Cinema: Ho, Ho (Well, No)

THE THIN RED LINE STARRING: Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Travolta OPENS: New York City, Los Angeles Dec. 23 WIDE: Jan. 15

It's that war again. At the end of a film year dominated by Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (Europe, 1944: D-day and after) comes Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (the Pacific, 1942: Guadalcanal). The two films, each with a rightful claim to magnificence, are as different as the terrain of their settings and the strengths of their makers. The New York Film Critics' Circle probably got it right last week by naming Private Ryan best film and Malick best director.

In Private Ryan, the flinty, competent G.I.s have a clear mission. The Thin Red Line, from James Jones' 1962 novel, is about military and moral chaos. Its infantrymen are scared and unprepared for the hilltop assault that consumes most of the film. (The Japanese are scared too.)

Who are these guys? There's John Travolta, briefly. And Nick Nolte and a nicely unmannerist Sean Penn. And many young faces we must strain to identify. Malick, a poker player or a mystic, does not easily yield information. His story is a meadow with a minefield.

Some films deal in plot truth; this one expresses emotional truth, the heart's search for saving wisdom, in some of the most luscious imagery since Malick's last film, the 1978 Days of Heaven. The new movie takes up where Days--and his haunting Badlands of 1973--left off. Each film is a tragedy of small folks with too grand goals; each is narrated by a hick with a dreamy touch of the poetic; each sets its tiny humans against Nature in ferocious rhapsody. The Thin Red Line begins with an island idyll, and to Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) it feels like the ideal hallucination. It is really Nature's tease: here is Eden, the way the world was before the Fall. Now go to war and screw it all up.

Malick's palette holds a precise orgy of colors; his camera moves like the sun's rush down a hill (a thrilling shot) that throws a fatal light on the men's position. Most of the G.I.s are doomed to have a past--iridescent memories of the blue Pacific or the wife back home--but no future. And Malick, like a god who made the world so lovely and life so harsh, ornaments their ordeal splendidly. The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave. --R.C.

STEPMOM STARRING: Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Ed Harris OPENS WIDE: Dec. 25

The stepmom in question is Julia Roberts, a career-distracted fashion photographer. The baggage her boyfriend (Ed Harris) totes includes bratty kids and an ex-wife (Susan Sarandon) who resents her rival's youth and glamorous career. The ex-wife is a near saintly mother, though, requiring only a bravely endured onslaught of cancer to complete canonization. Her ailment also brings the warring women together in mutual admiration, shuts the kids up and gets everyone gathered, trembling chins up, around the tree for their first and last Christmas as an inspiringly functional extended family. Under Chris Columbus' direction, they make a pretty but utterly misleading picture in which cheap sentiment is used to supply easy, false resolutions to agonizing issues. It doesn't help to tell lies, even saving ones, about such matters. It may even be immoral. --R.S.

A CIVIL ACTION