Nick Nolte as Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Tall in “The Thin Red Line” (1998)
It’s possible to think of Nolte’s towering Lt. Col. Tall in “The Thin Red Line” and remember only his monumental rages — snarling down the phone at the insubordinate Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) to send his men to their certain death “up that goddamn hill,” raspily growling at John Cusack‘s Captain Gaff that the men don’t need water and “if they pass out, they pass out.” But those are the sticky, memorable moments of a performance that is much more than that. Nolte’s prismatic turn gives off many flashes of fire, but it’s also one of the most conflicted and psychologically textured studies of the career soldier mentality — everything is here, from Tall’s fear (“I’m dying,” he says in voiceover, “Slow as a tree.”) to his braggadocio in front of his men (“We read Homer at The Point. In Greek.”) to his whispered admission that his pursuit of soldiering glory (and this is his last shot at it) has him “Shut up in a tomb. Can’t lift the lid. Playing a role I never conceived.” In a grandly humanist, sprawling film, it is oddly the tragic paradoxes of Nolte’s character that prove the most touching, and in his sometimes manic but often exhausted, running-on-empty performance we get the best expression of the hellishness but also the goddamn, soul-crushing weariness of war.
Jessica Chastain as Mrs O’Brien in “Tree Of Life” (2011)
It happens less frequently now that Malick seems to have moved into territory where he uses vast ensembles of already-established stars in ever more microscopic roles, but he has given several actors major breakouts. Jessica Chastain, playing the mother in “The Tree of Life” (and also the Mother, with a capital-M, as a kind of Platonic ideal) was legitimately one of those occasions, though whether she is in Malick’s debt for giving her this part, or he is in hers for making so much of it, is up for debate. This is a perfect example of the tension that makes discussion of Malick’s performances so complicated but also so fascinating. Certainly Mrs. O’Brien is not what we’d traditionally consider a great role — she is an ideal, a kind of abstraction, a memory, a fantasy even. Very little of the film actually comes from her point of view — none, in fact, if you discount the hushed scraps of voiceover she gets to whisper now and then. We do not inhabit the character any more than Jack can, in his memory. But somehow, and this does not always work like this (see almost every supporting character in “Knight of Cups” or “To The Wonder“) a remarkable actor can hit a kind of groove that resonates exactly on the right frequency and can give the flimsy, fluttery impressions of a character real dimension, depth, and solidity. Chastain’s turn here is both ethereal and real, and it announced her rightly as our next Great Actress, because you have to be this great to make a role that is essentially a memory so memorable.
We could go on and on — a few other performances we considered but cut for impenetrable and no doubt dubious reasons of our own: Sean Penn, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, and Adrien Brody in “The Thin Red Line“; Christian Bale and Christopher Plummer in “The New World”; Brooke Adams in “Days of Heaven”; Romina Mondello and Javier Bardem in “To The Wonder.” But we’re sure you have other favorites, let us know who they are below, and also tell us if you think Malick’s next film, dauntingly titled “Weightless,” is likely to afford us any more.