Dances with sheep

Rating: 4/10 (28 September 2010)

Terrence Malick has made a handful of loose, impressionist films over four decades; 'The New World' is perhaps his most impressionistic yet, but also his most unsatisfactory. It tells the story of Pocohantas, the native American who married an early settler; as in some other tellings of the same tale, he imagines an earlier, competing relationship with the first settler who met and described her. The film attempts to give a flavour of the difficult, confused times faced by settlers and natives which provided the political, social and military backdrop to Pocahantas ultimately being offered to the white man as hostage for the indigenous people's safety. It certainly succeeds in conveying the confusion, because Mallick seems to wilfully disregard every convention of movie storytelling, preferring to give us disjointed scenes from his characters' lives instead of trying to fuse them into a coherent narrative. While one appreciates his desire not to make life appear more linear than it is, the desire for narrative is a natural human one, not just in film audiences but also in people living their own lives; we find stories amid the chaos to make sense of ourselves, and Mallick's failure to do so on behalf of his characters is frustrating. As a love triangle, it doesn't work either, because the two men she falls for are (compared with everyone else in the story) uninterestingly similar; and I never really felt I learnt much about the inner lives of any of the protagonists (Pocohantas, for example, is throughout a picture of serene inscrutability). Ultimately, I didn't understand what Malick was trying to do with this movie; and it's great length left me indifferent and perplexed long before the end.