Heady As The Beating Drum

(Note: This review pertains to the 135 minute cut of The New World, and not the 155-minute one screened for critics. Currently, both cuts exist, as well as the promise of an even longer version on DVD. Click here for details.)

Terrence Malick's new film concerns John Smith (Colin Farrell - used well here, and probably cast to secure financing), the princess Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) and John Rolfe (Christian Bale). Christopher Plummer, David Thewlis, Wes Studi and Noah Taylor also have parts, undoubtedly truncated or expanded from their original roles. (Malick is renown for writing, shooting and cutting new material in the thick of production; The Thin Red Line was originally to star Adrien Brody specifically, an experience the actor is still bitter about.)

Although the film is historically rich with detail (used armor sold to the English by Philip II, the recreated Algonquian language), Malick mixes fact with conjecture. He uses the princess' relationships with Smith and Rolfe as dialectical allegories for the English acquisition of power in Virginia, and the slow surrender and erosion of "the naturals".

In this sense the film is brilliant. If you give yourself to Malick's unusual timing and structure - three seperate voices give three voice-overs, and important characters disappear for long periods of time - and pay attention to visual metaphors, the experience is rewarding. The director uses Wagner's "Das Rheingold" overture almost identically to Kubrick's use of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in 2001.

As a surface drama palatable to mainstream audiences, it's iffy; the players, the style and the cinematography are all beautiful and evocative, but it doesn't work as any kind of conventional (read: Hollywood) love/adventure story. Lots of short, impressionistic cuts and layered sound mixing gave Badlands a hand-crafted, personal feel - perfect for that story, and for 1974. This one may be too slow n' sensual for folks expecting Anthony Minghella, and the necessitized edits were undoubtedly made for the sake of general moviegoers. (thx, New Line)

The movie only suffers from a jerky opening. As the English land in Virginia, scenes are too short and pointed, until the movie finds its rhythm and things get cooking between Pocahontas and Smith. (I would assume this beginning, ensemble section played longer originally.) Clashes between the settlers and the natives are given good heft, but the relationship between the two leads buttresses the movie's subtext more than anything else.

If it sounds like I'm speaking in platitudes (which I am) it's because the experience of viewing the movie is unlike anything else presently in theatres. Breaking Malick down technically is near impossible, because his pictures are always so much more than the sum of their parts. He never shows his full hand. This is a movie that demands a lot of its viewers, and begs to be seen in a theatre.

Whereas Thin Red Line concluded in nature's favor (I think), here Malick seems uncharacteristically pessimistic. By the end, even in truncated form, The New World is one of the saddest, most thoughtful historical films of the last three decades, and one of the very best of 2005.