Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
This is a film the components of which are balanced with unprecedented complexity and delicacy. It is, on the other hand, not hard to enter into the immense and peculiar physicality comprising its heartbeat, because it is powered by virtuosic visual and aural concentrations concerning primeval America so kinetically charged as to function as a multiplex narcotic. Not only, thereby, does the moviegoer unmistakably become transported into dynamics on a scale having been expunged from the history of “the old world.” While it’s at it, the preparation goes a long way toward discontinuing the reflex to comprehend motion as encompassed and superseded by substantial objects and their causal programs. Therefore, when Captain Smith, assigned to bring off a reconciliation between the abrasive gracelessness of his exploratory compatriots, at Jamestown, in 1607, and the vivacious gracefulness of “the naturals” inhabiting the landing point at mid-Atlantic North America, reflects, in a voiceover channel constituting one of the film’s major constructs, “What urges me on?…What voice guides me towards the best?” he really does put into question the nature of his origin and fate. The unusual architecture of this work is not going to settle for anything like conventional underpinnings and destinies.
That much said, the work’s intensive drama hinges upon protagonists not being up to the crushing weight of dynamic integrity. The full-bodied convolutions of love within which a “natural” Princess and her man are torn are augmented by voiceovers from the Captain and his wild inspiration, articulations comprising as much breath and body as cognitive bite (and thus blunt and blurred sounds of nature) and thus fed into the sensual passage of the narrative. Before we see anything, the Princess holds forth (from out of a black screen) with this prayer: “True Spirit. Help us to sing the song of our lives. You are our Mother. We rise from out of the soul of you.” She meets warrior Smith, a military Captain, on his reconnoitre, intercedes with her father to spare his life, and they fall in love. Treading on strange and perilous grounds, she feels compelled to consult with a “Father” whose power would represent increased efficiency and assurance, as compared with the less definitive “Mother.” (Smith has, perhaps recklessly, told himself, “Love… Shall we deny it when it visits us?… There is only this. All else is unreal.”) “Father. Where do you live? In the clouds? …the sea?… Show me your face. Give me a sign.” The Princess and her man run afoul the political conflict. She dares to warn him of an imminent attack; occupied with direction of the defence of Jamestown, he nevertheless refuses to buy her from those sheltering her in her exiled daring, to exploit her as a shield against his forces’ extermination. Under such pressure, Smith resorts to facile common sense. “Don’t put yourself in danger.”/ “Why did you not find me?”/ “Don’t trust me. You don’t know who I am.”/ “Who are you?” Oh, my love!” Smith puts to himself what he must do, and can’t do. “Exchange this false life for a true one. Give up the name of Smith.” He asks her, “Where would we live?…in the woods?… in a treetop?… a hole in the ground?… You’ll have to come with me.” She runs away, into a dark night. During a vicious battle, Smith, too, tends toward a preference for masculine precision. “Lord, turn not away Thy face. We desire not the death of a sinner.” Surviving that war, and ordered to return to England to lead an expedition to the Indies, Smith’s moment of departure finds the Princess now trussed up in European fashion, including shoes with heels. “I will find joy in all I see.”/ “You know me as I was long ago. I have never been the man you believed me to be.”/ “Where am I?” He sails away. She grieves copiously and demonstratively (no longer her self of “long ago”). “You killed the god in me!” Courted by a benign tobacco farmer, she asks, “Are you kind?” displaying a completion of sorts for her shift from the sensual highs with the momentarily dashing and noble (and kind) Captain amidst a palpably radiant wildness.
