“What difference you think you can make? One single man, in all this madness?”
This is a question Sean Penn’s character asks Jim Caviezel in a memorable exchange in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line–a hardened cynic questioning an idealist’s optimism amidst the horrors of battle on Guadalcanal.
It’s a question that everyone who watches the film has at some point, in some way, asked of themselves. However idealistic we are, and whether or not we’ve ever experienced the tragedies of war and squalor first hand, we all are painfully aware of the limits of our own world-bettering, problem-solving abilities.
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