Death and transfiguration.

Rating: 8/10 (2 October 2007)

This pretty authentic reconstruction of the loves of Pocahontas in the first English colony in the New World, North Carolina, to be exact, is like most of Terence Malick's movies, deliriously slow, suffused with natural beauty, and voiced over with poetic narrative comments that touch only lightly on the scenes we witness.
Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) helps establish the colony in 1607, meets the teen aged Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), they fall for each other, and then Smith departs for England. Word reaches the colony that he died on the passage. She lives with the English now, going about her chores in a daze, but attracts the widower Guy Rolfe (Christian Bales), who talks her into marriage, has a child with her, and takes her to England with him. She learns that John Smith is still alive and Rolfe frees her to be with Smith. When they meet again, however, she realizes that so much time has past, about 8 years, that she has come to love Rolfe and she returns to him. Pocahontas is introduced to the King and Queen. She dies on the outward passage to the New World, happy enough to leave the future to her son.
So far, it sounds like a soap opera and in a way it is, but Malick makes it more than that. There are battles, for instance, between the colonists and the Indians of Powhatan's tribe. (I don't see any reason to call them Native Americans because I've lived with several tribes and they invariably referred to themselves as "Indians" when speaking English.) It's also a commentary on cultural dominance, though Malick doesn't hit us over the head with it. The location shooting is splendid. Compared to this, Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage", is very slow indeed.
Malick has wisely cast a young woman as Pocahontas who is half Peruvian and half Swiss and who is not a raving knockout, which is the usual tactic. Q'oreanka Kilcher has delicate, feline eyes, a bulky nose, and sensuous lips. I mention this because Malick spends a lot of film time on close ups of her, and it's all to the good. By the end of the film we've come to know her, and she's come to have a wistful beauty that belongs to her and not to Hollywood convention. Malick also seems to believe the audience is mature enough to do without any politically correct attributions of supernal spirituality to the Indians. They're doing okay, and that's good enough. They have a sense of humor and are pretty relaxed about things that have the Englishmen quaking in their boots. But neither do they go out of their way to avoid battles.
Malick is an interesting director. His first film, "Badlands," was in its own quiet way masterful. The next one, though exhibiting some gorgeous scenery, didn't do well. And "The Thin Red Line" had the misfortune of being released at the same time as "Saving Private Ryan," which was released under the aegis of Steven Spielberg. "Private Ryan" was an award-winning blockbuster and comparisons with Malick's more subdued, less commercial meditation on Guadalcanal were pointless.
This is really well worth seeing.