This unravelling, easily overlooked as such in face of the plethora of devastating obstacles and the ravishing vitality and beauty of actress Q’Orianka Kilcher, embodying the Princess, is something to cling to, because it gives access to a magnificent reflective showdown and, something very difficult to bring off in contemporary film, cogent heartbreak. She puts to herself, “I suppose I must be happy,” as coming within the orbit of the practical man who wonders, “Who are you? What do you dream of?” Knowing, as we do, something about her “dreams,” and their susceptibility to corruption, we are not surprised to overhear her say, “Father, why can I not feel as I should?…What is real, and what is not?… Great Sun, I offer you thanks…You give life to all.” She bears him a son, and whispers, “Your love is good for my eyes… Show me a way… Teach me a path… Give me a humble heart.” She hears of John Smith’s not being dead. They are invited to England to meet the King. She tries to define her confusing situation with a generally kind but delusory (and thereby nebulously vicious) partner. “I’m married to him. He lives.”/ “Married. You don’t know the meaning of the word… There is that in her I shall not know.” At the Court of King James, a poet reads a soggy effort—“…wild meanders the New World’s Princess.” She kneels to look at a racoon in a cage, her face unable to cover over a suffocating sadness. Her ever-kind colonist arranges for her a meeting with the death-prone Captain. “Did you find your Indies, John? / “I may have sailed past them.”
Being a Heidegger scholar, Malick would have shaped his scenario riveted to the slippery nature of intent, whereby one so recklessly sails into and overshoots ecstasies. Smith—true to his name—is only a common contender with those cruel seas. The Princess, treated with reverence by her English hosts, perhaps, to some extent, due to more than formulaic charity, displays a far more consequential misadventure. The Captain having lost all compellingness in her eyes, she addresses the kind alien who is the father of her child, “You are the man I thought you were. And more.” On the grand, green lawn of the estate where they are lodged, she gambols with the little boy, chasing a flock of white sheep, in piercing diminishment of her formative surging amidst the wildest entities. She plays hide-and-seek with him (a game she figuratively played with Smith), on a manicured lawn, amidst geometrically sculpted trees. And she goes back to the well, one last time, to shoot out all the lights: “Mother… Now I know where you live.” You could take that remark to signal her attachment to overtness of Fatherly securement as superseding Motherly tentativeness. Such a primal ground would stand, in all its mathematical supplementation, as firing on all cylinders in that tight little island construction centre for the grey goods of classical rational calculation by way of reasons, causes, grounds. And, then, what to make of her sudden death (by the logic of this artwork, not the factuality of historical incident) at the outset of returning to a “new world” of diminishing returns, and being buried in a dank old world graveyard? There is her anointment in a splash of water by an artificial pond. And there is our memory of her ribbonning through a clear blue expanse of river at the moment when the three ships of that exploratory party (including Smith, imprisoned in a dark hold for mutinous intentions) were about to land and thereby contend with serious newness (and thereby confront her with their incidental newness). A life in adoration of movement comes down to heartbreaking capitulation to the perdurable safety of stones.
In his 1969 “Translator’s Introduction” to the Northwestern University Press English version (called, The Essence of Reasons) of Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes, being nearly forty years prior to the 2005 production and 2006 general release of The New World, Malick argues that the writer was announcing to the world his contradiction of the classical rational heritage. The recent Oxford dropout—something about (surprise!) not getting along with the classical rational lifer assigned to tutor him—lays stress upon the uniqueness of the study’s weave between “world” and human individual, and ventures to insist that, “There is a way in which one cannot agree with Heidegger ‘on certain points’ any more than one can, even in a manner of speaking, be insane or revolutionary on certain points.” The crux of the text he worked upon could contribute to contradicting that claim. Provision of serious (sufficient) grounds, “is that which makes the question ‘Why?’ [questioning about causes] possible in the first place.” In another study, Heidegger proposes that taking to heart the couplet, “The rose is without why, blooms because it blooms,/ Has no concern for itself, no need to be seen,” comes to the workings of “because” trumping the workings of “why.” But Heidegger’s lifelong ulterior motive was surreptitious rehabilitation of a precedence of “why” due to a coagulative omnipresence within a primal dynamic. It is very definitely possible to appreciate that writer’s bravado as to “because” and, at the same time, drop his dead duck in the form of twitchy (dialectical) re-enshrinement of “why,” as lurking within Heidegger’s Hegelian snare, “onto-theo-logic.” In light of The New World, it becomes apparent that Malick—who was, in fact, once ready to put his head in that noose—took pains to get over the supposed everlasting grandeur of that classical rational heritage doing very well for itself apropos of Jamestown and apropos of today.
