Flak Magazine: Review of The New World, 02-20-06

Virtually all American students get several versions of Anglo-America's most fundamental myth: Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith. As I dimly recall, Indian princess saves Smith from braining by savages, and later saves Jamestown's colonists from sneak attack by same; later marries John Rolfe, helps him make the colony profitable with highly addictive drug; goes to England, and there dies — possibly of the cuisine. Without the plucky princess English culture might have been irrevocably set back on this continent (we might be speaking Spanish and still torturing Jews for the Pope!) and so Pocahontas has long been a saint in the Church of Manifest Destiny. Never mind that the story doesn't make much sense; I recall wondering, even as a kid, why she rescued Smith and then married this Rolfe guy, and later wondered, as do her living kin, why this Pocahontas person would turn on her own people to suck up to the weird, bearded interlopers. Camilla Townsend, a noted scholar of the period, recently published a highly-regarded monograph that addresses these issues. Townsend's Pocahontas is much more a woman of the world, who makes the best of a difficult situation, than a maiden mad for English lads.

The folks at Disney had their animated way with Pocahontas in 1995 and, typically, they didn't worry a bit about the history. They didn't even worry about the geography — their setting looks so like Jackson Hole that the guides at Jamestown Island must now disillusion some visitors about the local lack of snow-capped peaks and waterfalls.

Now there is a more adult consideration of the myth, The New World, written and directed by Terrence Malick, erstwhile Harvard man, Rhodes Scholar and Heidegger buff. He has long been a critical darling, worshipped as the auteur of Badlands, Days of Heaven, and, after a hiatus of 20 years, The Thin Red Line. His films have murky narrative and minimalist characterization, but he certainly does know how to put dizzying beauty on the screen. He's not so much telling stories with pictures as using story as pretext for hypnotic imagery and koanic utterance. Further, he has an amazing knack with locations. The New World is shot in the appropriate places: a few scenes at Jamestown Island, but most a few miles away, up the Chickahominy River, all to wonderful effect.

The colonists in this very real Virginia are more like extraterrestrials than entrepreneurs. Their landfall is inconceivably remote — indeed, when the Englishmen arrive they seem half-dead from just getting there. The area is also swampy, the cypress forests jungle-dense, alien and claustrophobic. The colonists know they're likely to need help surviving and so try to befriend the indigenous "naturals" who materialize from the forest, curious and bizarre but not threatening. Smith and an Indian girl have a small, poignant encounter in a field, and then, as in all versions of the story, become instruments of the two worlds' negotiations.

Instead of making a historical fiction, or a simple romance, Malick goes for something highly subjective and genre-bending. His focus is very tightly on Colin Farrell's Smith and the "Indian princess" (never here called Pocahontas), played by the authentically young Q'Orianka Kilcher. In small, intermittent bits of voice-over, we get their thoughts, their hopes, doubts, delusions and rhapsodies. Smith is a timeless type, a restless wanderer, possessed of both poetic idealism and ruthless practicality. Malick makes him partly a Proto-American who fantasizes about the sort of just Utopia that could be formed in this New World, far from the corrupt reach of European nobles. This strain seems to have gotten him into trouble, for he arrives in Virginia in chains, apparently for "mutinous" speech. After a hothead with pistol alienates the naturals, Smith is given a chance at redemption with a desperate mission to open trade with the natives of the interior. Malick stages a wonderful war-of-the-worlds battle then, pitting nearly naked braves against an armored soldier, after which Smith is captured by King Powhatan's men and brought to the village, to be saved from execution, of course, by the king's lovely daughter. A council of braves ensues, but Powhatan rules against the majority: "He will teach my daughter their language, and we will learn of their land beyond the waves."

The viewer may approve Powhatan's humanism, but there are also odd echoes here of '50s science fiction, of the egghead who wants to "learn from" the Thing, though the real men in uniform know that aliens should be killed immediately. In nitpicking fact, though Malick gives his story a "first contact" feel, the natives of the area already had plenty of experience with Europeans. Thirty-five years previous they'd wiped out a Spanish outpost a dozen miles from Jamestown Island — a policy which might have continued to serve them well. Instead, Smith and the girl embark on a language-immersion idyll of several months, wherein predictably strong affections take root. The story starts to conflate with Mutiny on the Bounty — white boy, bedazzled by exotic hottie, goes native. That aspect is amplified by Kilcher's particular beauty; she looks more like one of Gauguin's Tahitians than the cliché buckskinned maiden.

