(Credit: www.impawards.com)
Writer/Director:
Terrence Malick
Cast:
Colin Farrell……….Capt. John Smith
Q’orianka Kilcher……….Pocahontas
Christopher Plummer………Capt. Newport
Christian Bale……….John Rolfe
August Schellenberg……….Powhatan
Wes Studi……….Opechancanough
David Thewlis……….Wingfield
New Line Cinema presents The New World. Running time: 130 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some intense battle sequences).
Terrence Malick is not your typical filmmaker; he’s a renaissance man. Malick has taught philosophy at M.I.T., and is currently working with the University of Texas’ Burnt Orange screenwriting program. When he isn’t giving a lecture he’s standing behind the camera. In the span of 33 years Malick has made only four films. But he doesn’t limit himself to the Hollywood credo of moviemaking. He makes films the way he lives his life, as a modern transcendentalist. Now, the beliefs of a transcendentalist are based on a search for reality through spiritual intuition. As a professor of philosophy Malick tends to evoke this sort of belief in the stories he tells on screen. It must work since critics and fans alike consider all of his films masterpieces.
His latest, The New World, is his own interpretation of the story of Pocahontas and her tribe and the English settlers at Jamestown. Unlike Walt Disney’s animated version back in the 1990s, you won’t hear Mel Gibson as the voice of John Smith or be treated to light-hearted family fare. Instead, the director does away with all the luster and lore of the timeless love story, and shows us how different the English and Indians seemed to one another.
Malick imagines how the two civilizations met and began to communicate. At the beginning both groups were in awe of each other. The Naturals (the name the English refer to them as) stared in amazement as they saw three ships sailing to their edge of paradise. The Englishmen, notably John Smith (Colin Farrell), noticed how there was no jealously or envy in the Naturals. It’s as if there was not a word in their language to describe the feeling.
While many directors use nature or exotic landscapes as a backdrop to tell their stories, Malick, like he has with Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, brings it to the foreground in his latest opus. There isn’t much dialogue in the film, as the director likes to have characters communicate with their innermost thoughts. That is why The New World is told through the narration of three principle characters: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and John Rolfe.
Although never actually referred to as Pocahontas, or any name for that matter, she is the character that is central to the storytelling, and the link between two civilizations. Played by 14-year-old newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher, Pocahontas and John Smith didn’t have a romance like children’s stories lead you to believe. Their relationship develops after she saves Smith’s life by throwing herself on top of his body before he can be killed. The death sentence came at the order of her father, but she saw something in Smith that the other Naturals could not: curiosity. Curiosity for Smith, and sympathy for him and the strange visitors.
Pocahontas sees Smith as this courageous man who went in search of the Naturals to see where they inhabit; in reality, he’s a scalawag who was under a death sentence by the leader of the English expedition, Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer), because of his talk of committing a mutiny.
Despite the language barrier, both Smith and Pocahontas are able to create some semblance of a relationship through the new feelings they have for each other. In narration Smith describes her as one who has “exceeded the others not only in beauty and proportion, but in wit and spirit, too.” He teaches her simple words for sky, eyes, and lips in his own language. The scene, while serene, helps further their love through discovery.
As the story progresses, her father Powhatan (August Schellenberg), the chief of the Naturals, at one time would have killed her for wanting to know more about the visitors, but he is much too old. Instead, the tribe abandons her to live with the English. There she encounters John Rolfe (Christian Bale), a loyal and honest settler, and a man much different than Smith. Rolfe first thought of the young Pocahontas as a woman that was “broken, lost.” Years later, Rolfe and Pocahontas are married and he takes her to London to meet with the king. All the townsfolk admire her.
While it would be easy to say this film is just about man’s journey to “the new world” and meeting its inhabitants for the first time, The New World is based on a different kind of discovery. The love and strangeness that Pocahontas has for the visitors in a way brought two societies together. She had an ability to grasp the whole picture even when she could not speak the language. She was a pioneer and a visionary, much like the director himself.
Writer’s note: This review is based on a viewing of the re-edited version of The New World, which runs 130 minutes; the original 150-minute version will be coming to DVD later this year.