The hyper-sensual texture of the saga takes place as singing out the song of a rose and its “because,” its dynamics. The Princess, as seen at her first flowering, bounds through meadows, woods and waters from out of a repository of promising gambits of movement. The keynote of this inventory for “singing the song” is a dance motif of unfurling herself in stretching her back and head upwards and extending her arms, hands and fingers even with her head, in evocation of things in flight, as embedded with her quietly radiant, smiling face. This she especially deploys in communion with cherished friends—at the outset with a young brave, and then with the Captain—a gambit lost forever after Smith’s weaselling out. Topping off the momentum thus spurred, she wears a tawny-hued deerskin garment affording full exposure and range of motion of her lithe arms and legs. The lovingly rendered visual and aural surround of the flora, fauna and marine features of Southern Chesapeake Bay plays into the gleeful electricity of her casual and regal procession. Urgent animal calls (shrill and joyous) and rippling light and waters serve to pare down the Princess’ actions to their strange contingency, their keenly being about imminent disappearance. (Far less powerful but no less well-chosen are major-key selections from the classical music repertoire, often trilling in the background and installing a vaguely priggish, tepid, and thus ominous overture.)
Agents of confinement and disappearance, in the form of the English soldiers of fortune, spread forth at a kinetic pitch edifyingly at odds with that of the sprite and those of her people approaching her grace. The expedition’s leader (a desiccated bureaucrat), abounds in the vinegary push of violent policing and saccharine gush of churchy platitudes, ranging from self-righteous threats to schoolboy, axiomatic ultimacy. “Remember, Smith. You’ve come to these shores in chains. See that you redeem yourself.” He chooses to put down roots there, not due to any positive insight, but because he’s “weary” and the place is apt for repelling “enemies.” He rallies the crew by informing them that “slackers will be whipped at the site of their transgressions.” Soon after landing, in exploring the shore nearby, a crewman approaches the leader, his hands full of bounty from the waters. “These clams are as big as my hand! No one will go hungry here!” The Great Motivator pipes up with hardly warranted utopian rhetoric. “We shall be an example for mankind…We are the advance guard.” Soon thereafter, a unit of newness reports to him, “Someone has stolen five cases…Provisions are crawling with worms.” Here the CEO’s sharp mind turns to “the naturals.” “We shall need to trade with them for food if [or is that, when?] our crops fail.” Some of the natives having trespassed, we see one being shot in the back and a couple of others with hands bound. The brain trust of the discoverers observes, “We have lost the goodwill of the naturals,” and that is the cue for Smith to turn things around and “repair” his “reputation” in the eyes of his toney confreres. It is also the cue for the take-charge guy to return to England (“for fresh supplies”). Not only does the so-called advance guard specialize in retrograde acts and words, its skin is splotched with boils and the like and—to judge from a conference between the naturals and, as the deck is cut, the “unnaturals,” where the former tentatively touch the latter’s clothing and armor and regale them with sounds resembling that of saucy but not hostile songbirds, and also sniff with perplexity the air they occupy—is as filthy as the rot of its kitchen. With the exception of the Captain, these adventurers are noticeably scrawny, in marked contrast to the host population, the men of which display athletic muscle tone enhanced by tattooing and less permanent designs. (While thus establishing antipodes of dynamic energy, the film challenges us not to fall for the simplism of assuming that all is wrong with the unnaturals and all is right with the Princess and her people.)
