New World, Old Story

Rating: 6/10 (27 January 2007)

I imagine that Terrence Malick, like his characters in "The New World," takes pleasure in running frenetically about in new, beautiful places; he gropes and pets and feels all that is around him, taking it all in with one fresh, innocent gasp. His new film is photographed in his trademark sumptuousness, and when Europeans accustomed to castles see straw huts in meadows and Native Americans accustomed to straw huts see castles in metropoli, you inhale that same rich breath. The anthropological fascination that Malick channels into the first brushes between the two peoples is astounding. One sequence in particular  John Smith's taste of life among the "savages" and his first encounter with Pocahontas  is, perhaps, the movie's emotional high point. Anyone who can remember summers at the lake or simply has a penchant to frolic about in fields is enticed, and the courtship between the two lovers  demonstrated through touch more than talk  is lovely to the point of being affecting; it is like flowers ripening in the springtime. Unfortunately, the blossoms only open so much.
The movie remains a pretty thing to look at  a pictorial representation of the past the way that "2001" was of the future  but from there on the dramatics become wobbly. For two more hours, the plot revolves around the couple trying to regain that initial high, and when their relationship doesn't deliver, neither does the film. The majestic Wagner overture, which sets off the tone of wonderment with such promise, seems like a cheat. Smith (Colin Farrell) returns to the Jamestown settlement, the only ugly setting in the entire movie. His fellow colonists are all whiney, belligerent cockneys who  until the later, spontaneous appearance of Christian Bale  are almost entirely indistinguishable from one another. They do, however, provide a needed break from the monotonous, poetic soliloquies that Smith and his Indian princess (Q'Orianka Kilcher) deliver on the voice over track. Some of their gentle, archaic monologues are helpful in establishing the romantic souls of their sayers; they necessarily explicate the differing points of view had by the two peoples. But when Pocahontas is exiled to the white men  whose outpost is now, thanks to the natives, just as pretty as the rest of the production design  and when she seeks out Smith beforehand, we are dismayed to discover that these muffled trifles are all that is exchanged between the lovers in person as well. That is the extent of the central relationship of the entire movie: whispered sweet nothings.
To match the banality of their old-fashioned dialogue, the principals play as stiff, wide-eyed romantics who have a lust for beauty, but are otherwise hollow. Newcomer Kilcher is able to convey interior pathos rather well, but she is about the only person in this film who the director allows to emote; Colin Farrell, who actually can act, is stiff as a board for the supposedly rebellious professional soldier. His eyes are puffy, and his mouth, behind unkempt facial hair, perpetually droops. When the focus shifts from him to his girl, his comatose nature is somewhat excused: he's a warrior-poet but also a wanderer; he should've never let her love him. The storyline is nothing more than the soap opera of a man who cannot commit and his weepy paramour who'll nevertheless keep her darling's place set at the dinner table.
After Smith embarks to find the Northwest Passage, he has his broken-hearted girl notified that he has drowned. The grieving Pocahontas is Anglicized, baptized and rechristened as Rebecca (her birth name is, as I recall, never given during the film  probably so that people don't think this is just a rehash of the Walt Disney cartoon). John Rolfe's (Christian Bale) subsequent courtship with her has some of the sweetness that came with her early days with her previous John, but the latter affair pans out to be as formal as a business luncheon. Bale's role at least proves that the movie's premise is not to show that every Englishman/Westerner is just some ill-mannered invader unworthy of the Native Americans' enlightened lifestyle. For better or for worse, he's but a good, bland man.
Malick never asks the question of whether white man should have ever stepped foot in this country. The closest he comes to addressing this is the contrast between the early, floundering colony  which consists basically of forlorn hay huts lopped on goopy, barren mud  and the paradisiacal native enclave. But Jamestown gets a make-over half-way through when new settlers prosper and beautify the place. And Malick makes Jacobean England  the invaders' home turf  in its own way as attractive as virginal Virginia. The only sources of sorrow are unrequited love and failed crops; the specter of imperialism is barely hinted at. Even Rebecca née Pocahontas doesn't seem upset about her forced expatriation from the world she was reared in; any possible commentary that her unique situation should offer is bizarrely omitted.
It only seems right that Malick doesn't  and perhaps can't  make any species of political statement. He's much too busy gallivanting through the scenery and noticing again, for the first time, how lovely it all looks.