the film at all. This is not an accident of the production but the form of the picture: no man is allowed to be the story, because the story is the company and the island and whatever asks its questions through both.
Movement V
The company is ordered upriver to find the Japanese line, under a new lieutenant who is frightened. Witt volunteers to go forward with Fife and another man to scout. They find the Japanese coming down the river in force; the third man is shot and floats away, and Witt sends Fife back to warn the company and goes on alone to draw the enemy off. In a clearing in the trees the Japanese surround him, a ring of men shouting at him to drop his rifle. Caviezel’s face does nothing; then Witt raises the rifle, and is shot, and the film cuts to the green water where he swam with the children. The death is the only one in the film given a whole scene, and it is given almost in silence.
The company buries him. Welsh kneels at the grave and speaks to him, asking where the spark has gone, and Penn, who has played the whole film in contempt, lets the contempt go for a sentence. A new captain, played by George Clooney, addresses the men as a father to a family; the words are a parody of care and the film lets them stand. The men go down to the boats and leave the island, Welsh’s voice asking, if he never meets another soul in this world, to be allowed to feel the lack. The last shots are the island from the water, a parrot, and a coconut sprouting on the beach.
The film was received in 1998 beside Saving Private Ryan, released that summer, and was judged the lesser; it won the Golden Bear at Berlin and none of its seven Academy Award nominations. In the years since the comparison has reversed in most critical accounts. What Malick made was a war film in which the war is one event among others in a nature divided against itself, and in which a private’s calm and a sergeant’s contempt are given the same question to answer. The cost was drive, and the cost was paid. The gain was a film elevated almost from end to end, which leaves the question open.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on construction, since the dialogue is sparse. The film was cut down from a far longer assembly, and the drift that results is the method: scenes float, voices begin and end without an event to anchor them, and the Bell marriage returns in fragments that are a memory and not a plot. Much of this is required. The hill cannot be shortened without losing the exhaustion it is about, and the return to the village is needed to show that the first world was not whole either. But the subtractive test finds give: the Quintard scene on the ship, the second night in the camp, several voices that belong to no face. Held at the figure by a form that permits its scale rather than compelling it.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the evil in war is not the enemy’s and not an aberration; it is nature at war with itself, and the men who fight carry the division inside them. The film says so in the voice laid over the dying and the lit canopy, and shows it in Welsh’s insistence that there is no world but this one against Witt’s calm that he has seen another. The half-buried Japanese soldier who tells Witt that he too was loved puts the proposition in the enemy’s mouth. It holds, because beauty and butchery are given the same light. Held at the figure because the articulation is a question repeated rather than a condition anatomised: the film asks where the evil comes from and withholds the answer.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is almost continuous: the crocodile sliding into green water under the first notes; the children swimming and the hymn in the village; the grass of the hill moving in wind as the company climbs, John Toll’s camera low in it with the men; the light in the canopy, shot upward, the film’s refrain; Keck dying on the slope among the men who hold him; the bunker taken in dust and slow steps; Bell’s wife in the blue of a memory; Witt in the clearing raising his rifle, and the cut to the water where he swam. Hans Zimmer’s long lines hold the film near height between them. Two things hold it a step from the top: some passages in the camp are flat, and the elevation is so continuous that the viewer can stop feeling it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure is a fall: Witt begins in a village of the unfallen, is taken back into the army, is sent up the hill and into the camp where men kill prisoners and pull their teeth, returns to the village to find quarrels, sickness and skulls, and dies in a clearing. The film never names Eden; the shape does the work, and the return makes the point that the division was there before the war came. Beneath it run two kinds of man in one company, and the oldest question of theodicy asked in a soldier’s voice. The particulars stay hard: the bunker, the morphine, the gold teeth. Held at the figure because the pattern is sometimes announced in the voiceover rather than discovered, and announcement is a lesser carrying.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was the American combat film as Saving Private Ryan had restated it that same year: a squad, an objective, a mission with a moral, violence as immersive shock. The departures: a chorus of inner voices in place of a hero’s arc; attention to grass, birds and light equal to that given to battle; the enemy shown dying and praying; stars cut to minutes, and a cast’s worth of names removed altogether; nearly three hours with no climactic battle, only a patrol and one death. The stake was real: a studio’s money, a director absent twenty years, a release against the most honoured war film of its decade. Held near the top by precedent: Malick’s own Days of Heaven (1978) had already dissolved narrative into light and a child’s voice.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that the war is inside nature and inside each man, and the form carries it: the voiceovers float above the action and cannot always be assigned to a face, so the company becomes one divided consciousness; the cuts from a dying man to a lit leaf are not relief from the battle but its continuation in another register; the hill is held long enough that the viewer tires with the men. Held below the top where the form becomes a container: the Tall and Staros dispute over the field telephone is plain dramatic grammar, and the Bell marriage returns in a blue shorthand that explains more than it discovers.