the strange & wonderful art of Terrance Malick

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2006)

Great, sweeping, lyrical shots of the natural world. A passionate but respectful infatuation between the camera's eye and the lovely face of a young beauty we've never seen before. Ever-climbing, harmonious waves of symphonic delicacy. And a powerful, labyrinthine mood built of images that court the eye rather than assail it. These are just a few of the pleasures offered by "The New World." Something to realize, right from the start, about Terrance Malick's new film is that he's telling his story on an abstracted plane and by way of the mythological mode. If just hearing that gives you a headache, then maybe this isn't the movie for you. Otherwise, you're in for a real treat.
Okay, okay... So maybe Pocahontas was a mere ten years old when she saw her first white people and only twelve when John Smith left her and the Jamestown settlement in 1609. Maybe there was no enigmatic, and potentially romantic, relationship between the two. But this is all beside the point. Malick is not interested--and we can be ever so thankful for this--in telling a polemically-oriented story. He's not interested in giving us a dry, by-the-numbers, cinematic regurgitation of fact, or in constructing some historical-revisionist fantasy.
It should be obvious, for anyone paying attention to Malick's unusual filming style here, that this Pocahontas (played by the 14-year-old Q'Orianka Kilcher) is the archetype that has grown out of her legend. Here she is woman-as-land, a rather obvious but effective metaphor. Malick builds onto the metaphor two love stories, each taking as its object this blend of woman and land. The first romance (with explorer John Smith--Colin Farrell) is one of innocence, at least on the part of Pocahontas. The second (with farmer John Rolfe--Christian Bale), by far the more difficult relationship, is a romance of experience. These romances, of course, are what make great myth and great cinema. And like all great legends, this one presents a larger-than-life story yet leaves us to draw our own conclusions from it. But that's art for you--something with which most movies shouldn't be confused.
And how refreshing it is to see a film built from elliptical, intuitive patterns of imagery and soliloquy rather than from a dogged plot or ideologically-motivated pandering. The New World--like Martin Scorsese's "Kundun" or Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock"--is that rare thing, a dream you can sink into, a place to momentarily lose yourself in visual and aural poetry.