Movies into Film
Directed by Terrence Malick
USA, 2005
Having now seen Terrence Malick’s The New World for a third time (in three different movie theatres, in as many weeks) I still don’t feel adequately prepared to talk about it, or about the obsession this movie has become for me, or about the pleasantly intense sensation of sacredness that swims through me on beholding or contemplating. I suppose that’s another way of saying that it moves me to tears. Matt Zoller Seitz, as those of you in the blogoshere already know, has hailed the movie as “a generation defining event.” I don’t know if that’s exactly true; for myself, The New World separates the wheat from chaff. The “critics” who are either impervious to or openly contemptuous of the movie strike me as being a good deal worse than mere idiots – they are monsters who are indifferent to art, to poetry, to life, to the air we breathe, to the trees in the forests, to the pleasure of all that, and perhaps even to sunlight. They are victims of television. They cannot read books, and what’s more, this film, with its elliptical editing that expects us to think and to fill-in for ourselves, shows that a majority of reviewers can no longer muster the competence even to “read” a movie, if a film doesn’t spell itself out on a press kit platter.
Malick’s screenplay and his direction have a persuasive emotional truthfulness to them, a quality also found in the other two American masterworks of the year past, Brokeback Mountain and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. All of these movies, in portraying their respective sets of perfect yet impossible loves, mirror the unique sorrow that attends compromise. In the fiercely homophobic West of the 1960s and 70s, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar cannot really be together, any more than a sheltered teenage girl and her divorced, dying father can be surrogate lovers for each other. So it is with the English Captain John Smith and the Native Princess Pocahontas in The New World. As the handsome Colin Farrell and the stunningly beautiful, talented young actress Q’Orianka Kilcher embody them, they belong together. They know it – we know it. Fate, circumstance, career moves, and a repressive society don’t know it. And that is why one of the oldest scenarios in the world still breaks some of our hearts.
What we knew in the forest: Q’Orianka Kilcher in The New World (Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema)
The film’s intoxicating first scene, a long take of a gently undulating, open expanse of silver-blue water, with the cottony white clouds overhead reflected on the streaming surface, I could have watched forever. As good as Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography is, I think it's the brilliant editing in tandem with Malick's soul-satisfying disregard for linear narrative that makes the movie so transcendent. And then there’s his repeated use of Wagner, with all those unison horns sounding powerfully in the Vorspiel to Das Rheingold, that summons a crescendo of expectation – it’s musical shorthand for the thrill-of-the-new welling and volleying inside each of us, the moments of near-ecstasy when our innards have turned as bubbly as champagne. Malick scores the film to this as the British ships first approach the Virginia shore, the Natives watching from the banks, then again to a montage of Smith and the Princess frolicking, caressing, falling in love. This operatic staging reminded me, yes, a bit of Apocalypse Now and of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well, without being derivative of either.
Malick also weaves the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488, throughout the fabric of The New World, and to great effect. When Smith lives for a time amidst the Algonquian Indians, Pocahontas approaches him for a language lesson. Using her hands sensuously, the Princess gestures toward the sky, to the sun, exchanging the word in her language for the one in his. She soon moves on to such key terms as eyes and lips, and part of what makes this scene such a joy is the sly, barely present, yet unmistakable smile on Farrell as he obliges her. Malick times the passage from Mozart to begin with the solo piano (he uses a Naxos recording of Jenö Jandó with Concentus Hungaricus); as Smith’s interest in the maiden grows, the entire orchestra enters, a resonant musical motif for the Englishman’s delight and amusement, ever so slightly tinged with arousal. Shortly after this, as the music continues its soft, understated sweep, Smith lies on the ground as a Native toddler playfully crawls over him and, in a spontaneous instance of a child’s unconditional love, sweetly kisses Farrell on the lips.
