Worthwhile, Quiet Beauty of a Film

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2009)

This film has a quiet joy to it which I don't think I've seen anywhere else in my experience thus-far with film. The characters are all intensely, unconventionally, introverted, and the actors resist any temptation to exaggerate what is a sad but unsentimental story. And, while it's been said countless times, the landscapes of Virginia which are captured in this film are absolutely gorgeous. While I sometimes wished that the cinematographer had dispensed with the slow motion and disorienting cuts and opted for a more of a documentary-style, they did add a dreamlike quality to the film which seemed to parallel Pocahontas's and John Smith's mindsets.
The film's greatness weakness, ultimately, is it's running time. The first 75 minutes focuses on John Smith and Pocahontas's romance, only introducing John Rolfe in the last hour. Rolfe simply isn't given enough time to develop as a character, and the audience isn't given enough time to understand the life Pocahontas has with him. If a good fifteen or twenty minutes had been added to that part of the story, her final decision to stay with Rolfe and her son would have had a greater emotional impact. Nevertheless, the ending was effective in cementing Pocahontas's change from a young lovestruck girl to a mature wife and mother, and was therefore a fulfilling conclusion to the film.