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

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.

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