The New World
I didn't know what to expect, but it was definitely an art film. It made me so incredibly angry I was shaking in the car on the way home. Not because it was bad, (although it definitely falls in an ambivalent, difficult, category), but because it evoked things in me I hadn't realized were there, most notably a sense of betrayal on the part of the princess, who was betrayed by men.
The theatre was crowded, I was asked to move, but declined, as I was on a aisle seat and it wouldn't have made any difference. Two very large people sat like me, the woman pushing the edges of her coat onto my seat, despite the presence of a seat on the other side where it easily could have been deposited. She stank like deodorized feminine hygiene products.
The movie... what can I say, deeply flawed, deeply upsetting, and something that really deserves both to be seen and talked about. I think many years from now Terrence Mallick will be revered and screened in the same way as Stanley Kubrick, although he has an incredibly different style. (Like Stanley Kubrick his films are lengthy, self-indulgent, and controversial.)
The script was incoherent, which doesn't really matter as the story was told in pictures, though I must say the plummy declamatory style of Christopher Plummer is in sharp contrast to Colin Farrell's mumbled dialect. And the princess kept saying weird "mother" poems, it was only later in the film I realized they were prayers.
It is non-linear. The story progresses from beginning to end, but within that there are weird jump cuts, and repeated scenes, and scenes that you see that don't actually take place narratively, and weird moments when first you see the river flowing one direction and then you see it flowing the other. It would make sense because it's a tidal river, and they do that, but it's also a visual clue that things are not so straight forward as they seem.
The music was also really strange. There was the movie theme, which was a kind of minimalist repeating theme of upward intervals; [Note 2009: which the author now recognizes as Wagner's main theme from Das Rheingold, which choice has interesting implications in and of itself] then there was some weird orchestrated requiem type music WITH A PIANO which really drove me nuts until the end when they arrive back in England and they play period music.
The last fifteen minutes of the film were an A-HA! moment for me. Previously everything had seemed really artificial and stylized. Especially early in the film, with the way "the naturals" move, and with the princess always going on like a mime. The pacing is torturosly slow, but there is so much detail it almost feels that while the pace is slow, the visuals are torrential. But the whole point of this set up is to give the viewer a sense of the truly alien feel of Jamesian England, something we've seen in films before, and almost take for granted, looks and sounds truly alien.
I think that's what this movie is trying to do. Make the "New" World and the Olde seem new again. And to an extent it succeeded, and yet it broke my heart. Roger Ebert's review captures a lot of the experience of seeing the film, and how it does and doesn't follow the familiar narrative of the tale. All I can say is that I agree with his assessment of the visionary. This film, like Brokeback deconstructs another one of the Great American Myths. I keep using the word "deconstruct" but a better word would be "iconoclasm." These films are pulling down the stories, long built, that we have held near and dear; we are left with a horrible sense of betrayal and not-rightness.
Ebert claims this film does not contain an awareness of the history that follows; but the audience does... and the credits are covered with pictures, many of them lithocuts of atrocity, which are reminders of the world outside the film.
I can't even touch the native issues, because I don't feel I have the awareness or the authority to talk about it aside from saying it was deeply uncomfortable. But the princess' narrative in this film is like a metaphor for what the patriarchical culture has done to women. Not that her previous culture was terribly kind to her either...
But it seemed a horrible tragedy that the men who first came to this country, brought their shadows with them and played them out on grand scale across a continent. Whether it was the soldiers or the preachers, it's like taking the most fanatical fringes of society to Mars and letting them recreate a more warped and stringent version of the same.
RB mentioned the movie Contact in one of his horoscopes this week, how the Jodi Foster character looks around at the (sadly lacking in vision) "new world" and says, "They should've sent a poet." This movie for me begged the question of what the New World could've been had it been envisioned differently, had the explorers been different people, had the natives taken different action. What could've been, and what still could be. What vision could prevent the horrible betrayals between individuals, between groups of people, and within ourselves?
(Speaking of betrayal, Colin Farrell, whose appeal I have never seen before, has self-awareness to his acting, where he is able to project his self-loathing all over the screen. He is truly an actor for our times.)
Forget everything you ever learned about the princess, John Smith (so aptly named!) and first contact in the New World. Just watch it and see how it all unfolds, and imagine what could have been and what still could be. It is truly a visionary film, in a time when we are desperately in need of new visions.
It was also still a film that deeply upset me, and I can't recommend it to the vast majority of film goers, who have neither the patience or the understanding to appreciate this trying and uncomfortable, visionary and heartbreaking film, as evidenced by the number of people leaving the theatre asking, "Maud, did that make any sense to you?"
