**** (out of ****)
Starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, Yorick van Wageningen, Raoul Trujillo, Kalani Queypo, Jonathan Pryce, Alexandra Malick, John Savage, and Q’orianka Kilcher
Directed & written by Terrence Malick
2005
150 min 2005
Where do I begin? Terrence Malick’s “The New World” is an amazing film: at times hallucinogenic, muted, oblique, frustrating, sometimes like a thing remembered and not really seen. Critics enthusiastic about the film have described it as an old parchment manuscript with pages missing, words smudged, or a hole eaten through by a moth. An especially eloquent critic compared this version of Pocahontas and John Smith to something fossilized in amber, being turned in Malick’s hands to catch the light from different angles. “The New World” could be interpreted in a million different ways, but I’m not going to mention any of them. This is a movie that should be experienced, soaked up like a sponge, not an entertainment but a hermetic, self-contained environment. It’s a long, slow film—7 minutes shorter than the last “Harry Potter” but considerably more mysterious—but we live in a noisy, agitated world, and sometimes we need to get lost somewhere else, somewhere that slows us down.
In his previous films (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line”), Malick always keeps us a philosophical arm’s length from his characters and events, and “The New World” is unmistakably a film by Terry Malick. Pieces of the narrative seem to be missing, perhaps because they are foregone conclusions to any educated moviegoer, or perhaps because we are witnessing these events as a kind of milky, lazy afternoon recollection, where we can’t control which random memories pop into our heads. The English settlers meet the Powhatans in Virginia, then the next thing we know the Powhatans are wandering curiously through settlement, half-ignored. When Pocahontas decides she’s going to England—just like my wife predicting—there’s no voyage, no months at sea, just boom, she’s in England.
“Stream-of-consciousness” is a handy term; random memories are picked out, and we don’t always remember what a girl said so much as how she looked, how she was sitting, how the sun broke the leaves, or how she walked up to us right before she said something so powerful that we forgot the exact wording immediately. Like Malick’s other films, there are snatches of talk and snatches of narration; here they are alternately as staid and impersonal as 17th century correspondence, but also at times as intimate and opaque as prayers. Malick provides us with an abundance of narration from his three leads, but the result is more musical than literary: it doesn’t matter so much what’s said as that someone is whispering to us in a hushed, dark room. “The New World” is largely a silent film. Christopher Plummer plays a character but he’s more like an omniscient narrator, appearing periodically to beautifully intone some plot point that a normal movie would burn minutes on.
Yet there is undeniably a restlessness in the camera work and ESPECIALLY in the editing that is new to Malick. For every lingering image of Smith and Pocahontas together, there is a cut to something nearby, a glimpse of some memory, the footwork of a camera operator who was told to embody Smith’s inarticulate and possibly hopeless quest of self-discovery. The result is a masterpiece of movement, editing, camera, music (James Horner’s best since “Aliens” or even “Star Trek II”), and cinematography (most of the movie was shot on 70mm).
As Wagner’s horns describe the birth of the world, Powhatans seem to do a ballet when they spot the English ships. The black-clad lords circle Pocahontas in much the same way during her audience with the king. The first encounter between the English and the Powhatans is a strange, ethereal one, as they touch and smell each other. The scenes of a Powhatan wandering amazed through English gardens are like something out of a dream. Malick’s restlessness turns to formalism when we reach England, but this is only a ruse: it’s still there, hiding, just out of the frame and leaking in from time to time.
It was a packed house at the advance screening and, to my relief and surprise, the audience responded with nothing but silence and rapture (except that one jackass who answered his cell phone). Stunning, especially if they were out to catch a glimpse of Colin Farrell’s chiseled torso or sneak a peek up Q’orianka Kilcher’s buckskins. I don’t think everyone was satisfied at the film’s end, but it entranced them while it was playing.
Malick’s restlessness mirrors the three leads, who are all searching for something. Ripped Irishman Colin Farrell plays Captain John Smith as a man who thinks a place or a person will redeem him, will make him into the person he wants to be. He dreams of colonial equality and meritocracy. Then he imagines the Powhatans are living in Eden, but we know from “The Thin Red Line” that white guys who look for Eden among non-technological peoples always end up disappointed. “Red Line’s” Jim Caviezel returns to his beloved Melanesian village, only to find that harsh words, disease, and death had been there all along.
Smith also learns the Powhatans are mere mortals as well, capable of all his sins. By the end of the movie he is looking especially filthy and Irish, which I’m sure will please my wife. Newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher plays Pocahontas (although she’s never once called that…come to think of it, no one says “America” either), entranced by the realization that the world is larger than she thought it was, and John Rolfe is steady and honest, a great low-key performance from Christian Bale as a man who watches and listens.
Page two of "The New World." Back to home.