This account of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas is recognizable as another piece in Terrence Malick’s idiosyncratic body of work.
By:Bob Brown
Writer/Director Terrence Malick is known for being a meticulous filmmaker. Although his output is small by Hollywood standards, he’s marching to a different rhythm. The New World, written about 30 years ago, follows Malick’s three prior films to the big screen: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). During the extended gap between the latter two features, Malick taught philosophy in France.
Besides earning a master’s degree in filmmaking, he has a philosophy degree and was once a Rhodes Scholar. This explains some of the engrossing and exasperating features of Malick’s two most recent films. Like The Thin Red Line, this movie often veers from its natural setting and detours into the minds of its characters, whose disembodied voiceovers pose unanswerable questions. Their language is poetic and evocative, but it sounds more like Malick thinking on their behalf than the characters themselves.
In The Thin Red Line, this technique punctuates some of the more poignant moments, questioning the disparity between nature’s beauty and its indifference to the violence of man toward man. In The New World, these kinds of musings are more frequent and intrusive. Their purpose seems less relevant to the action at hand because it’s dealing with a now-legendary story we think we already know.
There’s a dreamy, languid quality to that action for most of the movie, which was originally 16 minutes longer than the final cut now in theaters. Test screenings apparently made audiences restless. Expecting sheer entertainment, they were not on the filmmaker’s wavelength.
Malick’s account of the Jamestown colony’s troubled founding is not so much a history lesson as it is a meditation on the gulf between humans and nature, and between humans in their more natural state and humans calcified by the deadening effects of civilization. The natives wear soft, pliable animal skins; the English are encased by steel and hard leather. To point up this weighty symbolism, Powhatan’s curious warriors tap on the armored English, as though testing a lobster’s shell.
This theme is carried over from The Thin Red Line, which is hardly a faithful retelling of James Jones’ novel. The New World uses the Jamestown account to convey the same message. Both films open with surprisingly similar scenes: from underwater, we see carefree native peoples swimming. The blissful humdrum of a primitive forest village is then interrupted by the arrival of sophisticated craft on the water’s surface U.S. Navy patrol boats in one case, and English square-riggers in the other.
The ocean that separates the "naturals" of fledgling Virginia from the Londoners of England is both physical and metaphysical. The filmmakers went to great lengths to convey historical accuracy. Sets designed by Malick’s favorite, Jack Fisk, include Native American birch bark dwellings built from the ground up. Linguistic historians re-created Powhatan’s lost language and coached actors in Algonquian, all to immerse actors and viewers in the time and place.
But for all this authenticity, Malick is as concerned with an ahistorical truth that he conveys symbolically. The film romanticizes the primitive. And this film is literally a romance. It might have been called The Short, Unhappy Life and Loves of Pocahontas, Later Known as Rebecca.
Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), a mutinous member of the Virginia Company, falls for the pure and compassionate young native princess, Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), who stands for the unsullied purity of a people in communion with nature. She inhabits Malick’s trademark vistas: waving grasses, forested rivers, which are swept by rain and thunder. The Princess looks skyward, drinking it in, communing with the Great Spirit; the Virginia Company just get soaked and discouraged.
Pocahontas falls for Smith, a renegade among his own people. But she settles for John Rolfe (Christian Bale), a more levelheaded, reliable Englishman. You know things will go badly for the young woman when she exchanges her skimpy deerskin wrappings for a corseted dress and high heels. The colony falls on hard times when the natives discover the visitors are literally putting down roots corn.
A fierce battle is the movie’s only heavy action, perhaps jolting awake anyone who has nodded off during Smith and Pocahontas’ Elvira Madiganesque idyll. Speaking of which, it’s curious that, as in the film classic about a Swedish officer’s doomed love affair, Malick chooses a Mozart concerto for the couple’s love theme. Otherwise, James Horner’s portentous score is moody and brooding.
Photography by Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Y Tu Mamá También) makes tidewater Virginia look as gemlike and unspoiled as possible. This film is one of the few that used 65mm stock for some scenes. The extra-wide format helps enhance the surrealism.
This movie is not quite up to the standard of Malick’s The Thin Red Line, but it’s recognizable as another piece in his idiosyncratic, and slowly growing, body of work. While it’s beautiful to watch, the Malick gestures are by now familiar. Hopefully, Mr. Malick’s next offering will be fresher, and sooner than another eight years from now.
Rated PG-13. Contains some intense battle sequences.