Jan. 25, 2006 - Issue #536: Bebop Cortez

Malick in wonderland

The New World does everything masterfully except tell an involving story

Few films can boast a more rapturous first 15 minutes than Terrence Malick’s The New World. Instantly, Malick immerses us in the sights and sounds of Virginia in 1607 as a shipload of exhausted British explorers reaches the shore, watched cautiously from the trees by a wary, deerlike band of natives, their faces and bodies covered in swaths of red and black paint; meanwhile, Richard Wagner’s overture to Das Rheingold—a low, eerie pulse of trombones and French horns—ebbs and flows with the sound of wind blowing through the trees and water lapping against the hull of the British ships. There’s almost no dialogue during this entire sequence, and somehow the absence of words suggests the strangeness, the utter newness of the situation—two alien civilizations discovering each other for the very first time. And after the tantalizing first glimpses of Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith (sitting in a cell belowdecks, imprisoned for mutiny, lifting his shackled hands to the sky shining through the grate high above his head) and newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas (her eyes filling with grave wonder at the sight of the approaching ships and their rippling sails), I couldn’t wait for Malick to conclude his opening montage and begin telling his story—probably the most legendary, mythic love story in American history.

The crazy thing is, though, the montage never really ends. The whole movie plays like a 130-minute opening sequence; Malick has conceived the film more as a cascade of images than a succession of scenes—and he spends just as much time, if not more, photographing birds flying across the sky and sunlight dappling the leaves of trees as he does showing Smith and Pocahontas getting to know each other or explaining the delicate shifts in the balance of trust between the British colonists and the “savages” outside the walls of their makeshift fort. You know how some stereos have a function that plays you random 10-second bits of every song on a CD? That’s what The New World feels like. The scenes never quite begin and end where you expect them to, and just when you start to grasp the rhythm of any one of them, Malick moves on to something else.

Malick is such a revered cinematic icon—indeed, now that Stanley Kubrick’s dead, he probably enjoys the most mysterious, godlike reputation of any director—that you run the risk of looking like a philistine if you admit that as The New World drags on, it becomes more and more of a challenge to stay interested in it. Not that Malick doesn’t know what he’s doing; far from it. By placing the natural world on the same footing as the human world, by telling his story impressionistically instead of linearly, by forcing us to see the world through the eyes of the natives as well as through those of the colonists, Malick deliberately confounds our usual moviegoing habits—he wants us to see his film in a new way, to make the experience of watching it as much an act of discovery as sailing to a new continent.

With such lofty goals in mind, it’s almost as though Malick considered actually telling an emotionally engaging story to be beneath him. Everyone in this movie seems like a minor character; the scenes are so brief and oblique that the actors barely get a chance to make any impression at all—except, that is, for Kilcher, whose graceful physicality helps fill a lot of the blanks in her sketchily conceived character. Her performance helps you intuit, sort of, the reasons why Smith and Pocahontas come together, why they eventually part ways, and why she eventually marries John Rolfe (Christian Bale), but even then, it’s hard to feel very deeply about any of it. Ambitiously conceived, spectacularly photographed, boldly executed and yet fundamentally, even deliberately uninvolving, The New World is a masterpiece in every way, except the one that matters. V

The New World
Written and directed by Terrence Malick • Starring Q’Orianka Kilcher, Colin Farrell and Christian Bale • Now playing

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