Review of The New World (2005) by Dave R — 05 Mar 2012

I've now seen four out of Terrence Malick's five films (I only have Days of Heaven left to get to), and in a lot of ways this was actually the one I'm the most okay with. His typical obsessions with nature and introspection feel much less out of place here than they did in The Thin Red Line, and the movie is more cohesive and less pretentious than The Tree of Life. I'm still nowhere near sold on this guy as the greatest living filmmaker, as some people seem to think he is, but this movie works reasonably well for me.

The movie is about the familiar story of Pocahontas and John Smith in 1607 Virginia. Pretty much everyone knows the basics of this story, and the basics are more or less all the movie covers. We see the relationship between Pocahontas and Smith, as well as the development of Jamestown, and the Indians' reaction to the English. Nothing unexpected happens, really. The movie spends a lot of time looking at all the trees and water and grass of "the new world," and seems to deal with its plot points begrudgingly. I wonder why Terrence Malick bothers having stories in his movies at all - he should really just drop the pretense of narrative and make a movie called "Terrence Malick takes evocative shots of plants for 70 minutes." That seems to be what he really wants to do, and he's good enough at that.

But no, the movie does have a story and characters, and I do have to give a lot of credit to the actors for doing what they can. Colin Farrell gives a pretty solid performance as John Smith, even though most of it consists of soulful looks at Pocahontas. Q'Orianka Kilcher (she was 14 when they shot this movie, and making out with 30-year-old Farrell! Ew!) actually manages to give a remarkably excellent performance as the idealized nature-child Pocahontas. Even though the movie gives very little dialogue to any of its characters, she manages to have a memorable presence anyway. Christopher Plummer is effective in a couple of scenes as the strict Captain Newport, and Christian Bale shows up for a little while near the end of the movie as John Rolfe, and mostly just seems to replace Farrell to give soulful looks for a while.

I don't know enough about Indian history to say whether or not Malick's depiction of the Indians is particularly accurate, but it seems rather suspicious. The movie seems at times to present a quite "noble savage" view of the Indians, and the elaborateness of the costumes and facepaint can seem a bit over the top. But then again, Pocahontas is fairly convincing as a character, even if she is romanticized. The Oscar-nominated cinematography is quite beautiful; even if the film's narrative isn't very strong, the world it re-creates is a memorable and immersive one. James Horner's musical score is quite grand and beautiful. Malick's pacing of the film is quite strange - he'll spend a long time looking at a tree, but then you blink and suddenly a baby has been born out of nowhere, or the characters have crossed the Atlantic Ocean in about 2 seconds. This movie will frustrate people looking for a conventionally entertaining and informative movie about the Pocahontas story, but in terms of Malick's over-arching "man's place in nature" project that he's been doing 1973, this actually feels like a relatively successful and unpretentious work from him.