The New World

A conflicted, intimate masterpiece on an epic scale, Terrence Malick's A New World retells the story of the 17th Century British settlement at Jamestown with a perfect marriage of sweeping melodrama and potent imagery. I was not one of the many dazzled by Malick's prior outing, The Thin Red Line, a tedious and self-important series of sketches about the Battle of Guadalcanal.

Caught up, perhaps, in the grand scale of the undertaking, Malick lost focus completely in The Thin Red Line, repeating similar, basic observations - "man's inhumanity to man," say - through a variety of vignettes about soldiers. The constant, droning monologues in voice-over, actors reciting ponderous lines of random dialogue over just about every sequence in the film, rendered Malick's film almost unwatchable.

Though he has regrettably not eliminated the unneccessary and trite voice-over narrative, just about all of the other obnoxious excesses of Thin Red Line have been streamlined with this new film. Rather than attempt to tell several stories to give the viewer a sense of the challenges faced by Jamestown settlers, Malick sets up a much more basic story in two halves.



Part One follows Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and his fellow English settlers as they land in present-day Virginia and establish the Jamestown colony. The film's striking, powerful and nearly-wordless beginning captures the mystery and wonder of this immensely significant event. The first meeting between the Native Americans and the colonists who would soon invade their lands and enslave their people.

Malick contrasts the brutality and avarice of the Englishmen with the simplicity and gentleness of the natives, but unlike in The Thin Red Line, he refuses to settle for easily-digestible binary oppositions. Rather than point out the divergence between peaceful Indians and sadistic Europeans, Malick studies the way in which the two groups interact and influence one another. Soon enough, the similarities between the two societies seem to outweigh the considerable differences.

Just as Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) is advised by Captain Wingfield (David Thewlis, clearly enjoying a brief but sinister role) to strike hard and fast against the natives as a demonstration of strength, Chief Powhatan (August Schellenberg) receives hawkish consul from Opechancanough (Wes Studi). Just as Captain Smith settles in the native village to escape the crude conditions and political duplicity of Jamestown, the native chief's daughter, Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), finds solace from exile with the white settlers. In one of the film's most warm scenes, a renamed and Westernized Pocahontas discusses regret with her English maid. The nature metaphor the maid relates, about trees that continue to grow even after losing branches, could have been taken directly from a Native American saying.

Malick additionally finds inspiration in the small misunderstandings that highlight where these two cultures differ most sharply. As he takes off on a voyage to the Old World, Opechancanough remarks that he looks forward to seeing the God of the Europeans of whom they speak. For a man who worships nature itself, God is a tangible entity that can be experienced in an immediate and physical way. When Smith demonstrates gunpowder for the natives, in the hopes that they will want to trade for some, he winds up terrifying everyone and possibly sparking a feud between the two peoples.



The film's second half finds Pocahontas (baptized and renamed Rebecca) marrying tobacco farmer John Rolfe and moving briefly to England. In this section, Malick explores with great success a kind of historical ripple effect. I expected the same old Thin Red Line thesis - that civilization corrupts the simple wonder of the natural world. But instead, Rebecca finds an odd kind of joy in England, a realization that both worlds in which she has lived offer great beauty and cruel sacrifice. London features bustling marketplaces, grandiose stone architecture and the glittery trappings of royalty, but can anything in the Old World match the serenity of the woodland utopia through which Pocahontas had raced as a girl?

1616 London been artfully and vividly brought to life, and sequences like one in which Opechancanough paces through a stately English garden really drive home all the film's melancholy insights without any dialgoue neccessary. The connection between this man and the natural world, and the correlation between the manicured shrubbery of a British manor and the forests of North America, doesn't need any disembodied spoken-word explanations.

I'm telling you, that voice-over is a real shame. It never enhances the meaning of a given scene. Most of the film is told in montage, individual shots that move the story forward and give a sense of the action, but that rarely congeal into dramatic scenes with a beginning, middle and end. That's fine, because a Malick film only adheres to a narrative in the loosest sense anyway. The films are about concepts, ideas and moods as opposed to air-tight plots. But rather than create a story out of the various, semi-connected shots and montages, all the New World voice over does is give you some generally-pointless and not particularly interesting inner monologue.

Colin Farrell will be walking through tall grass, watching Pocahontas dance around, and thinks to himself, "Who is this person? Who am I? What is this feeling inside my heart?" Meh. I don't need to hear that, Terry. The scene speaks for itself. All Malick accomplishes with this technique is stepping over the wonderful and largely non-verbal lead performances by Kilcher, Farrell and Bale, not to mention the gorgeous, sparkling cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki and the beautiful score by Howard Shore. (Shore's intense, brooding score easily ranks among 2005's best).

It's a rare misstep in a film that succeeds far more often than it fails. To see some thought-provoking, relatively-authentic American history realized on screen with this amount of artistry and detail is truly a gratifying experience. Plenty of films take on stories from history as their subjects, but how many bother to provide such a complete and satisfying picture of life on multiple continents while making poignant insights into Western society's relationship to the world and to itself?