Malick returns on a Thin Red Line

But the major question is, after two decades of self-imposed exile, does Malick still have the ability to pull off a film as ambitious as The Thin Red Line? It would be one of the greatest comebacks in Hollywood history. Fox may feel it is sitting pretty with Malick8217;s 55 million opus, which is the kind of prestige picture that the Academy loves. Theoretically, its box-office failure would not radically impair the studio8217;s megabucks performance in 1998. Fox8217;s unexpected successes, Dr Dolittle and There8217;s Something About Mary, boosted its summer take to beyond 500 million roughly a 200 million profit.

And yet Fox may need The Thin Red Line to stand firm in cinemas through the winter. But Fox8217;s particular Christmas wish depends on the acumen and artistry of a man who hadn8217;t stood behind a camera since 1978. Malick, who was born in Illinois in 1943, was instantly acclaimed when he made his debut as a writer-directorwith Badlands in 1973, a poignant and haunting reflection on misbegotten romantic yearnings that found their outlet in senseless violence, enacted against a mythic rural backdrop. The follow-up, Days of Heaven, was a less resonant biblical allegory set in the post-industrial American heartland, yet still a powerful and beautiful film.

In 1983, Malick8217;s production deal with Paramount ended with no further projects having been realised. He worked as a script doctor for a while but, a reputedly fragile ego, drifted into reclusivity in Texas and Paris. His return was stage-managed by New York-based producers Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau, who elicited Malick8217;s first draft of The Thin Red Line, based on James Jones8217;s novel, in 1989. When, eight years later, Mike Medavoy8217;s Phoenix Pictures shopped the film to Laura Ziskin at Fox, Geisler and Roberdeau were found to be expendable.

Filmed in Australia and Guadalcanal itself over a period of five months, The Thin Red Line has emerged as theone event film of the 1998 holiday season and the signs are, well, mixed. Opening a war movie on Christmas Day is a gamble to begin with, but especially a war film unlike any previously attempted.

Malick8217;s movie begins with the idyll of a young American soldier newcomer Jim Caviezel among peaceloving natives on one of the Solomon Islands in the Western Pacific. Restored to his company, he is gently upbraided by a stoical sergeant Sean Penn who has no truck with the soldier8217;s belief in a divine human spark. Their clashing value systems are put to the test when the company leads an assault on a strategically important Guadalcanal hilltop ferociously guarded by Japanese machine-gunners.

The cast includes Nick Nolte as an officer prepared to sacrifice men for his own glory, Elias Koteas as a captain striving to keep those men alive, and British actor Ben Chaplin as a soldier sustained in battle by his love for his wife. Woody Harrelson and John Cusack have brief supporting roles and John Travolta andGeorge Clooney have cameos.

The film is both a panoramic depiction of men at war in all its grisly, terrifying reality and a metaphysical meditation on the implacable cruelty of nature. Malick takes us into the minds of the soldiers through internal monologues, and intercuts images of them thinking, talking, fighting and dying with symbolic vistas of wind-tossed grass, the sun in the treetops, dying birds and insects just being insects.

The result is an art movie in the guise of a studio blockbuster. The Thin Red Line8217;s commercial potential is further complicated by its use of a two-act structure. War, of course, is like that a relentless from-frying-pan-to-fire existence but holiday viewers looking for more conventional rollercoaster rides may baulk at such temporal realism. Anyone who does, however, will be missing out on a questing movie experience that, without belabouring its anti-war sentiment, is as spiritual as they come.