On the clear and telling differences between two similarly star-studded
World War II films.
Jack Smight’s Midway (1976) and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) have more
in common than just their Pacific Theater settings. Or at least they have one
pretty obvious and striking thing in common: each uses a huge and star-studded
cast to capture a wide range of soldier and officer experiences within its
focal battle. Midway features Henry
Fonda, Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, Hal Holbrook, James Coburn, Dabney Coleman,
Robert Mitchum, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and
Erik Estrada (among others!); Line
includes Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, George Clooney, John Cusack,
Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, and John Travolta (to say nothing
of the equally big-name actors, such as Martin Sheen, Billy Bob Thornton, and
Gary Oldman, whose parts were cut by Malick during editing). When it comes to
cast size and scope, the two films are similarly old-school epics to be sure.
The similarities pretty much end there, though, and while some of the
differences can be attributed to Malick’s particular and very unique style—see:
long, long shots of waving
grass and the like—others can reveal a great deal about both the eras in
which the films were made and the distinct genres in which they could be
classified. For example, Midway makes
significant use of stock footage, both from wartime camera shots of aerial
battles and from numerous other films (American and Japanese); Malick’s film
features no such footage. That’s partly a difference in period, as the use of stock footage
was still somewhat common in the 1970s and has almost entirely disappeared from
filmmaking in the decades since (other than in rare and significant cases such
as Forrest Gump). But to my mind it
also reveals a key difference in the films’ emphases and goals: Midway is largely uninterested in
engaging critically or analytically with the history it portrays, focusing
instead on the character identities, interactions, and communities as they
experience those events; whereas in Line individual
characters come and go almost at random (and again, some were dropped entirely
in post-production), making the history itself far more consistently central
than any particular identities or interactions—and making the battle scenes the
film’s acknowledged centerpieces, rather than simply stock footage to be
quickly shown before we get back to the characters.
To connect those distinct emphases to genre, I would argue that the films
break down along the “period
fiction” vs. “historical fiction” line that I delineated in this post. As I
noted there, such a distinction is never absolute when it comes to individual
works—it would be silly to claim that Midway
could be set against the backdrop of any battle without changing in one important
way or another; and some of Line’s
key themes of individual choice and war’s destructiveness could be located in
any military conflict. Moreover, it’s important to note that Midway includes an interesting subplot
dealing with a very specific and important history, that of the
Japanese Internment. Yet those qualifications notwithstanding, Midway is to my mind about its star-studded cast, and the
individual characters they create and interactions they portray; while Line’s famously
haphazard usage of its equally starry cast makes clear how much Malick sees
those individuals as instead part of a larger and more central tapestry. While
that distinction does to my mind make Malick’s the more historically complex
and interesting film, the truth, as so often in this space, is this: watching
both provides a particularly balanced picture of how epic films can portray
war.
Next
Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on either or both of these films, or on
any related themes for the weekend post?
12/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two titanic 20th century cultural icons and influences, Walt Disney and Little Richard.
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