Erika Wilhite
Published: January 25, 2006
It’s beautiful, like a full-motion painting. It’s abstract and meditative, like a picture poem. It’s a romantic re-telling of the life and loves of Pocahontas, like a historical novel more concerned with feelings than with facts. But the most important thing viewers need to know going into it is this: “The New World” is 2 hours long.
It’s by no means the longest movie ever made, but it’s one of the longest movies ever made in which next to nothing ever happens and barely a word is spoken. OK, that’s not exactly true. There are plenty of art movies that are much longer in which no words are spoken. And, in fact, plenty of words are spoken in Terrence Malick’s movie; it’s just that they are spoken in whispery, dreamlike voiceovers. The result is a movie full of impressionistic images and artsy pretensions that plays like a 150-minute Calvin Klein Obsession commercial.
The opening sets the tone for this tone-poemlike experience. Water provides mirror-like reflections of clouds and sky as a woman’s voice delivers an incantation about Mother Earth and rising souls. The words fade, but the water-sky-earth images continue as other ambient sounds rise: bird calls, wind-rustled trees, the lapping of water. Writer and director Malick (“The Thin Red Line,” “Days of Heaven”) doesn’t want you to just watch his movie, he wants you to immerse yourself in it.
All this introductory immersion ends with the subtitle, “Virginia 1607.” Then comes a montage of ships arriving, men in armor disembarking. While natives hide in the shadows and watch curiously, the explorers start tramping about as their leaders issues orders to “chop down every tree” and build a fort and watchtowers. The European imperialists have arrived.
For the most part, the story here is that there is no story. Colin Farrell is John Smith, who soon falls into a wordless love with the chief’s daughter (newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher) while she even more quickly, and unaccountably, not only falls in love with him but learns to speak English with an English accent, no less.
Much of the first half of the movie is spent in a “Dances with Wolves”-like vignette in which John Smith is captured by the Natives, lives with them, learns their ways and falls in love. When he returns to his people, he finds them old-world ugly and brutish, utterly lacking in the new-world serenity and innocence of his new-world friends. Amplifying this connection is the presence of Wes Studi, reprising his “Dances with Wolves” role as the scary warrior.
As time goes on (and on), John Smith leaves and a kindly tobacco farmer (Christian Bale) arrives as Pocahontas goes from Native free spirit to civilized repressed soul, literally bound in corset and high heels. She marries the farmer, has a child, visits the King and Queen of England, and so on amid extended sequences in which Malick trains his cameras on the play of sun and wind on tree leaves or the patterns of bark and moss on tree trunks. Lots of trees, in other words.
All of this is presumably intended as some rumination on things lost and gained: innocence and wisdom, paradise and civilization. Malick refuses to allow things such as character development or storytelling distract him from deeper concerns. That’s honorable in theory, but in practice it makes for weird, frustrating viewing.
For example, he spends lots of time contemplating water rippling over a stone or, you know, the bark of a tree. But major life events such as childbirth or a sea voyage? That’s just an off-screen blip of time. This is a movie that at any given moment could end in five seconds or five hours and make as much sense as it’s ever going to.
Whether that sounds like an endorsement or an indictment probably foretells how much you’ll enjoy “The New World.”