What a Wonderful 'World'
Malick's 'New World' a hypnotic, visionary feast

Imagine fields and forests of such lush, gemstone green and clear skies so vibrantly blue it almost hurts to look at them. Imagine a race of people sophisticated enough to plant and harvest crops and pray to the gods of sky, clouds and water, who yet have no words in their language for greed, treachery, slander or jealousy. No, it's not some idyllic, remote tropical island featured in National Geographic. It's the continent of America just before the arrival of the first European settlers as imagined by Terrence Malick in his masterful cross-cultural epic The New World.

While 'epic' is often a code word for big, long and boring, that's not the case here. Malick has devised a work of stunning hyponotic grandeur, gorgeous to look at and spiritually and emotionally complex. We may think we've already heard the story of John Smith, Pocahontas, and the founding of the Jamestown Colony. But Malick plunges us into the eerie strangeness of cultures in collision without much of a road map (as disorienting as it must have been for the natives and colonists themselves) in a lavish feast of experiential sensation that keeps the viewer mesmerized.

In 1607 three wooden ships carrying a few score ragged Englishmen sail into a pristine bay of Virginia. Their first civilized act is to erect a scaffold for soldier of fortune, Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) who arrives chained in the hold for making "mutinous remarks." But the expedition leader (Christopher Plummer) releases him, knowing they'll need all skilled hands to build a fort and found their colony. Early encounters with the vividly painted, pierced, tatooed, and feather-bedecked "naturals" are merely curious—until one of the braves is killed by a jumpy English musketeer.

Left in command of the colony, Smith goes upriver into his own heart of darkness to trade for supplies; in a sequence of propulsive surreal intensity, he's abandoned in an everglade and abducted to the longhouse of Chief Powhatan (August Schellenberg) amid chanting, clamoring tribespeople and posturing shamans. But his death sentence is interruped by the chief's favorite daughter (poised and soulful Q'Orianka Kilcher)—the woman known to history as Pocahontas. Temporarily adopted into the tribe, Smith learns their culture while he and the princess forge a deeper bond.

After Smith returns to the fledgling fort, the princess brings a train of supplies for the starving inhabitants. New ships bring women and fresh soldiers for the colony, and a commission for Smith for an expedition of his own. Abandoned by her lover and banished by her tribe, the princess is taken into the colony and laced into a dress and shoes. Smitten colonist John Rolfe (Christian Bale), a lonely widower, offers her marriage hoping that love will follow, and ultimately escorts her home to England for her famous audience with King James.

Malick spins the familiar tale without resorting to melodrama, bombast or conventional narrative. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum; backstory is non-existent. Aside from Smith, the characters are rarely even called by name, caught in the act of birthing their new selves in the New World at the historical moment when everything is about to change forever.

The staging is less dramatic than operatic, as the principal characters express their thoughts, feelings and dreams in aria-like interior monologues that punctuate scenes of simmering suspense, erotic discovery, or awed reverence for the natural world. (The film was shot on location along the Chickihominy River in Virginia.) Consistently in the moment, Malick's storytelling style evokes the purity of silent film.

Farrell wanders though the movie with a single expression of dumbstruck wariness (not unlike Elijah Wood's Frodo in the Lord of the Rings films), yet he makes Smith's transformations in and out of grace vivid and wrenching. However, several other reliable actors listed in the credits (Ben Chaplin, Jonathan Pryce, Roger Rees) are scarcely even extras in the finished film. No matter. Liberating his material from the musty prison of classroom and history book, Malick crafts a dazzling vision of paradise found and lost. Treat yourself and succumb to its majesty.

THE NEW WORLD With Colin Farrell, Christian Bale and Q'Orianka Kilcher. Written and directed by Terrence Malick. A New Line Cinema release. Rated PG-13. 135 minutes. (****)
Review published in Good Times, March 16, 2006