The New World
If you plan to watch The New World, here’s a tip for you. If you can maintain your interest through the first 5 minutes, you will probably enjoy the rest of it.
Director Terence Malick is not known for making extremely accessible films; among fellow filmmakers however, he enjoys a mythical reputation approaching that of the late Stanley Kubrick. And during a sitting of The New World, several comparisons came to mind. But more of that later.
Back to those first 5 minutes. The film opens with stunning shots of the English fleet entering the James river estuary in Virginia circa 1607. Here, the sea-weary English sailors, including a perenially unshaven Colin Farrel as Captain John Smith chained below-deck, are given their first look at this impossibly vast and beautiful world. For the music, James Horner has borrowed the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first installment of the monumental Ring cycle. And what an entry statement it is; a single monumental orchestral chord lasting 5 relentless minutes, the strings rising in soaring arpeggios to fever pitch.
The story departs little from the well-known tale of John Smith’s deliverance from certain death at the hands of the natives by the Indian princess Pocahontas, her marriage to an English landowner (Christian Bale) and her subsequent journey to England. It is a tale so over-familiar, the disneyfied version having long passed into the corpus of American founding myths, that to strip this seminal story of a clash of cultures of its historical baggage would seem an uphill task. While Malick has chosen to retain the apocryphal love relationship between Pocahontas and Smith, he succeeds in drawing upon the few surviving records of the time to create an utterly believable snapshot of a moment long lost to history.
With stunning cinematography, Malick brings to life an image of the pristine, untouched new world, a place so alien and new that even the name America, with all its later connotations, never surfaces; even the familiar-sounding names of Pocahontas and Powhatan are never once used. All this serves to highlight the impression that this is the new world as you have never seen it, and probably never see again.
Here, every marsh, every leaf, every blade of wild grass is rendered in all its unspoilt grandeur. Sometimes it feels like watching a very long National Geographic special, but the vision is so compelling that you can’t help but be mesmerized at the visuals. The native Indian tribes are portrayed with Rousseau-esque innocence as natural children of this undiscovered Eden. Here Malick’s obsession with detail and authenticity is most conspicuous; the customs and clothing of the native Indians are rendered meticulously; contrasted with the squabbling, unkempt band of Europeans, they move with a touching mixture of childlike caution and wonder. Even the language of Pocahontas, extinct for centuries, has been resurrected by linguists using historical documents and cross-pollination with related surviving languages. The result is a credible historical document in itself.
Most of the detractors complain about the slow pace of the narrative and the unconventional way Malick has chosen to let it unfold. Movement is largely through a lengthy series of stylized montages where the inner thoughts of the main characters are narrated as voice-overs; some view this as overly self-indulgent, a case of style over substance. For me, I found some of the scenes confusing; the rapid short-cutting of contrasting images, the fact that it’s not clear to whom some of the voice-overs are addressed to (mostly to God, the Great Spirit, the ether, or no one in particular) makes it hard to follow.
In Q’Orianka Kilcher, Malick could not have found a better vehicle to translate the themes of innocence lost and found. As the symbol of the undiscovered world, the story of her journey from naïve love, treason and exile, to self-discovery is the central spine of the film. An astonishing 14 years old at the time of filming, Kilcher plays the free-spirited princess with a finesse and tenderness way beyond her years. While not beautiful in a classic sense, her long facial features, shy as a horse and seemingly utterly unaware of the camera’s presence, convey an utter lack of pretension which is refreshing.
Farrel plays Smith as the reluctant leader who falls in love with this dream of paradise, but for whom the dream remains an illusion from which he must awaken; he is charged by the king to discover the way to the Pacific and the East Indies, but never reaches his goal. Similarly, the film strips him of his role as discoverer by having him leave midway, leaving Pocahontas to navigate her inner journey alone. However, despite having the lion’s share of the billing, Farrel’s lengthy screen time never quite translates into a character for which we genuinely care about a great deal.
Christian Bale on the other hand, despite appearing late and quite suddenly in the film, plays John Rolfe with great tenderness, revealing the character’s inner goodness little by little. The remaining roles, including Christopher Plummer as a stoic puritan leader and David Thewlis as Smith’s scheming subordinate, remain little more than stock characters.
All in all, The New World succeeds as a feat of non-verbal storytelling, but at the expense of the coherence of a traditional narrative. Not that it’s a bad thing, but you need to have the legs for that kind of experience; the relentless Wagner chord occurs no less than 3 times throughout. Think of it as a symphonic poem, think Space Odyssey. It moves as slowly as the ripples on the banks of the James River, but it’s a feast for the eyes nonetheless. I liked it.
