They are joined by a large and reliable cast, including Christopher Plummer, playing the standard Christopher Plummer authority figure, which would get old if he didn’t do such a bloody magnificent job of it. David Thewlis and Yorick van Wageningen search for religion and gold in the New World. August Schellenberg plays the king of the Powhatans, coincidentally named Powhatan, a convenience that would probably find its American equivalent in the election of Denzel Washington for president.
It’s fitting that the side of Wes Studi’s head graces the movie’s earliest posters. His part in the movie is not enormous, but he has a perfect actor’s face: leonine, evocative, and sympathetic. It’s been 15 years since he was in “Dances with Wolves” and almost as many since “Last of the Mohicans” and “Geronimo: An American Legend,” but the years have only made his face more powerful. It is he who gets lost, bewildered, in the royal English gardens. He tells Pocahontas that he has been sent by his king across the ocean with a handful of sticks, and to put a notch on them for each Englishman he sees. A single downward glance makes this a perfect line reading.
Almost as surprising as Malick’s newfound agitation is what an effective love story “The New World” is. It isn’t so much a story of love between two people as Pocahontas’s story of love. I can’t think of another movie off the top of my head—at least not one this expensive—that devotes so much energy to a teenage girl in love for the first time. Kilcher gives a lively, natural performance, and some would argue that the movie should stop after she is abandoned by Smith. But neither love story, Smith or Rolfe, seems complete without the other. We can love all by ourselves, but we are made into people who get the love of others by the people who break our hearts. What a genuinely romantic film.
Malick is, of course, one of the reigning saints of movie snobs. Once again, he has delivered unto us the movie snob’s holy grail: the big budget art film, as magnificent as it is puzzling to mainstream audiences, leaving us snotty punks feeling good and smart about ourselves. “The New World” could stand to loose a couple minutes here and there; I think Smith and Pocahontas have a little reunion while they’re still in Virginia that may not be entirely necessary, and the narration might get a bit thick. Malick’s first two films (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven”) are clipped and efficient, with a combined runtime of only 187 minutes. At 150 minutes “The New World” is more like his 1998 film “The Thin Red Line” (170 minutes) in that it is bustling and fat with ideas—characters show up without introduction and vanish without farewell. It lacks the structure inherent in “Red Line’s” attack on Guadalcanal, but I often like the humanity of sprawling, overly-ambitious flicks like “The New World” better than many tighter, soullessly perfect pictures.
In the end, yes, I got a little wet-eyed, not because Pocahontas dies or even because she dies young, but because she lived so fully, so exuberantly. She never lost her joy in what was around her. For her the world was always new, and the reward for her optimism is that she got to see so much of it. Yeah, “The New World” might make your hips a little sore watching it, but, trust me, that next day when it gradually dawns on you that you’ve seen a masterpiece is worth it.
As for the movie’s historical accuracy…how do I begin to show you how little I care?
Finished Thursday, January 19th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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