As such, “the only professional soldier,” from out of what begins to resemble a fantasy big leaguer excursion that hasn’t been effectively vetted, musters the physical vitality and poise to win over the tribe. (His musings en route and once on the job comprise a discouraging quantity of the loopy boosterism and slipshod extravagance of his boss—“We shall make a fresh start, a fresh beginning…We shall build a true Commonwealth…”/ “They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile…They have no jealousy, no sense of possession…”—but they also speak to his being [to his surprise] engaged by currents drawing him toward unprecedented and frightening lucidity.) But it’s a close one, due to features of the social and political energies of the naturals which bring their mainstream into affinities with the unnaturals. Taken captive to the chief’s lodge, he wows the crowd with such turns as gunpowder in the fire, and the upstaged shamans start muttering, “We shall drive them into the sea.” They precipitate the upstart’s execution, but the Princess (who had, weeks before, encountered him from afar, and was now touched by his courage under such pressures as those raging at the lodge) authoritatively intercedes on his behalf with her father, and the Captain is inducted into the tribe by way of a ceremony whereby many women press his body with their hands.
Amenable to being guided “towards the best,” he readily, though with bemusement, enters into her orbit that is strange and uncharted even by local standards. The progress of their love passes through territories of intent keyed by the reserve and wit, and, above all, the love, entailed in consistent evocation of the carnality of the “because.” With many shimmering outreaches and touches by her, and, by both, rapt perusal of each other’s face, they teach each other the words, “sky,” “sun,” “water,” “eyes,” “ears,” “lips;” and she recharges the motif of twirling, outstretched arms to simulate the phenomenon and uncover the word, “wind,” and to celebrate a unison not widely achieved. He does his best to round out the poetry of the occasion. “Love. Shall we deny it when it visits us?” She, too, feels compelled to understand more fully what is happening. “A god he seems to me…I will be faithful to you.” And then, in a voice like that danced wind, “One!…One!…I am… I am.”
The tribal exponents of Realpolitik have the outsider deposited back inside the stockade, and the physical and intentional squalor there gives the impression that the latter is an ancient and obsolete ruin, in conjunction with the fecund and viable society nearby. On first setting foot within Jamestown, he is assailed by a group of boys with riddled skin and addled tongues (“Did you bring food? We’re starvin’…When will we go back to England?”) He is apprehended by the temporary head man, who pronounces him “indicted on a chapter in Leviticus”; then he is (again) about to be executed forthwith, but he is saved this time by someone in the crowd murdering his executioner. The defeatedness and venom of the place soon have him looking ungodlike and once again sounding like the absent commander, in trying to induce some efficiency from a population running solely on crude pluck. “He who will not work will not eat.” In the winter, led by the Princess in a beautiful fur robe, a contingent from the naturals brings food to prevent full-scale starvation. She continues to exude summer fluency of sensual composure, though she is hurt by his absence and the guardedness of his comportment toward her. “Why did you not come?”/ “Don’t trust me.” He has palpably become a functionary, anxious about his performance-rating by a coercive power, and mindful that the reinforced Jamestown will crush the naturals. During the heated military skirmishes between questionably holy combatants, the ludicrous campers (led by Smith) give a surprisingly effective accounting of themselves, speaking to skills (coming out of physicality laced with hate) offering destruction as an underside of their clueless march toward material well-being. One of those noticeably missing in action when there is work to be done becomes galvanized, livid, foaming at the mouth in confronting the enemy. “You evil bastards! Devils at the mouth of Hell! One of the King’s sons is critically wounded and, while the Princess tries to soothe him, the witch doctors launch a tiny turtle along his torso, toward his head. There would be the hope that a simple organism like that would bring the victim’s energies to a pristine concentration. The medicine fails and soon we see the CEO’s second coming, armored more heavily than the turtle, with a voiceover by Smith. “They fired their cannons, leading the naturals to sue for peace. The tide now swung to the other side,” as he had banked upon. Before that, the Princess is expelled from her people for abetting the Europeans’ remaining, Smith refuses to acquire and exploit her as a hostage to ward off destruction from the numerically superior foe, a mutiny expels him to cutting down trees to fortify the stockade, and his careerist energies seem to have been handed an irrevocable setback. But the Big Gun with the big guns bears tidings that the English King wants him to return to the Old World (for which he has been steeling himself) to lead a party to find a viable (shipping) passage and acquire the riches of the Indies.
