To those who don't buy the Malick-as-reclusive-genius patter...

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2005)

See The New World anyway. To establish my low place on the Malick-worshipping spectrum, I thought Badlands was serviceable, that Days of Heaven went for Old Testament and settled for coffee-table book, and that The Thin Red Line was feebly improvised on set by someone who didn't seem to have the character, style, depth or experience to shoot good footage on the fly and so constantly resorted to uninspiring nature shots to cover up for the fact that the actors had no clue what they were doing ( although I did appreciate the magic trick of making Adrien Brody disappear. ) So as you can see, I wasn't exactly about to hoist Malick up to the Rivette-Kubrick-Cassavetes level.
As it turns out, there are more cutaway nature shots than in Days of Heaven and Thin Red Line combined, Malick is still riding his Paradise Lost hobbyhorse, the classical music samples are as cheesily tasteful as ever, and all around, this is just like his other movies, or the difference is so small as to be infinitesimal -- AND it stars Colin "Will Arch His Eyebrows For Food" Farrell, maybe the only actor on earth more annoying and vain than Adrien Brody, a man who seems to destroy historical epics the way the locusts in Days of Heaven destroyed Malick's exasperating wheat.... Yet despite this morass of handicaps no movie should be able to recover from, The New World left me in a state of absolute rapture ( like so many other movies in this fiscally but not artistically cursed year, including the Brody-starring King Kong. ) Why? I can't quite figure it out. Malick's brand of National Geographic tone poem should be more pallid and generic than ever considering so many amazing latter-day examples of cinematic impressionism like Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flowers of Shanghai, Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, Arnaud Desplechin's Esther Kahn, Xu Wei's Purple Butterfly or Claire Denis's Beau Travail -- the last of which this film actually resembles quite a bit in the way it refuses to privilege, in fact glosses over, the usual dramatic highlights.
But there are subtle changes to the formula, the kind of tweaks performed by a skilled mechanic on a recalcitrant Jaguar to make it good as new. The detested voiceovers, for example, mostly stay far from the cornpone "My heart was heavy like a thundercloud" Carson McCullersisms that Malick usually favors, and that his amanuensis David Gordon Green has, over a regrettable series of films, rendered unuseable for at least the next two hundred years. Here they are fragmentary, shadows of thoughts more than coherent statements, and instead of stopping the action dead they're superimposed over the dialogue, which they interrupt, contradict, obscure and deepen. Fascinating stuff. For instance, there's a motif of Pocahontas saying "Mother" in voice-over whenever she's in a prayerful mood, and this happens not only when she's staring out at the ( mother ) ocean but also when she's nibbling on Colin Farrell's ear. For her, everything is illuminated. Colin Farrell's voiceovers, in contrast, are self-doubting and waffling, to show how the shock of his experience with Pocahontas has betrayed his linear macho ambition. Malick is thinking symphonically to place us in the heads and hearts of personages long dead; he is using words paradoxically against themselves to destroy the equivocal and deceptive power that they have to betray the soul.
Malick, like Michael Haneke with Cache, also seems to be advancing beyond that goofy liberal habit of "implicating the audience." Those who say that this movie is about nature's superiority to civilization -- and in their favor, there is a voice-over monologue by Colin Farrell as he rows upstream towards a native encampment that is very pagan-communist, "Any man who labors honestly will be free from the stranglehold of landlords," etc. -- may not have noticed that, later on, Pocahontas is sold out by her own people for a copper pot, or that Malick is anything but condescending towards her first exposure to Catholicism, that it in fact frames her experience and brings meaning to her private suffering in a way that epileptic tribal dances can't.