The New World
Written and directed by Terrence Malick
New Line Cinema
2005
Rating:


"There is one mind common to all individual men….Who has access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent…. The human mind wrote history, and thus must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience…. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Every step in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History"

For the first time in cinema, a film has managed the seemingly impossible task of living up to Emerson's definition of History. Few have even seemed up to the challenge — Robert Bresson, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni are among them — and while those directors created masterpieces in their own right, none of them has accomplished something as at once universal and individual as Terrence Malick's "The New World."

The simple elegance and unassuming profoundness of Malick's film begins with its title. "The New World" sounds at once like a sci-fi novel and a historical epic that lurches under the weight of its own pretensions. Happily, this film is neither. The title refers to, at once, what settlers called the land that would become "America," how the "Naturals" of that land viewed the encroaching newcomers, the discovery of one's first love and so much more.

Beginning like a dream that merges with the bookends of Malick's 1997 masterpiece "The Thin Red Line," Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), her brother Parahunt (Kalani Queypo) and other members of the Powhatan tribe swim in the Atlantic until English ships appear on the horizon to Wagner's "Thus We Begin in the Greenish Twilight of the Rhine," an appropriate herald for what is to come.

Malick has been accused of merely editing together random images of nature photography by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki ("Y Tu Mamá También) in a bid for pretentiously artsy incoherence. Film criticism has apparently fallen so low that critics are no longer willing to meet a film on its own terms, and the willful ignorance of what Malick has done here is astounding.

The opening 40 minutes of "The New World" is the most hallucinatory, transcendental experience to be had in a theater since Stanley Kubrick released "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968. The film adheres to Emerson's assertion in his essay "The Poet" that "a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures" and Malick's camera goes "Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and lover." Malick, Lubeski and his editors Richard Chew ("Star Wars"), Hank Corwin ("Snow Falling on Cedars"), Saar Klein ("The Thin Red Line") and Mark Yoshikawa (Chew's longtime assistant) have created a tidal pool of images that set a new standard for editing, refusing the spastic assault of MTV and Tony Scott in favor of a near wordless tone poem.

"Poem" is a carefully chosen word, and it's one that does the most to refute the argument against Malick's vision. There's nothing arbitrary about what's presented here, and that's evident from the first sequence. Malick is a director — no, a visual poet — who gives a subtle rhyming scheme to his work. In the opening scenes of "The New World," Pocahontas is seen raising her arms to the sky in a ritual that pays homage to the Earth Mother. Moments later, Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) makes his entrance bound in chains in the hull of a ship. He raises his hands to the sky, too, although it's to catch dripping warm to quench his thirst.

Once the ships reach land, Capt. Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer), realizing he doesn't have men to spare and seeing a leader's spirit in Smith, pardons Smith for his mutinous actions during the voyage. Smith is selected to lead a party of men to befriend the "Naturals" and open a dialogue of trade between them. The Naturals remember what settlers in the past have done and they capture Smith, bringing him before Powhatan (August Schellenberg) for his death sentence. Powhatan's favored daughter Pocahontas intervenes and Smith's life is spared.

Smith views the Powhatan way of life with as much wonder as the Powhatans view him. Malick never condescends to the Powhatans by exoticizing them more than the Powhatans exoticize the English, and Malick also refuses to make them "noble savages." As the English foolishly pan the waters for gold, Malick cuts to the Powhatans collecting English tools as if a hammer might hold some secret of the world. At one point Smith's narration describes the Powhatans as having "no jealousy, no sense of possession." Smith's description of the tribe speaks to his own misunderstanding of the people, naively attributing them the qualities he wishes they contained. Powhatan's sense of jealousy rears its ugly head when, enraged by Pocahontas' relationship with Smith and the English settlers, he exiles his treasured daughter from the camp and strips her of her name.

Malick insists on "the new world" being experienced on a personal level through the philosophical narration of multiple characters. Malick allows so many characters to narrate "The New World" because he acknowledges that the transformation of America isn't just about Pocahontas, Smith, Rolfe, Newport, the English or the Powhatans; it's about all of them, and to give one person or one group centrality would be a lie. That the narration is contrapuntal and therefore frequently contradicts the action underlines the tension between what the characters believe and what is actually happening. "[A]ll language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead," Emerson says, but the ability of a one work to at once convey individual thoughts and a singluar chronicle is what he would call "History."

The love story of Capt. John Smith and Pocahontas, long the subject of legend, has been recast here, not just as emblematic of the English conquering of virgin soil, but as innocent rapture that gets carried away by history unfolding. Pocahontas and Smith experience joys that are at once minor and major, with Smith finding Heaven in the down of the young girl's arm and in the touch of the field that churns around them.