The lead-up to that business trip on a one-way ticket sets the dramatic tonality for the remainder of the narrative. Recipient of the improving touches of classical rational civilization, the town-based (dating from her being acquired by those deposing Smith) Princess (now named, “Rebecca,” [from “bind”], a name that was a great favourite with Puritans for its implication in dutiful, ascetic wifehood) has been corseted in weighty fabric and given to clunk around in tight shoes with considerable heels. Despite being thus, to all intents and purposes, mutilated, she has resolved (how successfully being the crux of the work), “I will find joy in all I see,” and in finding Smith labouring in the country she asks, “Am I as you like?” Sitting on the ground, she curtly covers with that big dress a bit of tattooed ankle, a little touch but also an earthquake. He—more mutilated than she—counters with, “I am not the man you thought I was.” Her face being subtly drained before our eyes, she muses to herself, “What does he say?” Then she pronounces, “I belong to you.” His face is troubled; but it is a budding CEO’s face. Her voiceover cuts through the game—“He knows…Where am I?” Then he calculates his phony death (while we know he is in truth already dead)—“Tell her I’m dead. Drowned” (definitely out of his depth)—his ship moves away and the seriously tarnished Princess—unable to find joy in what she sees—goes into a fit of despair (for him? For the best that is her, as requiring social concourse?), culminating in her caking her face with ashes. We are being shown at a gut level what really happened to that glorious smile and those masterly moves, and the subsequent scenario augments that holding, with a view to fresh overtures someday. Ascetic platitudes from the Princess’ town-appointed maid—“Forget about him. He told you a pack of lies. All this trouble will give you strength. Keep reaching towards the light!”—and Smith’s Highness-appointed superior—“I remember when you had sight. Would you refuse the opportunity to press ahead?”—clearly do not rise (despite some coincidental hitting the mark) to the struggle for innovation that consumes her and somewhat bothers him.
Before we see the departure and the despair, there is a lovely touch maintaining the nebulously promising suspense by which this disaster has been graced. We see her asleep in morning light, and his shadow (he now lacking any substance) briefly touching her as he beholds that daunting promise one last time. This gift is followed up in many ways. Her husband explains there are sixty minutes in an hour. She asks, “Why does the earth have colors?” (reaching for the sensual, but getting tangled in the misapprehension of “why?”. She goes about her farm chores, her mothering and her being a celebrity in England by and large in silence, a charging device that in this case barely keeps her sane. She chases moths happily. She beholds an ox in harness, and her pain far exceeds that of the beast. On the voyage to meet the King of England, she comes upon a former tribesman sent by her father “to see this God they speak so much about,” at His breeding ground. She has just repulsed her godhead husband over the lost hope in the freshly resurfaced Smith. In England, her smiles come in gusts, like its weather of sun-dappled gloom. Her abortive meeting with Smith has her putting in a bit of diplomatic chat. “I’ve been away in the Capital,” he says, his instinct for damage-control through name-dropping now at medical levels. “Your Ladyship! Who could have guessed it!…You’ve become a great favourite at the Court. All speak well of you!”/ “Did you find your Indies, John. You shall, I’m sure of it.”/ “I may have sailed past them.”
The jewel in that crowning impasse consists of her own having sailed past the treasure having slipped through her fingers. “It is enough that you and our child should live” is her deathbed rejoinder to a husband seemingly blasphemous to describe as someone she could have loved more nobly. But of course it is far from “enough” that underlings trace still more variations of nonsense with highlights going nowhere. She had had “enough” of the war, that “war” implicit in the “rose.” In the first throes of his love for her, the Captain-warrior expounded (to hopefully attentive listeners in some distant future), “Her father had a dozen wives, a hundred children, but she was his favourite. She exceeded the rest not only in features and proportions, but in spirit and wit.” The old monarch understood what was needed, and could see how far short of it his well-primed charges had fallen. The Princess could muster similarly handsome tributes to her kindly husband. “You are the man I thought you were. And more.” But she, the onetime avatar of spritely play, could no longer find within herself an instinct of play that would include game goodwill as proffered by motley pretenders. Did the phrase, “You shall, I’m sure of it,” carry a facetious barb? Would she have risen, however quietly, to the unintentional irony of her husband’s, “You’ll have no peace until you see him”? In touching upon bitterness at her besiegement, she would abrogate the exigencies of everlasting “war”—exigencies prominently featuring love for all entities—as expounded by an even more ancient aristocrat, whose work Heidegger (and hence Malick) revered, namely, Heraclitus. A brilliant start does not preclude adjustments down the line. Adjustments need not be capitulations, nor abandonment of that productive solitude her husband could only marvel at, when he admitted to himself, “There is that in her I shall not know.”
New World settlers land in what will become Virginia, meeting the “Naturals”, the Indian tribe who lives in the area. Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) stops the planned hanging of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), asking him to lead an expedition to the north, to meet the indigenous tribe’s leader. Smith soon meets Pocahontas (newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher) and they are each intrigued by the strangeness of the other. Returning to the settlement, Smith finds his fellow settlers are living in squalor and almost starving. Taking charge, he manages to help them survive the winter, along with a timely delivery of game and fowl by Pocahontas. Soon, they are under attack and they decide to bring the Indian princess there to live. As Pocahontas acclimates to her new life, Smith balances his desire for her with his desire to explore the New World.
Terrence Malick’s “The New World”, his first film since “The Thin Red Line” in 1998, is certainly a beautiful film to watch, perhaps the most beautiful of the year. But as I watched the painterly compositions, I realized that even though his films are beautiful, they suffer from similar problems.
Malick is one of a handful of directors who seem to compose every single frame of film as though it is a painted canvas. Composition, color, depth of field, everything in just about every scene is visually stunning, even when the settlers are living in squalor. Some of the shots brought to mind the work of Frederick Remington and his studies of Native Americans. Given the amount of time Malick takes to make a new film, it is clear he is more interested in creating art.
During the first hour of “World”, Smith and Pocahontas fall in love. It is interesting to watch Farrell and Kilcher portray this without words, at least words the other can understand. Each stares into the other’s eyes as they walk in circles in a field. Or they might be walking together, Kilcher tracing the exposed muscles in Farrell’s chest, as he watches her in rapt appreciation. As this continues, there becomes a noted lack of entrance into their relationship. Yes, we get the attraction of the new, the physical attraction. But unless we understand their thoughts, what is going on in their heads, we can’t become emotionally invested in their relationship.
Malick solves this problem in two ways. The first is with voice over narration. As Smith and Pocahontas are engaged in their mating dance, Farrell and Kilcher provide voice over, presumably their character’s thoughts. But their narration is fairly esoteric, much like the characters are thinking love poetry they can’t express verbally to each other. This adds to the lyrical nature of the film, almost creating a visual poem. It is intriguing to watch this, for about 30 minutes, and then you begin to hope for and expect more of a dramatic arch to the story. The second solution to the communication problem occurs when Pocahontas begins to learn English. Soon, she is very fluent, yet we still get the narrative love poems. They never seem to stop. And they are always accompanied by people staring at one another, or walking through a beautiful field. It becomes more than a little monotonous. It is like going to a museum and viewing an overly large collection of landscapes painted in the same style. They may be pretty, but after 20 or so, it becomes difficult to tell them apart.
“World” depicts the founding of the first settlement in Virginia, the relationship between Pocahontas and Smith and later her relationship with John Rolfe (Christian Bale), the relationship between the settlers and the Naturals, and more. Stuff happens. So why does the film feel so inert? A significant portion of screen time is devoted to characters staring at each other, as they circle one another, gazing into each other’s eyes as they prance around in a stream, or their hands gliding across the other’s flesh, as the voiceover attempts to explain their burgeoning love. World” is based on actual events in history, but Malick makes a wrong turn in the last 45 minutes. I don’t care if it actually happened or not, we don’t need to see Pocahontas travel back to England with Rolfe. Again, the scenes are beautiful to watch. And I understand why Malick wanted to include this. We have seen Smith’s New World, now we must see Pocahontas’ New World as well. The problem is Pocahontas has become so integrated into the lives of the settlers her discovery of England doesn’t have the power of Smith’s. And it only makes the film that much longer.
Farrell and Kilcher are both good. Am impressive supporting cast (Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer, David Thewlis, Wes Studi, Jonathan Pryce) clearly wanted the opportunity to work with the respected filmmaker.
Throughout, we don’t get enough of a sense of what makes John Smith tick. Why did he leave his relationship with Pocahontas? Why the teary reunion in England filled with regrets? What is the point of these scenes? Malick devotes so much attention to the visual, that he doesn’t seem concerned with answering these questions. Until we can understand, the drama will falter.
Malick’s films are always beautiful to watch, but the dramatic elements receive less attention. Until Malick is able to more evenly distribute his attentions, his films will always be beautiful, but frustrating.
Bill,
Thanks for a very thorough and spirited account of your response to this film.
What I was especially drawn to, in writing this piece, was the work’s dramatic audacity. I think what makes Smith “tick” (what “urges” him on) is what makes the Princess tick; and that confluence is the heart of their heart-stopping love affair. They see eye-to-eye (at length, to be sure) in occupying an aperture immersing them in a carnality so unusually intense as to impose a suspenseful hesitancy upon their actions. The drama particularly has to do with that thread of newness breaking down.
Best,
Jim
I have read that Malick was a devoted deciple of Heidegger. You do a terrific job in connecting the dots between the two. I was far more mesmerized by the towering aesthetics of this film than Bill, but it seems people are either bowled over or bored with this. It might be my favorite Malick of the four, though I love The Thin Red line just about as much.
Again, you have raised the temperature and given your readers an intriguing challenge to corroborate or reject.
Thank you, Frank.
I think what bowls me over about The New World derives from Malick’s coming to see the wisdom of picking and choosing amidst Heidegger’s efforts. The film, for all its stately surface, roils largely unseen with the problem-filled adventure of innovation.
All the best,
Jim
The ‘hyper-sensual’ section is amazing, but that’s exactly why this film has left many so awed.
Frederick,
I am very pleased that dimension made sense to you! It more often than not prompts incredulous apprehension.
Best,
Jim
I continue to read the reviews of this film here and have almost rented it 2x recently, but every time I start to make the attempt, I stop.
We had rented once previously and never got past the first 5-10 minutes. Yes, the film was beautiful, but also, the people looked so fresh and clean, they looked out of place for the time of the events.
Thus, it simply seemed too pretty, although realizing it’s a film, that’s once thing, but to recreate a time and place with people, with all the hardships at the time, looked that good, er, call me a crazy.
Pow Wow Highway and Smoke Signals come to mind, although not early period pieces, but show people as they really look, with all their different attributes………..which always draws me into films anyway.
BTW, did you hear Hans Zimmer on NPR today, talking about how he came up with the music for Inception? Having never heard him before, it was interesting.
An interesting review of the “World” film too, just not sure I’ll ever find the nerve to seek it out and try again.
Cheers!
coffee messiah,
Malick surely was taking liberties with historical fact.
What, I think, accounts for the premium upon such a glamorous sheen is the decision to install upon the story of Jamestown an eruption of a type of historical watershed involving virtuoso carnality. As such his Princess and her precincts become endowed with features of up-to-date staging. Her story requires a primeval reservoir, but it is also very much a contemporary story. She is a sister of sorts to Lynch’s Rita and Alice. In an appropriately weird way, she is a sister to the Pee-wee having a Big Adventure, the comedy of which makes up the subject of my next blog.
Thanks for the insightful and productive arguments.
Cheers!
Jim
Or philosophically it matters little how the world is recreated; after all coffeemessiah just wants the world to seem more realistic to another recreation he prefers or feels is more ‘accurate’. After all none of us were there, and Malick is clearly using the historical setting, people, and events as mere jumping off points (Malick likes to deal with philosophical themes of utopia, recreation of the self, and the world as itself as it’s described by this new self etc so obviously an old culture settling in a ‘new world’ would be an idea he’d be attracted to). Complaining it didn’t look accurate is akin to complaining that these people (in real life old Virginia) didn’t have the actual word-for-word conversations that the film depicts.
Then it’s a slippery slope condemning all historical film, and eventually art…
Oh and Jim, if your next blog entry is going to be PEE WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE 2 points:
1.) Man, I’m pumped. It’s one of my personal favorite films. It’s both guilty pleasure, and (I believe) legit art masterpiece.
2.) At some point watch the Italian realist classic, BICYCLE THIEF. PEE WEE I believe, is a post-post modern take on that film and viewing it like that will really open up quite a bit. Then to complete the trifecta, watch 2008’s WENDY AND LUCY. Which is both BICYCLE THIEF and UMBERTO D, but has enough PEE WEE malaise (though it never attempts comedy) to make for a very interesting three films back-to-back-to-back.
Jamie,
It’s a blast you love Pee-wee’s Big Adventure!
I know and love Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. I’ll try to catch Wendy and Lucy. By the way, have you seen Kurosawa’s Dodes’ Ka-Den? It does seem to fit here, too!
Thanks for the tips and your great enthusiasm!
Cheers,
Jim
Hey, I ain’t gonna argue, but I really like this:
“she is a sister to the Pee-wee having a Big Adventure”
Not sure I’ll see it despite that great line……….might be more believable with pee wee in the lead though, I’m just sayin’
don’t mind me, I still enjoy reading the reviews
jamie: once again, I wasn’t complaining, simply stating that to me, when films only show flawless looking people, well, they lose me.
take a look at all those old photographs, even from the civil war period. there are some nice looking people, but not that nice looking.
ps: i didn’t say anything about the films accuracy anywhere. thanks though for making it appear so ; (
well the logical leap for saying the people didn’t look like they would have or should have is saying it’s not realistic or accurate. same difference. But to each his own I suppose.
I would wonder if you don’t like seeing predominately beautiful people do you ever turn the TV on? LOL, when one does beautiful people are everywhere from tv, commercials, to film.
The metaphysical underpinnings of this tone poem are a perfect fit for Jim Clark’s highly evocative writing, which is this instance aims the magnifying glass on character. Hence, when Mr. Clark asserts:
During the first hour of “World”, Smith and Pocahontas fall in love. It is interesting to watch Farrell and Kilcher portray this without words, at least words the other can understand. Each stares into the other’s eyes as they walk in circles in a field. Or they might be walking together, Kilcher tracing the exposed muscles in Farrell’s chest, as he watches her in rapt appreciation. As this continues, there becomes a noted lack of entrance into their relationship. Yes, we get the attraction of the new, the physical attraction. But unless we understand their thoughts, what is going on in their heads, we can’t become emotionally invested in their relationship.
he provides the essential seemingly minimalist drama that is then widened to include the philosophical meditations that define the essence of this film beyond the typical Malickian visual splendors. The entire essay here, though challenging -like all Jim’s work – is a must for all students of this contemporary masterpiece, and for a deeper look at this great artist.
Sam,
It’s a delight to be working in the context of Wonders, which you so marvellously tune to an exciting network of discoveries.
Malick, who flirts with being dismissed as a stylist gorging himself on the attractions of film technology, has so much more to offer, as you very effectively express in your tribute to his art.
Cheers!
Jim
jamie: paper or plastic? no plastic for me Thanks! er and that’s a big no on the boob tube……….beauty is one thing, sameness is another.