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are twenty-eight years of it. The film has grown on return and been much re-examined, in the literature on Malick that followed The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011), and in the long argument over the Jones novel and the hours cut away. The questions are the film’s own: whose voice speaks the questioning passages, whether Witt’s calm is grace or evasion, whether Welsh’s words at the grave are a conversion or a reproach, what the sprouting coconut at the end is. Formal and semantic depth both yield. Held at the figure because part of what looks inexhaustible is the drift itself: the film can be re-entered at any point and gives the same reverie, a return without an accumulating deepening.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 1998, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film showed that the combat picture could be made as metaphysical reverie, with a chorus of inner voices and nature as witness, and that a cast of stars could be dissolved into a company. The reach is moderate and partly inward. Malick himself is the chief heir: The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011) extend the method of floating voice and lit canopy this film established. Outside his work, David Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000) is an acknowledged debt, and the lyrical register of American independent cinema since owes it a lineage. But the war film went on as before; Saving Private Ryan, not this, set the genre’s grammar. Held at the figure for that reason.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Survival is partly demonstrated. The film was received in 1998 as the lesser of two Second World War films released that year, lost the Academy Awards to the other, and has since reversed the comparison in most critical accounts; it is now the one more written about. Its surface is not fixed to its moment, since grass, light and questions asked over the dying have no decade, and the 1942 setting has already outlived the conditions of its making. What is weighed against it: twenty-eight years is a short span by this measure, the film’s standing rests on a critical consensus more than a popular one, and its length and drift keep it from the continuous circulation that the gangster film and the thriller enjoy. Held just under the gate for want of elapsed time.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: John Toll’s photography, the camera low in the grass, the light shot upward through the canopy; Hans Zimmer’s score, its single rising figure for the climb, with Ives’s The Unanswered Question and a Melanesian choir set against it; the sound, in which birdsong and wind are given the weight of gunfire; Jack Fisk’s design; Nick Nolte’s Tall, Sean Penn’s Welsh, and Jim Caviezel’s Witt, who carries the film by stillness. The costs lie in the department the film depends on most, and run through it, which holds the figure: the editing by Billy Weber, Leslie Jones and Saar Klein made a reverie out of hours of material, but the structure shows where it was cut, and voices the viewer cannot place recur to the end. Symphony No. 9, its costs running through its score, stands at the same figure.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Welsh’s contempt, a sergeant who tells a private there is no other world and who then runs under fire to a dying man with morphine and refuses the medal; and Witt’s grace, a private who sees light in everything and dies drawing the enemy off. One law governs them, questioning: the film does not decide between them, and asks the same question over both, where the evil comes from and whether nature has one power or two. Welsh at the grave, asking Witt’s spark where it has gone, is the law closing. Two things strain it: the Bell marriage, which resolves into a plot of betrayal, and the Quintard scene, a career drama from another film.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: the natural order first, as the film’s witness and its question; the sacred, in the village hymn, Witt’s other world and the dying soldier’s prayer; war as the state’s instrument, in Tall’s career and his need for the hill; the family, in Bell’s marriage, remembered and then lost by letter; the self, divided, in the voices; death on both sides, with the enemy given faces. They are integrated: the hill is at once a tactical object, a career, a field of grass and a theodicy. What holds the axis from the top is thinness in two orders: labour and class, which the company only glances at, and history, since the war’s causes and the island’s people are present as setting more than as forces.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 9.3, then The Living Form at 9.1. Elevation that is almost continuous, from the crocodile under the first notes to the coconut sprouting on the beach, a command of photography, sound and score that makes grass and light bear the weight of battle, and a form of floating voices and nature cuts that is the knowledge itself.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.7 — cut down from a far longer assembly, the drift is the method, but several scenes and voices float free of any need, and the form permits the scale rather than compelling it. Level with it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, since the war film went on as before and the chief heir was Malick himself, and then The Imperishable at 8.4, held under the gate by twenty-eight years.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on three of five: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5; Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 and The Imperishable at 8.4 do not. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 7.7, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.7. The work is held below the summit by two conditions, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 and The Imperishable at 8.4, each against 8.5, and by its aggregate, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Thin Red Line as released by Twentieth Century Fox in December 1998, about 170 minutes, from the crocodile sliding into green water to the coconut sprouting on the beach. No print, script or recording was consulted. The theatrical cut is the object; the longer assemblies from which it was cut, and the footage of performers removed from it, are not part of the work. James Jones’s novel of 1962 and the 1964 film made from it are not part of the work, and nothing from them is imported. Dialogue is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the length of the first assembly, the number of performers cut, the days of shooting in Queensland and the Solomon Islands and the box-office returns, are not given.