The nameless girl apparently falls victim to the Colin Farrell Effect (as reportedly did, during the shooting, various co-eds and a waitress at the Williamsburg Hooter's) and soon Smith is her world. Smith, meanwhile, drifts around, like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, in another Utopian fantasy ("These people know neither possession nor jealousy"), even as Powhatan's people are clearly preparing for war. Soon the king sends him packing with a message to his fellow English: "Get out on the next boat, or else." Smith returns to Jamestown where, in a chilling interlude, all sorts of scenery chewing goes on. The English, unable to hunt or forage for fear of the natives, are going mad with thirst, starvation and terror. Smith takes command and gets a well dug. Then Pocahontas saves the day with a shoal of slain wildlife, and again with a timely warning about an impending attack. There's still plenty of bloodshed and the story takes on a Romeo and Juliet my-love-my-enemy-sense, just before Smith is deposed and his lover is taken hostage by the desperate Colonists.

Just in time Christopher Newport returns with his many-gunned ship (the Deus ex Machina, perhaps) and the settlement is saved. Given a chance to earn the notice of the British King, Smith lights out for the Old World and leaves Pocahontas flat. What happens next is Malick's own, ingenious narrative contribution, a working out of how all the main characters in the troubling triangle (Smith-Pocahontas-Rolfe) can come off more or less honorably.

Malick's take on it all is rather operatically based on the "historic record." He needed to use the Jamestown Foundation's three ships for the filming, and those scrupulous folks had some say about which liberties might be taken by the script. The writer's problem here is, which history are you faithful to? Smith himself wrote an account of his salvation by Pocahontas. But he did so many years after the fact, and his version of the events sounds suspiciously like several other incidents he'd elsewhere recounted. Moreover, even if it did happen, Smith may've just misunderstood a mock-execution ceremony that was allegedly part of the indigenous welcome. Of course, virtually all accounts leave out the husband Pocahontas left behind among her people; his mention might make the princess a little too Liz Taylor-ish for sainthood. Told from his point of view the myth shifts again, and becomes Troilus and Cressida, which would be way too much freight for its little ships to carry.

It's clear that Malick was, as he should have been, more interested in the "mythic truth," the psychological resonances of the story, as well as its visual and dramatic possibilities, than the historical record. After all, we actually know about as much about Pocahontas as we do about Shakespeare, who died the year before her; that is, we know almost nothing. Some contemporary accounts would be tricky to get in theaters, such as this from one William Strachey: "Pocahontas, a well featured, but wanton yong girle, Powhatan's daughter, sometymes resorting to our fort, of the age then of eleven or twelve yeares, [would] get the boyes forth with her into the markett place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning up their heeles upwards, whome she would followe and wheele so herself, naked as she was, all the fort over …"

Still, Malick went to considerable trouble to at least get the look right — the places, buildings, costumes, weapons, and war paint — for his version of the myth, creating not a kitschy historyland but a seamless, weirdly wonderful world. He deploys many first-rate actors in even the lesser roles, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer and David Thewlis among them. All this care has the surprising effect of de-familiarizing the old story, renewing it, rescuing it from the Disneyfied storybook images with which it is embalmed. In the quieter moments even the aural world of the film seems authentic; somebody endured a lot of mosquitoes while catching "wild sound" in the Chickahominy Swamp. The Celine-free score by James Horner (of Titanic fame) is non-intrusive, though it is eclipsed by judicious lifts from a Mozart piano concerto and Wagner's Das Rheingold. During one Wagnerian interlude the history buff finally gets the famous cartwheel by (a decently clad) Pocahontas, and it gives a sharp allusive charge, and also the sense of her life and history rewinding before our eyes, to when it and her world were newest.

The New World will not find a broad audience. It's too slow, despite being cut by 20 minutes after its world premiere, to hold those antsy for action, and it's not sentimental enough to sell as melodrama, and it is way too chaste. But it is smart, lush and strange enough to reward close attention, and to keep the Terrence Malick legend alive until his next effort.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)