2005 / 135 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

“The New World” is the sort of movie that you just bask in. It’s a highly visual experience. You could watch it without any sound and still understand everything that’s going on. The dialogue is almost inconsequential. Not to say that the dialogue is bad, not at all. Some of it is quite poetic. It’s just that the film is a primarily visual and emotional experience.

Terrence Malick and his collaborators have created something truly magical in “The New World”. They’ve created a haunting, mesmerizing spectacle of the early days of American colonization. At the heart of the story is the arrival of English explorers to the shores of America (Virginia, I think, though I’m not entirely sure and the movie doesn’t really specify as far as I can remember). The explorers’ captain expressly tells them to establish a good relationship with the indigenous people on these shores. After all, if things don’t go that well, they will have no one but these people to rely upon.

The settlers and the “naturals”, as Christopher Plummer’s captain calls them, establish a fragile, uneasy peace that is doomed from the start. The barrier of language as well as the natural animosity of these Europeans toward a culture so different and intimidating to them soon sabotages their best efforts and Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) is sent up the river to broker a more permanent sort of peace. At first, things go badly. Most of the crew accompanying him is killed or lost (the movie is rather vague on that point) and Smith himself is soon captured by the naturals. He is sentenced to death and the sentence is nearly carried out until a young woman (Q’Orianna Kilcher) steps between him and the weapon meant to kill him and pleads for his life. This is the beginning of an intimate friendship between the two of them. The young native princess falls in love for this strange brute from across the sea but Smith warns her (and probably himself) not to become too attached. He senses that there are too many barriers and obstacles between them for the relationship to last, though he longs to abandon his responsibilities and take up with this charming, amazing young woman and flee into the paradise of the new world he and the others have discovered.

America is portrayed as paradise in this film. It is a place unspoiled and majestic. It is a Garden of Eden where the white men come to introduce the concept of Original Sin. The film offers a fascinating take on this subject matter and I don’t think I’m going too far when I say that no filmmaker could have pulled this off like Malick. He makes the plot simple to follow without explicitly spelling too many things out. He portrays the relationship between Smith and Kilcher’s princess with a charming innocence, yet there are hints of something more carnal, sexy moments that hint at a physical relationship that may or may not have taken place. This relationship haunts and affects every other aspect of the film and the plot and it is well done. Farrell does a good job as a dreamer who is ultimately a harsh realist. And Kilcher is simply stunning as Pocahontas (though she is never called by that name in the film, perhaps to evade any images of the earlier Disney film with its wacky raccoons and talking trees). I’ve never seen her in anything else but I can’t wait to see where her career takes her from here. Her work in this film, though largely silent, is nothing short of amazing.

“The New World” is, ultimately, the story of this young woman. After Smith meets her, the film mainly focuses on her. The experiences Pocahontas undergoes are the same as those thrust upon the country itself. The settlers marvel at her natural charms at first and then go through great pains to remake her as just another English woman. When I first saw her in a dress and heels in this movie, my heart broke a little bit. There is no going back for Pocahontas. With the simple act of putting on new clothes, we know that a whole chapter of her life, a simpler and more wondrous chapter, has irrevocably closed.

She eventually becomes the wife to another settler, a kind man played by Christian Bale. And while he is good to her and almost unnaturally understanding, she is still haunted by her early relationship with Farrell’s Captain Smith. After all, she sacrificed everything she knew for this man who so harshly cast her aside. Smith seems to feel that there are too many obstacles for them to ever live happily ever after, one of them perhaps being his own insubstantial nature. What he doesn’t understand is everything that Pocahontas has sacrificed and done to overcome such obstacles and render them moot.

“The New World” uses this relationship to illustrate the relationship of the settlers to the land itself. They marvel at the world they have found, this perfect world, and then begin defacing it for their own gain and in order to make it more like the world they have just left behind. It’s a fascinating theme. Malick’s usual theme, the interaction of man and nature, is explored here, and it is explored with his usual poetic grace and visual splendor. This is the kind of movie that deserves to be seen on the grandest possible screen. The visuals will overpower you, stimulating your eyes and overwhelming your mind. The film delights in small treasures: the sight of water rushing over rock, the sight of ships gliding into a harbor, the wind passing over a field of grain, the sun shining through trees, a beautiful young woman playing in tall grass. Such things are Malick’s forte. He makes movies that truly capture the beauty of nature and mourn much of its passing. As long as there is still an untouched corner of the world, Terrence Malick will put a camera there and capture its beauty. I was not a huge fan of his last film, “The Thin Red Line”. I felt that his themes of man and nature were an ill fit with the story of soldiers fighting World War Two. “The New World”, however, is a completely different story. “The New World” is, perhaps, his masterpiece. It is the story that Malick was born to tell. It’s a movie that only he and those he has chosen to collaborate with could have made. Malick appreciates the natural beauty that the English settlers found and he displays it magically, making us mourn its loss and savor every minute this movie places us within that world.

“The New World”, like Jackson’s “King Kong”, is the reason movie theaters will always need to exist. “King Kong” was big, bustling, action-packed spectacle at its best. “The New World”, on the other hand, is more subtle, more intimate, but no less staggering in its visuals or its wealth of heart. I will buy this movie on DVD, of course I will. And I will savor it in the comfort of my own home. I will still love it. I will love Kilcher’s magical performance, its glorious cinematography, its wondrous scenery, and the dark themes and hints of tragedy within it. I will forever cherish Terrence Malick’s singularly beautiful history lesson. But each time I watch it, I will wish I could experience it once again in the theater, where such amazing visuals dwarf me, enchant me, and make me feel insignificant. That is the magic of cinema, not to mention the magic of Malick at the top of his game.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.