The Thin Red Line.

Some writer was once described as being long on genius but short on talent. Terence Malick, who wrote and directed The Thin Red Line, actually has plenty of both, and his masterpieces of the '70s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, exist to prove it. But the peculiar exigencies of making a World War II combat movie have discombobulated his talent without obliterating his genius. The new film stumbles time and again, but a vision of war as Original Sin, the canker in the rose of life, shines steadily through.

First, let's get a comparison, not odious but inevitable, out of the way, for there's no denying that Malick's film dwells rather in the shadow of Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg's film drives forward ruthlessly to its climax with the force of great, brutal, unshaded art. Despite minor glitches, it never swerves. The Thin Red Line meanders, runs into fog, has moments of inanity, even downright goofiness. Ryan's battle scenes seek to engulf us with the terror felt by the soldiers, while Malick wants to give us a certain distance from the violence even as his camera plunges into it - a Buddhistic calm strives to make itself felt amid the fury.

The story takes the audience with the U.S. Army's Charley Company into the invasion of Guadalcanal. Malick uses James Jones's novel, laden with the minutiae of battle and of men getting on each other's nerves, to meditate on the nature of man and the nature of nature. Much of this reaches us through the consciousness of Witt (Jim Caviezel), a country boy who seems to have read a surprising amount of Ralph Waldo Emerson, judging by his meditations heard on the soundtrack. "Is each person just part of one large soul?" he asks. Then why does each particle of that soul try to destroy the others? "Why can't we just reach out and touch the glory?" And is nature itself at war with nature? Is that what's killing us? Conversely, why is life so beautiful both in its physical aspect (this is emphasized by the beauty of Guadalcanal itself) and in the human capacity for tenderness, loving sexuality, compassion?

And how must a man live his life? Like Witt, who goes AWOL whenever the impulse to bask in nature and consort with islanders seizes him, but who also demonstrates devotion to his company when he returns to action? Or is the way of Witt's enemy/friend, Welsh (Sean Penn), preferable, who maintains a philosophy of absolute nihilism? Does it matter to the world at large, since the life-loving Witt kills in combat as any soldier must, while the seemingly life-despising Welsh ("In this world a man's nothing...and there's no other world") can't help being generous and self-sacrificing, especially on Witt's behalf? (Like Prewitt and Sergeant Warden in From Here to Eternity, also by James Jones, the two men seem to reflect each other's possibilities, which may be why they both deplore and love each other.)

And, in light of the yoked bestiality and tenderness resident in men, how does a leader lead? Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) is determined to keep his agenda on track, no matter how many of his men die. But Captain Staros (Elias Koteas in a particularly subtle performance), believing you can't win in war if you don't have the trust of your men, refuses to sacrifice them for the sake of strategy. (Moreover, he's just too humane to regard humans as pawns fit for sacrifice.) Which man is right? Or is some synthesis possible?

Given the themes of this movie, Terence Malick was exactly the right man to make it.

And given the genre and scope of this movie, Terence Malick was exactly the wrong man to make it.

He was the right man because, among American filmmakers, he is the supreme brooder over humanity's inexaustible talent for destroying itself. There is a scene in which a dying Japanese soldier seems to plead with a G.I. for a moment of understanding. Full of a hate oddly gentled by fascination with impending death, the American, wagging his finger tic-toc like a metronome, kills the prisoner's hope of comfort and indicates that the world wants no more of his existence. Matching this is a close-up of a Japanese face, seemingly petrified in an avalanche of earth and gazing out at the Americans like a bas-relief. The G.I.s seem to hear the buried corpse's voice warning them that he once felt as much life as they do now, and that soon they will be as dead as he is.

Malick broods just as much over man's capacity for tenderness. Look at the death scene he gives Woody Harrelson. Playing a macho redneck sergeant who accidentally blows himself up with a grenade, Harrelson seems to subside into a child as death seeps into him. His men hover above him, sheepishly assuring him that: (a) he won't die, and that (b) he will die but not in vain. Humanity as tender and as atrocious as this seldom reaches the screen, even in good movies.

