Prepare yourself for something spiritual

Rating: 10/10 (27 January 2006)

OK, I'm a massive admirer of Terrence Malick. I think he is the greatest living filmmaker. His films touch part of my psyche that are left unmoved by any other filmmaker. But... Nothing, repeat NOTHING prepared me for the sensory explosion that is The New World. I had been following the production for over 18 months, watching the trailer online... counting the days... But I was worried. Some suggestions that Malick have over-reached himself, was self-indulgent... And Malick's style of cinema is so fragile, it could fall apart. So with optimism, but trepidation I took the plunge... and - oh joy, oh bliss, this is truly heaven.
Why is it so wonderful? The only word I can give is that it, unlike any film that I have seen since the death of Bresson (except, maybe, Flowers of Shanghai), is deeply, deeply spiritual. We have familiar Malick motifs - the wind on the grass, the shots of the sky reflected in water from The Thin Red Line - but here that take on a completely new and more satisfying meaning, for Malick's concern is with man in his purest communion with nature. The 'naturals' are precisely that - at one with nature. Malick uses his poetic imagery to set our senses aglow with the sheer wonder and of purity of the indigenous lifestyle. This is cinema at the level of what I can only term 'super-expression' - imagery communicates complex interaction between things and the way our senses perceive them, but it does so at an incredibly elevated level. The most remarkable thing for the casual viewer is how much Malick manages to express complex and wonderful things completely without dialogue. John Smith (Colin Farrell) barely speaks to his own people, let alone his indigenous captors. Yet we sense what he is thinking through Malick's absolutely magnificent use of imagery and sound.
There are other motifs. People hold hands. They express themselves through their breathing. And, yet again, Malick has found a wonderful vehicle for his vision in the form of Q'Orianka Kilcher. Her screen presence and the range of emotions that she suggests with so little dialogue is little short of miraculous.
For people who love the cinema not just on the basis of the quality of the stories that it tells, but the manner in which it tells them, this must be one of the films of the decade. Many people have said that the cinema is like a language, but that is to belittle it. It is not like A language, it is simply like language itself. And just as there are many languages, there are many cinemas - that is forms of cinema. And in each language there are masters of the language who excel in expressing themselves in poetry and in prose. In English we had Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Now, in 'poetic cinema' at a higher level even than Stan Brakhage, we have Terrence Malick. Yes, The New World is THAT good. See it. See it. See it.