The New World (2005)
Directed by Terrence Malick
A drama about explorer John Smith and the clash between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century.
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Although his feature debut was the stunning "Badlands" (1973) and his follow-up was the even more stunning "Days of Heaven" (1978), his third film, the World War II movie, "The Thin Red Line," didn't come out until 1998.
Like his previous movies — "Badlands," "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line" — "The New World" doesn't resist interpretation so much as it wanders away from it in an incandescent brume of wonder, dread and awe.
Terrence Malick ("Badlands," "Days of Heaven," "The Thin Red Line") joins worlds old and new by combining harsh realities of human nature with an almost mystical passion that bridges a cultural divide.
I liked The Thin Red Line, but parts bored me, and I was less than impressed by Days of Heaven.
With "The New World," that body of work now presents itself in two distinct phases -- Malick's '70s-era classics "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" on the one side and 1998's "The Thin Red Line" and 2005's "The New World" on the other.
As with ''Days of Heaven" (1978) and ''The Thin Red Line" (1998), Malick has made a sprawling cinematic tone poem that paints the characters' thoughts on the soundtrack in the form of inner pensees.
Although his feature debut was the stunning "Badlands" (1973) and his follow-up was the even more stunning "Days of Heaven" (1978), his third film, the World War II movie, "The Thin Red Line," didn't come out until 1998.
Like his previous movies — "Badlands," "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line" — "The New World" doesn't resist interpretation so much as it wanders away from it in an incandescent brume of wonder, dread and awe.
Terrence Malick ("Badlands," "Days of Heaven," "The Thin Red Line") joins worlds old and new by combining harsh realities of human nature with an almost mystical passion that bridges a cultural divide.
With "The New World," that body of work now presents itself in two distinct phases -- Malick's '70s-era classics "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" on the one side and 1998's "The Thin Red Line" and 2005's "The New World" on the other.
One-hit-wonder director Terrence Malick ("Badlands") condemns his overwrought career to final damnation with a flatulent telling of the ill-fated romance between English settler John Smith and Native American Pocahontas.
Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's ''Badlands."
Mozart tinkles over the couple's love, but the music is not the shampoo-commercial jingle of Bo Widerberg's Elvira Madigan, far closer instead to Bresson and Schubert in Au Hassard Balthazar, another acknowledgement of the grave beauties and horrors of the world.
A reunion between her and Smith is arranged, and the flood of feeling, overwhelming yet rigorously kept in check, reminds viewers that Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff is Malick's favorite picture.
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Although his feature debut was the stunning "Badlands" (1973) and his follow-up was the even more stunning "Days of Heaven" (1978), his third film, the World War II movie, "The Thin Red Line," didn't come out until 1998.
Of course in writer/director Terrence Malick's ("The Thin Red Line") world, where visual poetry outweighs story and dialogue, you may be hard pressed to learn the names of many of these characters.
Like his previous movies — "Badlands," "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line" — "The New World" doesn't resist interpretation so much as it wanders away from it in an incandescent brume of wonder, dread and awe.
Malick's previous film is the spectacular 1998 WWII tome The Thin Red Line, which eclipsed its same-year competition Saving Private Ryan by virtue of its staunch existential perspective, not to mention the exclusion of digital dissolves.
Terrence Malick ("Badlands," "Days of Heaven," "The Thin Red Line") joins worlds old and new by combining harsh realities of human nature with an almost mystical passion that bridges a cultural divide.
I liked The Thin Red Line, but parts bored me, and I was less than impressed by Days of Heaven.
The midsection plays like a Malick rework of "The Story of Adele H," Truffaut's tale of a poet's daughter gone mad by unrequited love for a soldier.
(I look forward to what she does next, but even if she does nothing, she'll have this one extraordinary moment, much like Maria Falconetti's great, single performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc .)
And in a career that goes back 33 years, he has directed only four films: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and, now, his version of the Pocahontas legend, The New World .
When last we encountered Pocahontas in movie-land, she had been Disney-fied to allow children to experience a sanitized version of her adventures.
The New World is, in its most reductive form, another version of the legend of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) of the Virginia Company, and Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher, devastating in her first performance) of the Powhatan people of what is now the state of Virginia.
While Malick's film has several striking moments and convincingly captures the kind of raw beauty that Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and his men must have seen when they landed in Virginia, "World" seems woefully unbalanced, spending so much time on externals that it leaves glaring gaps in the backgrounds of Pocahontas, Smith and Pocahontas' British husband, John Rolfe (Christian Bale; coincidentally, Bale and Irene Bedard, who has a brief role in "World" as Pocahontas' mother, also did voice work on Disney's 1995 "Pocahontas").
Years later, "Pocahontas" is brought by her new husband to England for an audience with the Queen, where she's declared royalty, and Kilcher seems more comfortable and suited for that environment than the wilds of America.
In The New World, the Indian princess Pocahontas, played by 14-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher, a German-born actress of American Indian descent, has an even more crucial role.
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Much of the film's first hour reminded me of Dances with Wolves.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course: like all Malick films, it's a treatise on the relationship between the natural landscape and the human beings inhabiting it; it's a mild critique of the white European destruction of the Native American way of life (though neither as forthright, nor as mildewy in its political earnestness, as something like Dances with Wolves ); it is a tribute to the founding principals of the American democracy, while recognising those principals are more honored in the breach than the observance.
It's certainly a great idea, and in the hands of a fine filmmaker like Malick, one would expect something quite remarkable, especially considering the number of great films about the interaction between Europeans and Native Americans that have come before, like "Dances with Wolves" and "The Last of the Mohicans."
I have no idea how much of this comes from genuine acting talent and how much comes from Malick luckily finding the perfect personality to embody the role (in much the way that Roland Joffe did when he hired newcomer Haing S. Ngor for “The Killing Fields”) but the end result is a stunning performance that utterly overwhelms the work from her more seasoned co-stars Farrell and Bale–both are good in their roles but good only goes so far when you are up against the real thing.