Manhola Dargis sums it up much better than me:
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=304430
The theatre was crowded, I was asked to move, but declined, as I was on a aisle seat and it wouldn't have made any difference. Two very large people sat like me, the woman pushing the edges of her coat onto my seat, despite the presence of a seat on the other side where it easily could have been deposited. She stank like deodorized feminine hygiene products.
The movie... what can I say, deeply flawed, deeply upsetting, and something that really deserves both to be seen and talked about. I think many years from now Terrence Mallick will be revered and screened in the same way as Stanley Kubrick, although he has an incredibly different style. (Like Stanley Kubrick his films are lengthy, self-indulgent, and controversial.)
The script was incoherent, which doesn't really matter as the story was told in pictures, though I must say the plummy declamatory style of Christopher Plummer is in sharp contrast to Colin Farrell's mumbled dialect. And the princess kept saying weird "mother" poems, it was only later in the film I realized they were prayers.
It is non-linear. The story progresses from beginning to end, but within that there are weird jump cuts, and repeated scenes, and scenes that you see that don't actually take place narratively, and weird moments when first you see the river flowing one direction and then you see it flowing the other. It would make sense because it's a tidal river, and they do that, but it's also a visual clue that things are not so straight forward as they seem.
The music was also really strange. There was the movie theme, which was a kind of minimalist repeating theme of upward intervals; [Note 2009: which the author now recognizes as Wagner's main theme from Das Rheingold, which choice has interesting implications in and of itself] then there was some weird orchestrated requiem type music WITH A PIANO which really drove me nuts until the end when they arrive back in England and they play period music.
The last fifteen minutes of the film were an A-HA! moment for me. Previously everything had seemed really artificial and stylized. Especially early in the film, with the way "the naturals" move, and with the princess always going on like a mime. The pacing is torturosly slow, but there is so much detail it almost feels that while the pace is slow, the visuals are torrential. But the whole point of this set up is to give the viewer a sense of the truly alien feel of Jamesian England, something we've seen in films before, and almost take for granted, looks and sounds truly alien.
I think that's what this movie is trying to do. Make the "New" World and the Olde seem new again. And to an extent it succeeded, and yet it broke my heart. Roger Ebert's review captures a lot of the experience of seeing the film, and how it does and doesn't follow the familiar narrative of the tale. All I can say is that I agree with his assessment of the visionary. This film, like Brokeback deconstructs another one of the Great American Myths. I keep using the word "deconstruct" but a better word would be "iconoclasm." These films are pulling down the stories, long built, that we have held near and dear; we are left with a horrible sense of betrayal and not-rightness.
Ebert claims this film does not contain an awareness of the history that follows; but the audience does... and the credits are covered with pictures, many of them lithocuts of atrocity, which are reminders of the world outside the film.
I can't even touch the native issues, because I don't feel I have the awareness or the authority to talk about it aside from saying it was deeply uncomfortable. But the princess' narrative in this film is like a metaphor for what the patriarchical culture has done to women. Not that her previous culture was terribly kind to her either...
But it seemed a horrible tragedy that the men who first came to this country, brought their shadows with them and played them out on grand scale across a continent. Whether it was the soldiers or the preachers, it's like taking the most fanatical fringes of society to Mars and letting them recreate a more warped and stringent version of the same.
RB mentioned the movie Contact in one of his horoscopes this week, how the Jodi Foster character looks around at the (sadly lacking in vision) "new world" and says, "They should've sent a poet." This movie for me begged the question of what the New World could've been had it been envisioned differently, had the explorers been different people, had the natives taken different action. What could've been, and what still could be. What vision could prevent the horrible betrayals between individuals, between groups of people, and within ourselves?
(Speaking of betrayal, Colin Farrell, whose appeal I have never seen before, has self-awareness to his acting, where he is able to project his self-loathing all over the screen. He is truly an actor for our times.)
Forget everything you ever learned about the princess, John Smith (so aptly named!) and first contact in the New World. Just watch it and see how it all unfolds, and imagine what could have been and what still could be. It is truly a visionary film, in a time when we are desperately in need of new visions.
It was also still a film that deeply upset me, and I can't recommend it to the vast majority of film goers, who have neither the patience or the understanding to appreciate this trying and uncomfortable, visionary and heartbreaking film, as evidenced by the number of people leaving the theatre asking, "Maud, did that make any sense to you?"
Manhola Dargis sums it up much better than me:
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=304430