The New World Review
by Rick Ferguson (filmgeek65 AT hotmail DOT com)February 20th, 2006
As of this writing, Terrence Malick's THE NEW WORLD is playing on only about 800 screens in the United States. It's earned less than $8 million in domestic box office on a $30 million budget. By the end of next week, it'll be gone from theaters. Given that relatively modest budget against international grosses, DVD sales and rentals and various other money-grubbing tactics, the film probably won't end up a complete financial debacle. But neither is it going to land anyone involved in its making that summer home in the Hamptons they've been dreaming about.
The film has also faired only middling well with the critics (being an after-the-fact critic, I can report that it's running a mediocre 57% Favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes). It's been shut out at the Academy Awards, snagging only a token, if no less deserved, nomination for Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography. This combined financial and critical yawn ensures that THE NEW WORLD will suffer the sad and lonely fate of hotel room rentals, endless repeats on Starz and as $9.99 used DVDs for sale in soon-to-be-extinct Blockbuster stores. Soon enough, it will fade into oblivion.
So here I stand, one lonely voice on the Net, in opposition to this cruel and undeserved fate. Gay shepherds, effete true-crime writers and bigoted Los Angelinos aside, THE NEW WORLD is in fact the best picture of 2005. Yes, it's painfully slow. Yes, it's often confounding. Yes, it's self-indulgent. But it's also fucking brilliant. Don't let all those awful hack critics toiling away for Old Media fool you. These are the same guys trying to convince you that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is deep. Don't listen to them. They don't get it.
THE NEW WORLD begins with a tracking shot of water. A trio of ships, owned by the Virginia Company and bearing 103 would-be colonists, glides up the mouth of the James River and weighs anchor on the shores of what will become Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. It's 1607- Shakespeare has yet to write The Tempest. Shackled in the hold of one ship is Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), a mutinous soldier of fortune scheduled to be hanged shortly after landfall. But the expedition's leader, Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer), foresees that a man of Smith's talents will prove useful in taming the swampy wilderness where the Jamestown colony will rise, and orders him spared. Smith's mission: to seek out the local native tribes-the "Naturals"- and attempt to trade with them.
The rest of the story you'll remember from American history class. Malick deftly blends historical fact with romantic legend to spin the tale of how Smith came to meet the teenaged daughter of the Native American chief Powhatan, of how she saved his life, of their blossoming friendship, of how she saved the fledgling colony from winter starvation, of her exile from her own tribe and her eventual assimilation by English society. True to reality, no one in the film calls her "Pocahontas"-a nickname meaning "playful one." But from the moment she arrives onscreen, embodied as a living forest sprite by the amazing young actress Q'Orianka Kilcher, it's clear that THE NEW WORLD is her story. Through her, we learn much about our own origins as a nation- and also something about Paradise lost.
Water imagery permeates the film. Water both unites and divides the new world and the old. To the natives, water represents life; to the colonists, it represents commerce. THE NEW WORLD is constructed of similarly compelling contrasts- between freedom and captivity; between interiors and exteriors; between manmade structures and pristine wilderness; between what might have been and what will never be. Malick captures perfectly the utter sense of alienation, of otherness, inherent in the first meeting of the two opposing cultures; imagine taking a spaceship to Pluto, setting up a space colony without having much idea of how you're going to survive once your supplies run out, and then meeting a tribe of purple-skinned Plutonians with three heads, six arms and multi-tentacled sex organs. That'll give you some idea of what the natives and the colonists experienced when they laid eyes on each other for the first time.
In a lesser film that mistook political correctness for intelligence- in other words, if it was directed by Rob Reiner-the natives would have been portrayed as innocent proto-hippy flower children and the colonists as rapacious invaders. But Malick posits nobility and treachery on both sides. Led by Pocahontas, the natives keep the colonists from starving to death. But when it becomes clear that they aren't going anywhere, the natives plot to drive them off. Likewise, the colonists are treacherous and cruel- but when Pocahontas is banished by her tribe, they take her in and treat her as an honored guest.
What I learned from THE NEW WORLD was that the meeting of John Smith and Pocahontas represented one of those critical fault lines of history. When the natives and the colonists first encountered one another, was bloodshed inevitable? Pocahontas herself embodies the promise of a different future, in which these opposing cultures would learn to coexist, to build a new nation together. As portrayed by Kilcher, she's a relentlessly curious explorer, enamored of life, and she perceives a kindred spirit in Smith. Even when she is used badly and betrayed, she exhibits forgiveness and learns to accept love. She represents the tragic loss of opportunity for the old world, as embodied by Smith, to make a happy marriage with the new one. Of course, an American history without native genocide would mean that we'd have no tradition of Western films, no John Wayne, no DANCES WITH WOLVES. But wouldn't that be a small price to pay?
The knock on Malick is that he's the "waving grass" director- a naturalist by disposition, if not by trade, he positions in each of his films his human protagonists as extensions of and in opposition to the natural world. You get your insert shots of flora and fauna, your obtuse voiceover narrations, your long takes in which nothing much happens. I was one of those who thought this sensibility got in the way of the storytelling in THE THIN RED LINE, transforming what might have been the best war movie of the 20th Century into a butt-numbing endurance test. But Malick's style is ideally suited for this tale; indeed, it's an essential component. Like most works of art, THE NEW WORLD requires attention, yielding its considerable treasures only to those willing to settle into its slowly undulating rhythms. There aren't enough of us to make a film like this one anything but a box office afterthought. But if you're willing to meet Malick halfway, he'll blow your mind.
***
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