The New World

(Terrence Malick, USA )

It’s always been important to know this about Terrence Malick, but never more so than before watching The New World: he’s a birder. Known by locals in the Austin area where he lives for traipsing for hours in the bush on avian quests, Malick apparently likes to get lost even more than codifying every fine-feathered friend he comes across. Like the late English author John Fowles (telling name), Malick’s art places nature in a position of primacy, which is why his human creatures always seem slightly out of place, not belonging, intruders in the wild. Watch his camera, and it will invariably wander away, drawn by a bird, a flick of grass, a disturbance in the water. This is only part of the reason why The New World feels, from the first frame, like the film he’s been working up to making for the many years of his long, strange, protracted career.

One might assume that The New World is about (a) the founding of Jamestown by English settlers exploring the East Coast of North America in 1607; (b) the fateful meeting of Native Americans and the English, embodied in the encounter between John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher); (c) a love affair between said couple that would get “America” off to a lovely multicultural beginning; and, since this is a Malick film, (d) The eventual failure of Smith to realize his dream of an egalitarian, thrifty, and workaholic Utopia. One might assume all these and more, and one would be wrong. To get at what Malick is after, the eye has to follow his camera’s cue, and skirt around the humans. Or, at least, adjust to placing the humans in their proper position inside an all-engulfing nature.

In a way comparable only to documentary filmmakers, Malick creates his films in the editing room, where he wades through the miles of film he’s shot. (And, true to his nature, days before the film’s release, he is still trimming and fiddling with The New World, which will be first shown in the longer 149-minute version, and later shown in a slightly briefer cut.) When he finds what he’s looking for—which is a high percentage of the time in this case—he can assemble sequences that operate like music, but music of a specific type, where a stated theme can easily be subsumed in large orchestral colourations and mood passages, like Mahler. (The film employs bits of Wagner and, surprisingly, Mozart, plus a few contemporary composers on the soundtrack alongside James Horner’s rolling-rolling-rolling score.)

The first encounter between the Virginia tribe and the English is built on an exchange of glances of native people peering out of the woods and standing tall in the grass, and white people swaying back and forth on their creaking galleons, each pulled to the other by some unidentified magnetic force. The film assiduously refuses to explain this force and nearly anything else—despite, or because of, a characteristic river of internal voiceover narration, less self-consciously poetic than previous Malick films—as if to place the viewer in the tall grass, where one can easily get lost. The town named after King James I suddenly appears, hemmed in like a medieval fort. Smith (in chains at first, like his spiritual kin Prewitt in 1998’s The Thin Red Line, another dreamy-eyed rebel under arrest on a ship about to land in a remote and wild place) is abruptly freed, but the interest is in his endless, lingering route upstream to and back from the indigenous people’s home, and how every shot seems dominated by trees. Clashes erupt out of nowhere, and end just as suddenly—wrongly deemed by some as a severe flaw, proof that Malick can’t stage “action.” Smith and Pocahontas make eye contact, and touch. In the distance, an actual lightning storm cuts through the sky.

In a real way, The New World isn’t even trying to be a history film, and certainly not anything like an historical epic, with its clear delineation of figures and their roles, and with the Lean-ish grammar of personal and social clashes evolving over long stretches of time, stitched together by dissolves and grand illustrative music. It’s made as if cinema existed in the early 17th century, but with a 21st century eye: there hasn’t been so much jump-cutting since Pierrot le Fou, and the refusal of the establishing shot-medium shot-close-up template, plus the willingness to convey the sheer chaos of what it must have felt to be both the invader and the invaded in central coastal Virginia, recalls nothing less than Elim Klimov’s remarkably similar Come and See (1985), still unmatched in its ability to orchestrate the madness of clashes of “civilizations” amidst wilderness.

Never mind the inevitable, post-screening cracks about the nearly missing cast members (gee, David Thewlis sure died off quickly, and wasn’t that Ben Chaplin in one shot, and, wait, Christian Bale arrives—what?—two hours into the film) because the cast, like so many other things that matter in Hollywood movies, matters only a little. The exception is probably Kilcher—Farrell, in the most radical narrative stroke in any of Malick’s cinema, more or less vanishes from the story—because it emerges that “The New World” only partly refers to Virginia . Suddenly (again), things shift, Pocahontas takes up Western wear and some Western ways, settles in with Bale’s John Rolfe, and ends up journeying back to England, where, out of nowhere, we’re in a new new world. Europe has never looked stranger: the woods are gone, the grass is mowed, castles and churches loom overhead, and everything is manicured and designed. The carving of nature becomes the drama of The New World, made physical by such images as King James I (Jonathan Pryce, gone in a second) offering Pocahontas an ironic gift of a bird in a cage, her tribal friend Opechancanough’s (Wes Studi) curious striding through a geometrically perfect British garden, and Pocahontas set against the highly structured landscape like one of the figures in Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Of course, in such a stratified environment, a child of a non-stratified society like Pocahontas can only die, but Malick removes the satisfactions of tragedy. As in Days of Heaven (1978), which ends with Linda Manz’ slightly feral youth adapting to a new home, The New World ends with the suggestion of some new possibility back in Virginia. But, as far as Malick is always concerned, the new is always going to happen somewhere out there, where one can’t help but look up into the trees.

—Robert Koehler

The New World

Articles in this Section

C.R.A.Z.Y.
By John Anderson

Web only

The New World
By Robert Koehler

and in the magazine..

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
By Geoff Pevere

After Innocence b
By Jared Rapfogel