Colin Farrell in The New World (Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema)
There’s little doubt in my mind that Smith’s time with the tribe – he plays among the men, learns their games, their culture, chants alongside them ‘round the fire – is the film’s aesthetic and emotional centerpiece. My favorite spoken line comes as Smith and Pocahontas reunite after a long winter apart, and he says to her, “There’s something I know when I’m with you that I forget when I’m away.” Isn’t that just like so many relationships? Doing the “honorable” thing saddens and diminishes us, which in Smith’s case means leaving Paradise to tend to the malnourished Jamestown colonists. It’s only in taking risks and doing what we aren’t supposed to do that anything in life ever gets done. “Love…shall we deny it when it visits us?” Smith asks earlier, in the enchantment of an Algonquian spring. Yet Smith, a young, ambitious man who, like most of us, yearns for a greater recognition in his field, would still very much want a chance to navigate that elusive route to the West Indies, and so he does deny love, ultimately. In a supremely well-directed moment, Malick tweaks the sound design as Smith paces anxiously in his hut, tormented by the decision to sail back to England instead of staying with the Princess. The Captain deliberately flings over a small table, and we hear… silence: it makes the hurt worse than if we’d heard the sound of the objects crashing.
This crisis of love versus career rings awfully true, as I suppose it would for anyone who’s faced a similar choice, weighed the decision, and forever wondered, “What if? What if I had chosen the other path?” There’s a critic whose writing and sensibility I find exceptionally loathsome. His name is James Bowman, and he’s as reliable as clockwork when it comes to missing the point. Bowman dismisses Smith’s conflicting sense of duty and desire as a “flip-flop,” and the use of this casually cheap term underscores Bowman’s failure not just as a critic – failing to perceive the worth of a work of art – but his startlingly abject failure at recognizing quintessentially human behavior. Often in life, we don’t know the “side” we’re on, so why should the 27-or-28-year-old Smith? Do we go to the movies (or read novels) to find characters who have it all sorted out already?
Much undue criticism has been leveled at Malick’s eloquent use of voice-overs. These interior snippets (they certainly aren’t monologues) resemble prayers. Pocahontas invokes, “Come, Spirit,” in the opening scene, and her subsequent asides are appeals to her absent mother, “Show me your faith; give me a sign.” Kilcher, in a quietly magnificent debut, speaks these lines straightforwardly, sans affectation. When the wonderful Christian Bale, making a late, perfectly timed entrance as John Rolfe, one of the second wave of English settlers, observes of the Princess as she dwells amidst the colonists, “She seemed barely to notice the others about her,” it’s refreshing to hear the English language spoken correctly. Note that, “barely to notice,” a far cry from our dumbed-down era of endlessly split infinitives. And one more sample: As Rolfe, too, finds his infatuation with Pocahontas turning to love, he plaintively wonders, “Who are you? Who do you dream of?” an inner voicing of the same questions we all would ask our objects of desire.
Christopher Plummer, Q’Orianka Kilcher, and Christian Bale in The New World (Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema)
In struggling to write about Malick’s creation, I don’t think I can even get close to conveying the visual splendor of this movie, or to the veracity of the psychological underpinnings that support it. There’s a brief shot of icy frost blown by winter wind over a partially frozen river; there are inserts of past actions that the director will drop in, almost subliminally, to comment on present turmoil; there is Kilcher’s wide smile amidst the tall, summer grasses; Rolfe’s tight-lipped, bemused expression when the Princess asks him, “Why does the Earth have colors?”; the way Captain Smith looks extraordinarily beautiful as he stands before a waiting noose; the way he gives a single insouciant nod, without speaking, at his last-minute reprieve; the gorgeous maps tracing the route from England to America, which are animated in dusky blues and browns, that ornament the opening and closing credits (are these the handiwork of production designer Jack Fisk?); the cool greens, chilly to the eye, of the rigorously manicured English garden in the film’s final sequence, a cold beauty that contrasts to the warmth of the Virginia landscapes; the luxuriant, black-and-white body paint that adorns the Native American men; the gamy, frontier costumes by Jacqueline West, notably the leather doublet in which she outfits Farrell and the buckskin slip for Pocahontas; the feather the Princess hands to Smith; the feathers he wears at the back of his ponytail; the unassailable fact that Farrell’s hippie-esque long hair, whether loose and flowing, or tied back with said feathers, is terrific; and last but not least, the means by which Malick’s bevy of four editors – Richard Chew, Hank Corwin, Saar Klein, and Mark Yoshikawa – functions as a cinematic equivalent to a string quartet, creating programmatic chamber music of the highest, richest caliber: The New World is “about” each of these elements. They are the “story.” The movie reviewer from an Edmonton, Alberta newspaper who wrote that he kept waiting for the story to begin – didn’t it just seep through after awhile, this bountiful generosity of Malick’s spirit? – NPT
February 4, 2006
Movies into Film
©2006, N.P. Thompson
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com