Though not a virtuoso director of action sequences like Spielberg, Malick nevertheless gets exactly what he needs: cross-hatchings of sporadic anguish and terror within the larger picture of overwhelming violence: Nolte's colonel spasmodically raking his fingers through his scalp as Captain Staros radios his refusal to obey orders; a crawling soldier in a field singing with bullets suddenly swerving away from a gorgeous and malevolent-looking snake.

Aided by cinematographer John Toll, Malick uses the beauty of nature to emphasize rather than mitigate the horror of death. The very second after several G.I.s are shot down on a hillock and their bodies drop down into the long, waving grass, the sun lights everything up in glory. It's like God practicing sarcasm.

But: Though Malick has an epic sense of physical space, his talent operates best with a small cast of characters. Badlands has two protagonists and Days of Heaven four (though both movies are rich in colorful minor roles). But a war film that takes on an entire company as a sort of group protagonist requires that a filmmaker define each soldier quickly by focussing on a few defining gestures or traits. (Granted, this solution lends itself all too easily to caricature.) Otherwise, in scenes of combat where darkness, filth, and fast confusing action obscure the identities of all but the instantly recognizable, the audience is going to lose track of what is happening to whom, and this breeds irritation and lack of empathy for the suffering men.

This happens time and again in Red Line. When a soldier played by John Cusack volunteers for a mission, Colonel Tall beams and says he expected such bravery from this particular man. Why? Later, Tall says that he feels toward Cusack like a father. How come? There was no previous relationship between the two shown on screen.

When a soldier kills one of the enemy for the first time, his inner voice, heard on the soundtrack, expresses both shock and exultation. "It's the worst thing you can do...nobody can touch me for it!" Is this simply a normal man shocked by his first kill or the possible genesis of a criminal? We can't know because we don't know this character.

In hope of tipping the odds toward survival, another soldier steals an officer's pistol on the transport ship. What becomes of the thief and the pistol? Since we never find out, why was the scene left in?

The part of Bell, who yearns obsessively for his beautiful wife back home, is played by Ben Chaplin, who (at least in battle fatigues) bears a striking resemblance to Jim Caviezel's Witt. Many scenes featuring one of them began confusingly for me because I thought I was looking at the other guy, a confusion prolonged by the fact that the two share no scenes. The physical similarity is unfortunate because their inner lives are so different: Bell's love is erotic, fixed on one woman, while Witt's agape is for the entire human race and includes the enemy.

Does Malick share Witt's intuition that all humans are just so many pieces of coal flung from one huge fire? If so, did this subtly undermine the dramatist's task of keeping characterizations distinct? Or was there a more familiar problem to which many filmmakers fall prey? In an interview with PBS's Charlie Rose, Nolte remarked that there were at least two other versions of Red Line left on the cutting room floor that could have been released instead of the one that we have. Perhaps we will see them in alternative-version video cassettes. But though I'm eager for those other Red Lines if they exist, that doesn't mitigate my frustration with the current version or keep me from wishing that Malick had sharpened his focus on the characters of Colonel Tall, Captain Staros, Sergeant Welsh, and Private Witt, since it is these four who carry the movie's themes.

Still...I stop at a red light and think of Nolte raking his scalp as Staros's voice defies him on the walkie-talkie. I stand at a grocery check-out line and remember the Japanese soldier pathetically waving a stick to keep the onrushing Americans away from the body of a fallen comrade, and the way the Americans throw him puzzled looks but run on without hurting him. I stand in line for yet another movie, something I won't remember two hours or even two minutes after seeing it, and the sight of Sean Penn as Welsh kneeling at the grave of Witt comes back to me, and the way Penn asks, with a touch of scorn and with infinite love, "Where's your spark now?"

You know those cold-relief capsules that supposedly release their pellets in your system for twelve hours after you swallow them? The Thin Red Line is a slow-release capsule for the mind.