Dana Stevens: The New World is another chin-scratching poem
For a certain core group of patient, passionate cinephiles, The New World (New Line), Terrence Malick's retelling of the story of the Jamestown settlement, was already a major movie event before it even hit screens last Christmas. (Since withdrawn for a recut by the director, the movie reopens nationwide today in slightly shortened form.) Malick began his career with two films of an almost Rimbaudian purity and perfection: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). These movies, both of them lyrical reflections on doomed love against the backdrop of a cruel (but lushly filmed) nature, made Malick's name as a poetic and visionary director, on par with Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola.
But post-Days of Heaven, Malick dropped out of sight. He refuses to be photographed, hasn't given a real press interview in more than 30 years, and fields whatever questions do cross his path with a vague, "Uh, I guess I don't want to talk about that." The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick's return to filmmaking after 20 years, was generally received as a failure, but it was a fascinating one—a World War II epic that eschewed conventional plot and character in favor of endless nature shots and overlapping, dreamy voice-overs. "Why does nature contend with itself?" asked an off-screen Jim Caviezel in the opening frames, over an image of tree-suffocating vines. No doubt a less compelling question to most soldiers than, "Where's my body armor?" but that obliqueness was part of Malick's point—to step back from the immediacy of battle and ponder the strangeness of war itself.
The New World takes a shopworn American myth—the first encounter of settlers and Indians at Jamestown, and the romance between Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) and Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell)—and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy. Most serious scholars now dispute the notion that the Indian girl and the English adventurer were sexually involved, though Smith's memoirs do relate how she begged her father, the tribal chief Powhatan, to spare his life after his capture. But the Smith/Pocahontas affair is like the erotic equivalent of the Thanksgiving story: It is true as a metaphor, a condensation of fantasies about colonization and first contact....
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But post-Days of Heaven, Malick dropped out of sight. He refuses to be photographed, hasn't given a real press interview in more than 30 years, and fields whatever questions do cross his path with a vague, "Uh, I guess I don't want to talk about that." The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick's return to filmmaking after 20 years, was generally received as a failure, but it was a fascinating one—a World War II epic that eschewed conventional plot and character in favor of endless nature shots and overlapping, dreamy voice-overs. "Why does nature contend with itself?" asked an off-screen Jim Caviezel in the opening frames, over an image of tree-suffocating vines. No doubt a less compelling question to most soldiers than, "Where's my body armor?" but that obliqueness was part of Malick's point—to step back from the immediacy of battle and ponder the strangeness of war itself.
The New World takes a shopworn American myth—the first encounter of settlers and Indians at Jamestown, and the romance between Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) and Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell)—and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy. Most serious scholars now dispute the notion that the Indian girl and the English adventurer were sexually involved, though Smith's memoirs do relate how she begged her father, the tribal chief Powhatan, to spare his life after his capture. But the Smith/Pocahontas affair is like the erotic equivalent of the Thanksgiving story: It is true as a metaphor, a condensation of fantasies about colonization and first contact....