Director Terence Malick is not known for making extremely accessible films; among fellow filmmakers however, he enjoys a mythical reputation approaching that of the late Stanley Kubrick. And during a sitting of The New World, several comparisons came to mind. But more of that later.
Back to those first 5 minutes. The film opens with stunning shots of the English fleet entering the James river estuary in Virginia circa 1607. Here, the sea-weary English sailors, including a perenially unshaven Colin Farrel as Captain John Smith chained below-deck, are given their first look at this impossibly vast and beautiful world. For the music, James Horner has borrowed the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first installment of the monumental Ring cycle. And what an entry statement it is; a single monumental orchestral chord lasting 5 relentless minutes, the strings rising in soaring arpeggios to fever pitch.
The story departs little from the well-known tale of John Smith’s deliverance from certain death at the hands of the natives by the Indian princess Pocahontas, her marriage to an English landowner (Christian Bale) and her subsequent journey to England. It is a tale so over-familiar, the disneyfied version having long passed into the corpus of American founding myths, that to strip this seminal story of a clash of cultures of its historical baggage would seem an uphill task. While Malick has chosen to retain the apocryphal love relationship between Pocahontas and Smith, he succeeds in drawing upon the few surviving records of the time to create an utterly believable snapshot of a moment long lost to history.
With stunning cinematography, Malick brings to life an image of the pristine, untouched new world, a place so alien and new that even the name America, with all its later connotations, never surfaces; even the familiar-sounding names of Pocahontas and Powhatan are never once used. All this serves to highlight the impression that this is the new world as you have never seen it, and probably never see again.
Here, every marsh, every leaf, every blade of wild grass is rendered in all its unspoilt grandeur. Sometimes it feels like watching a very long National Geographic special, but the vision is so compelling that you can’t help but be mesmerized at the visuals. The native Indian tribes are portrayed with Rousseau-esque innocence as natural children of this undiscovered Eden. Here Malick’s obsession with detail and authenticity is most conspicuous; the customs and clothing of the native Indians are rendered meticulously; contrasted with the squabbling, unkempt band of Europeans, they move with a touching mixture of childlike caution and wonder. Even the language of Pocahontas, extinct for centuries, has been resurrected by linguists using historical documents and cross-pollination with related surviving languages. The result is a credible historical document in itself.
Most of the detractors complain about the slow pace of the narrative and the unconventional way Malick has chosen to let it unfold. Movement is largely through a lengthy series of stylized montages where the inner thoughts of the main characters are narrated as voice-overs; some view this as overly self-indulgent, a case of style over substance. For me, I found some of the scenes confusing; the rapid short-cutting of contrasting images, the fact that it’s not clear to whom some of the voice-overs are addressed to (mostly to God, the Great Spirit, the ether, or no one in particular) makes it hard to follow.
In Q’Orianka Kilcher, Malick could not have found a better vehicle to translate the themes of innocence lost and found. As the symbol of the undiscovered world, the story of her journey from naïve love, treason and exile, to self-discovery is the central spine of the film. An astonishing 14 years old at the time of filming, Kilcher plays the free-spirited princess with a finesse and tenderness way beyond her years. While not beautiful in a classic sense, her long facial features, shy as a horse and seemingly utterly unaware of the camera’s presence, convey an utter lack of pretension which is refreshing.
Farrel plays Smith as the reluctant leader who falls in love with this dream of paradise, but for whom the dream remains an illusion from which he must awaken; he is charged by the king to discover the way to the Pacific and the East Indies, but never reaches his goal. Similarly, the film strips him of his role as discoverer by having him leave midway, leaving Pocahontas to navigate her inner journey alone. However, despite having the lion’s share of the billing, Farrel’s lengthy screen time never quite translates into a character for which we genuinely care about a great deal.
Christian Bale on the other hand, despite appearing late and quite suddenly in the film, plays John Rolfe with great tenderness, revealing the character’s inner goodness little by little. The remaining roles, including Christopher Plummer as a stoic puritan leader and David Thewlis as Smith’s scheming subordinate, remain little more than stock characters.
All in all, The New World succeeds as a feat of non-verbal storytelling, but at the expense of the coherence of a traditional narrative. Not that it’s a bad thing, but you need to have the legs for that kind of experience; the relentless Wagner chord occurs no less than 3 times throughout. Think of it as a symphonic poem, think Space Odyssey. It moves as slowly as the ripples on the banks of the James River, but it’s a feast for the eyes nonetheless. I liked it.