Mapping Out the Line | Far Flungers

What's more, the whole concept of having Jim Caviezel's mystical-minded Witt pitted against Sean Penn's cynical Welsh is completely at odds with how these characters were portrayed in the book, but stays in accordance to the dynamics between Prewitt and Warden in "Eternity..." ("They were like two philosophers starting from the same initial premise of life and each, by irrefutable argument, arriving at a diametrically opposite conclusion").

The subtle play that Malick engages in with Jones' work goes very far indeed, which can be even observed on the level of subtle word choices he makes in his script. Consider this passage from Jones' "Eternity...", which refers to Prewitt's memories of his mother's death:

He wondered often (...) about his own death, how it would come, how would it feel, what it would be like to know that this breath, now, was the last one. (...) He only hoped he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden.

Here is the way in which Jim Caviezel's Witt recollects the same event in Malick's film:

I wondered how it'd be when I died. What it'd be like to know that this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it in the same way she did, with the same... calm. Because that's where it's hidden, the immortality I hadn't seen.

One can say that the entire Malick sensibility - if not his deep religious conviction - is packed into that tiny word shift. "Calm" instead of "magnificent indifference" marks the distance between a deep engagement with the spiritual world (of which Malick's film is a testimony) and a stoical refusal to be puzzled by it. "The Thin Red Line" is a religious work in that it's interested in how a human being relates to eternity, and I think its beauty goes well beyond any sense of order that could be offered by an organized religion. It is at instances like that when movies seem to truly mean the world to us, and I guess my sixteen-year-old self sensed it right.

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