The remote, reclusive Terrence Malick occupies a most unusual position in American cinema
as a kind of living anachronism, an artist practicing in a complicated, highly
collaborative, labor intensive medium who behaves like some solitary, tormented
genius from an earlier time.
After making two highly praised
films, Badlands(1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), he lapsed into two decades of silence,
finally bringing out the eagerly anticipated Thin Red Line in 1998. In that movie he turned James Jones’s gritty
short novel about a World War II battle for a Pacific Island into a dreamy Emersonian meditation on nature, innocence, and war, filled
with shots of tall grass waving in the wind, rain sweeping in sheets through
trees, close-ups of drops of water flowing down ferns, all accompanied by a
voiceover commentary laden with the sort of ponderous
sentimentality many people mistake for poetic utterance.
His latest work, The New World, unfortunately continues the style and theme of The Thin Red Line, employing the dubious
legend of John Smith and Pocahantas to explore once
again the contrast between unspoiled nature and corrupt civilization. Malick shows some of the history of the Jamestown
colony, the first permanent European settlement in North America,
beginning with the arrival of three English ships in 1607 and ending with the
death of Pocahantas 10 years later.
He concentrates most of his efforts,
naturally, on the relationship between the Indian maiden and the English
soldier of fortune, which he depicts as the sort of Edenic
idyll that Rousseau and his followers would celebrate a century later.
Apparently
concerned with historical accuracy, the director works with natural light and
actual locations, duplicating the clothing, tools, and weapons of the early
17th century, and featuring genuine Native Americans playing their ancestors,
trained to speak the extinct Algonquin language of the tribe that the English
encountered. Typically, he spends much of the film’s time dwelling on
the purely visual interpretation of his subjects, sweeping his camera through
the forests and meadows, shooting at low levels to suggest the movement of
people through the wilderness, using a mixture of hand-held cameras and slow
motion to impart a weird tension and grace to his battle scenes.
His perfectly commendable emphasis on
the visual unfortunately here tends to overpower everything else in the
picture, so that he repeats endless scenes of landscapes or shows John Smith
(Colin Farrell) and Pocahantas (Q’oriankaKilcher) gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes or
dancing around in fields for what seems like hours. What the film lacks in
dialogue, however, it makes up for in the curious interior monologues he used
in The Thin Red Line. The characters
speak little to each other, but a great deal to themselves and the audience,
almost as if they were delivering soliloquies, uttering their innermost
thoughts, many of them of them once again of the moony pseudopoetic
variety, without really saying a word, a device that Malick
has just about finished off by now.
Although the director apparently
indulged himself and no doubt enjoyed the whole process, the actors appear
quite uncomfortable most of the time. Even while singing the praises of the
noble savages and the Indian way of life — and sounding very like Kevin
Costner in Dances With Wolves —
Colin Farrell looks tense and uneasy, as if he comprehended not at all the
point of his character or the story. The newcomer Q’oriankaKilcher, allegedly beautiful and lively, overacts and
poses obnoxiously and, strangely, acquires an upper-class British accent in a
very short time after meeting John Smith.
Notorious for delays and last-minute
alterations — the movie was supposed to appear in November, for example — Malick here appears to have edited with an axe, cutting out
whole lines of plot that he then papers over with cryptic, artificial
exposition. He repeats so many sentimental shots of the lovers and so many
phrases of the portentous interior monologues that the long, slow film seems
even longer and slower than its actual two hours.
Despite the promise of its subject
and the artistry of its director, The New
World, finally, is cruelly, punishingly dull, a
sort of purgatorial experience that forces the viewer into melancholy
contemplation of matters like death and disaster, recollecting all his misdeeds
and regrets, penitently enumerating his countless sins, and hoping for some
forgiveness.
Leaving the theater, as a result,
provides a truly blessed relief.
The New World(PG-13),
written and directed by Terrence Malick, is playing
at Little Theatres and PittsfordPlaza.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2006.
