The acme of re-evaluation

Rating: 10/10 (29 June 2012)

John Smith is made the captain of the ship. He is humane and he is able to save a man overboard in the middle of a tempest. He is a discoverer and goes out to meet the Indians, and he meets Pocahontas, the daughter of the chief Powhatan who is seen as a warrior and not an old man. The Europeans are shown a little bit more realistically than usual and they use row-boats to go up and down the river, not Indian canoes, like in most other versions.
Pocahontas is shown as a young woman and not a girl, who is adventurous in her own way though at first distant and even fearful. But she accepts contact rather easily and she introduces John Smith to her grand mother Willow, a willow that speaks and gives advice.
This meeting of John Smith and Pocahontas is amplified by the meeting of Pocahontas' raccoon and Ratcliffe's pampered dog. This is both charming and funny, how the savage raccoon is so much apter to survive any kind of trouble coming from a civilized dog than the reverse. The third animal here is a humming bird who is the jester of the triad.
At this moment Thomas, a young sailor who had followed John on Ratcliffe's order, tries to protect John Smith against Kocoum who had followed Pocahontas, shoots Kocoum dead. Then John Smith, who protects the young chap, is submitted to an ordeal, a path of torture between two lines of Indians hitting him with any bludgeon they may have. He is saved by Pocahontas in extremis. Here the Indian custom is not specified, because of course it is not the case here: a woman who has lost family in a battle can claim a prisoner to replace the dead relative. This is the weak point of the film because Pocahontas' claim is not justified from the Indian point of view. That makes Powhatan weak.
But the most important part of the film is the showing of the opposition of two cultures, two visions of the world.
Powhatan declares: "These white men are dangerous. No one is to go near them." That's pure fear in front of the thunder sticks, the rifles.
But then John Smith explains to Pocahontas what follows. "We'll show you people how to use this land properly, how to make the most of it." And he retorts to Pocahontas' objection as follows. "You say that because you don't know better." And he calls the Indians "savages" which causes the retreat of Pocahontas. Then he explains his mind. "Savage is just a word, a term for people who are uncivilized." That's burning his boat and then sinking the ashes. Pocahontas conclusion is just to the point. Savages are people who are "not like you." And that's when a war starts.
The two cultures, Indians and English men, are just the same and they sing the same song about savages, the savages being of course demons on the other side. Powhatan leads the Indian movement as the chief of them when the warriors from other tribes have arrived. Ratcliffe leads the English but for his own narrow-minded, violent, even cruel, and greedy motivations.
Grand Mother Willow advises Pocahontas properly, the raccoon brings Jim Smith's compass it had stolen a long time before and that's the dream: a spinning arrow showing the way. Pocahontas takes John Smith with her and they go to Powhatan to stop the war just when the two armies are face to face. Powhatan accepts his daughter's demand. "My daughter speaks with the wisdom beyond her years. We've all come here with anger in our hearts, but she's come with courage and understanding. From this day if there's to be more killing, it will not start with me." The fool then is Ratcliffe who tries to shoot Powhatan, but John Smith gets in-between and It is John Smith who is shot. He has to go back to England, to be cured and healed, or to die on the ship taking him to England. That ending is a lot better than going back to England to cure and heal severe burns caused by his dumb smoking next to a bag of gun powder.
So what's the meaning of the film? Definitely a call for wisdom in the relations between ethnic groups, a total evacuation of the invasion of Indian territory by Europeans, a discrete allusion to the genocide that was to come later on, a total absence of real commerce between the English and the Indians, the fact that the Europeans do not seem keen on starting survival activities like cultivating the land or hunting properly.
The film is in fact entirely transferred from the historical point of view to the sentimental point of view, as a metaphor of the ethnic situation.
When John Smith falls in love with Pocahontas and is a prisoner destined to be brained alive or rather brained dead on the following morning he tells Pocahontas: "No matter what happens to me, I will always be with you, forever." And when John Smith is being taken to his ship, Pocahontas says: "No matter what happens to me, I will always be with you, forever." Perfect echo, perfect metaphor.
The animals show the same meaning with Ratcliffe's dog dressed in an Indian cape at the very same moment when Powhatan put his own cape on the wounded John Smith on his stretcher.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU