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Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
Directed & Written by: Terrence Malick
Starring: Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale
Running time: 135 minutes,
Released: 12/25/05
Rated PG-13 for some intense battle sequences |
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 ``The
New World'' is writer-director Terrence Malick's beautiful
evocation of the unspoiled American Eden that the first
white settlers discovered in 1607, a picture poem of
paradise lost. At times, it also appears to be Malick's
haunting homage to the perfume commercials of Calvin Klein.
With its whispery voice-overs from explorer John Smith
(Colin Farrell), and the breathy, brooding requitements of
his Indian princess, Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), the
film is always just one gooey, gazing shot of those two a
moment away from whispering, Obsession!
Malick's own obsession with the pristine beauty of this new
world -- where native Americans had been living in harmony
with the land for many millenniums before the English
arrived at what would become Jamestown -- is evident in
every frame of his strange, gorgeous film. The version that
arrives in theaters today is 15 minutes shorter than the one
Malick submitted in December for Academy Award
consideration. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, that moody
maundering through the American primeval seemed to go on for
what the Calvin Klein ads recognized as Eternity!
What has been lost in the new ``New World'' are such
incantations as Pocahontas' tribute to John Smith: ``He's
like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade.'' It's not
so much his shade that she's interested in, as it is his
darkness; Farrell plays Smith as the classic bad boy that
women say they don't want, but really do. If there were
Harleys in the 17th century, Smith would be riding one.
Whether Malick consciously meant to do so or not, he has
created an opening sequence that closely parallels Stanley
Kubrick's ``2001: A Space Odyssey.'' As the English ships
sail into sight, fish and indigenous people swim underwater
like Kubrick's floating space ships, and other natives jump
up and down on the shore like the apes gathered around
Kubrick's monolith. Even the swelling ``creation music''
from the prelude to Wagner's ``Das Rheingold'' recalls
Kubrick's use of ``Also Sprach Zarathustra'' by Richard
Strauss.
Once ashore, Capt. Newport (Christopher Plummer) warns his
men not to offend the native people, whom he refers to as
``the naturals.'' Pocahontas is the most natural of the
naturals, periodically raising her outstretched arms to the
sky as if in communication with the clouds. The first time
she and Smith see each other across a field of tall grass,
she runs from him like a deer. Kilcher, who is the
15-year-old daughter of a Quecha-Huachapaeri Indian from
Peru, brings a beautiful naturalism to the role.
Pocahontas (a name never spoken in the film) is the favored
daughter of a tribal king (August Schellenberg), who is wary
of the settlers. He assumes they will one day get back on
their wooden ships and leave, but when he discovers that
corn is growing in the settlement, the chief realizes that
the Englishmen, too, have put down roots in his land. He
will have to drive them away.
When Capt. Newport returns to England for provisions, he
leaves Smith in charge of the colony -- a shivering shelter
of mud and despair. After their food runs out, the men eat
boiled belts, and when one of them dies, another settler
eats his hands.
Compared to the English, the native people are more
primitive than savage, although Malick suggests that all men
are equally prone to violence, no matter how advanced their
civilization. With their painted faces and Tourette-like
whoops, these are not unlike the Indians we know from
earlier wilderness adventures, but they are not presented as
abstractions. Malick moves in close to give us an idea of
what their lives might have been like.
The movie's gorgeous pictorialism draws us toward the shore,
but Malick often leaves us marooned in the shoals, waiting
for a story to arrive. Every scene overflows with matchless
images and the sounds of birds cawing, crickets whirring and
water lapping at the land. What is missing is any sense of
narrative flow. Life unfolds, picturesquely.
After the Jamestown colony is established, Smith seems to
tire of urban life, and once again we start to hear his
thoughts as a kind of babbling brook. ``Start over,'' he
says. ``Exchange this false life for a true one. Give up the
name of Smith.''
But it is the princess Pocahontas who is banished -- like
Eve -- from the Eden she has known, and forced to dress up
in settler's clothes. Soon enough, her lamentations drown
out the crickets, and the movie slows to a crawl. A new man
(played by Christian Bale) has come into her life, and the
first time we hear him speaking, it is in numbing
voice-over. By then, what comes to mind is less a perfume ad
than the thought that this picture is a slow-moving stinker. |
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THE NEW
WORLD ©
2006 New Line Cinema.
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2006 Alternate Reality, Inc. |
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