It's easy to turn Pocahontas and her love for Smith into a metaphor for the Europeanization of America. Malick and the astonishing performance by Kilcher give Pocahontas too much humanity for that, allowing, as Emerson says, the universal mind and the individual mind to become one incarnation. Pocahontas is a symbol in the same way that Nicole Burnell is a symbol in "The Sweet Hereafter" in that she emblemizes what happens to a community, but what she does happens on a personal level, not in the abstract ("all symbols are fluxional," Emerson says). Pocahontas is a person first and foremost, a girl who falls in love with a strange man against her better senses, and the film shows what becomes of her life for giving into the weight of her heart.

In terms of metaphor, however, the love of Pocahontas and Smith represents the moment when the Europeans and the Native Americans could have coexisted. Their ultimate separation, forced by both the English and the Powhatans, is the moment when America is truly born.

Pocahontas eventually meets and marries rich tobacco farmer John Rolfe (Christian Bale) and is invited to the court of James I (Jonathan I) for an exposition on America. Pocahontas' arrival in England places Malick in a less naturalized environment for the first time in his filmography, and his camera retains its sense of in his view of 18th-century England. Pocahontas' introduction to England mirrors Smith's introduction to the Powhatans. The greeting of English nobility is presented as mysterious as the ritual that allows Smith to remain in Powhatan's camp.

The telling difference between the two is in how the Powhatans and the English treat nature. As Smith is held before Powhatan, sunlight floods into the shelter from a hole in the roof. Later, Smith and Pocahontas languidly walk through the untamed trees and fields of what would become Virginia. In England, Pocahontas is stunned by the sunlight streaming through a stained glass window, while her uncle Opechancanough (Wes Studi) is equally astounded by the topiaries in a garden. Where the Powhatans allow nature to be free, the English feel compelled to tame it and make it into their own image.

Malick doesn't judge the English for this or deem them inferior to the Powhatans. When they begin tearing down the wilderness to build homes, it's seen as a necessity; the stained glass and topiaries are likewise viewed as a different kind of beauty, not just the Europeanization of nature.

There's also a rhyme to Smith's naïve assessment of the Powhatans when Pocahontas says of Rolfe, "You are the man I thought you were — and more," when he allows Smith and Pocahontas a brief reunion. Rolfe's willingness to permit Pocahontas to see Smith, who looks haggard and impoverished in comparison to the estate-owning Rolfe, is all about jealousy. He wishes to remove Pocahontas' feelings for Smith by showing her the man Smith has become. Smith (woundedly portrayed by a great Farrell) stands before Pocahontas having returned from his attempt to find a passage to the Indies through North America. When Pocahontas asks if he ever found them, Smith can only reply, "I may have sailed past them."

Malick doesn't openly portray Rolfe's intentions as cruel or selfish, but as an instinctual act of self-preservation. What's more is that the relationship between Rolfe and Pocahontas is seen as, if less passionate than the one between her and Smith, more mature, more pragmatic. As Malick places the English and the Powhatans on the same level, he doesn't privilege passion or maturity because both men love Pocahontas in equal, but different, ways.

The final moments of the film are a breathtaking series of images: Pocahontas splashing in an English river, having finally discarded her English garb; an empty bed; the ghosts of Parahunt and Pocahontas' mother; and an eroding gravestone, adding to the film's elegiac quality. Pocahontas has journeyed to another new world, but the final shot is of a stream of water, untouched by man, running free in Virginia.

"The New World" is, finally, a new world unto itself, though it's not one that's unprecedented. Resnais was a proponent of audiovisual Impresionism (his 1962 film "Last Year at Marienbad" is overtly referenced in the meeting between Pocahontas and Smith as they overlook a topiary maze, while the structure of his 1959 film "Hiroshima Mon Amour" can be seen as an influence on "The New World's" love story) and said that, "A classic film cannot translate the real rhythm of modern life. Modern life is fragmented, everyone feels that. Painting, as well as literature, bears witness to it, so why should the cinema not do so as well, instead of clinging to the traditional linear narrative?" Film theoretician Noel Burch likewise wrote in his 1971 book "The Theory of Film Practice" that it was possible to foresee a time when film would "create a poetic function." That time has come.

Speaking of 18th-century scientist and spiritual explorer Emmanuel Swedenborg, Emerson himself could be describing Malick, for Malick, "of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature."

For in Malick's film, in the words of Emerson, "there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee." It is a work of such a grand magnitude that "The New World" may very well prove to be the key to this era.

Posted Monday, January 30, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/new.world