![]() ![]() And yes, spiritually too, I guess, though that is a word that should be banned, so encrusted is it with goop and mush. And surprise, it all seems more than plausible, experientially and psycho-emotionally. More startling still is the sort of afterlife into which Witt travels. The wonder is that Malick finds the cinematic means to the pull that off-namely, the passage of the soul into a plausible afterlife. All of these judgments proceed from the fact that in Witt’s death Witt himself does not die. The third is the very surprising, peculiar, and cinematically spectacular death of the film’s main character, Private Witt, whose passing is no less violent but oh-so-different. Here Malick’s suggestion that death can be something other than terror prepares the way for the last of three. Indeed, Beade’s vision seems at this point to go what we might call quasi-mystical, reckoning with a world transfigured from dirt and blood to light and delicacy. Amid his evident physical pain and his sorrow at dying, Beade at one point bids his captain to look at what he sees. Rather, and in stark contrast to Keck’s death, viewers see both the care of others and, surprisingly, what Beade himself sees as he approaches death: light sliding through trees and holes and leaves. Here Malick pays no heed to the particular means of war that has brought about Beade’s demise. The only one who seems unsurprised or unfrightened by death’s horror is Private Witt (James Caviezel), who is more engaged in consoling Keck than in calculating his own risk in a war zone.Īnd there’s also the death of Private Beade, a sweet-faced young soldier, to whose dying Malick gives a minute and half of screen time. In Keck’s death several clearly confront with inescapable immediacy the fragility and tenuousness of their own existence. It is stark, and death is abrupt, and his cohorts are amply horrified and unsettled, as well they should be. There Malick chronicles the whole of his dying, from explosion to death and brief aftermath, a process that takes all of three minutes, an eternity of screen time, especially for a death sequence. The first is the accidental death of gnarly Sargent Keck (Woody Harrelson), who dies suddenly by his own grenade. In his towering WW II film of the battle for Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick closely chronicles numerous violent deaths it is, after all, a war film. There is one filmmaker, though, who embraces the challenge full-heartedly, and that is, as one might guess, Terrence Malick, a fearless Texan with camera (or binoculars, him being an avid birdwatcher). And there’s Ingmar Bergman, of all people, who features the death of Agnes, the saintly of three sisters, two of whom are diabolical. ![]() There’s Carl Theodor Dreyer in Ordet wherein, lo, a resurrection transpires, though that sort of evades the question posed here. To be fair, though, it is a daunting problem, especially for those filmmakers, now a fast vanishing few, who have some notion of a post-bodily existence of some sort, namely what we have traditionally called an afterlife. And usually it’s gush, just short of sugarplums dancing in the soul of the deceased. In general movies have greatly prettified the usually stark and often gruesome means by which humans leave this world, bathing the process in muzak, gauzy lighting, and last-breath last words of farewell and/or wisdom. Metacritic: 78% Rotten Tomatoes: 79%.įilms have not historically done much with death. Starring James Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, and Elias Koteas.
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