Frustrating but Ultimately Rewarding

Rating: Null/10 (29 January 2006)

It's a shame that Terrence Malick has never found the balance between what we see and what we know in his films. At this late stage I'm beginning to think it's too late for the old dog to learn new tricks. As with "The Thin Red Line", you'll be hard-pressed to find a better looking film in the genre, but this is both the movie's gift and its curse. The New World is like getting a stack of postcards, sixty years late, addressed to your grandmother from her then boyfriend who soon after died in the war. It's words are few, careful and secret. It's pictures lush and exotic. It speaks of a feeling that somehow lasted through the ages. If you were to film the "story" you discerned from those post cards -from the feelings buried in the margins- you would have "The New World". A film so transcendental it transcends the audience, and leaves us behind as it continues to run unhindered by our needs anymore. Half Discovery Channel documentary, half Pocahontas home video collection, the movie tells a historically accurate version of the events that lead to Pocahontas travelling to England to meet the Queen. It's lucky that the girl they found to play her embodies her inquisitive, energy so well because the movie rests almost entirely upon her shoulders. Ferrel playing John Smith, like a sad sack washed out baseball player, does admirably in their minimalist scenes together. Creating a sense that we're watching what can never be put into the words of history, because history isn't interested in love, only sin.
There's not much exploding, and very little action for those thinking "big historical epic", but you will find painstaking detail, and one of the harshest looking portrayals of the hard winter suffered by the British that first year after making landfall. Overall, a frustrating but ultimately rewarding experience that might play better in a museum than in a theater.