The New World is a brilliant sight to behold

I went into The New World fully expecting to be disappointed because I hated writer/director Terrence Malick’s last film (The Thin Red Line) so very much. However, this film turned out to be rather good, despite running too long and having very little action. I think that the storytelling method Malick was trying to achieve in The Thin Red Line worked much better for this movie.

This movie is based on the famous and tragic love affair between English explorer John Smith and a young Native American girl named Pocahontas. It begins with the English explorers making landfall to establish a colony in what would eventually become Virginia. The ‘naturals’ greet them at the shore with curiosity and caution, and this meeting is brilliantly portrayed on screen, even if it does take almost ten minutes to play out.

Colin Farrell plays John Smith, and his character arrives to the new world in the ship’s brig. He’d been imprisoned for mutinous remarks, but his life is spared at the last moment by the captain, played by veteran actor Christopher Plummer. Smith is the only seasoned soldier in the group, and the captain decides to put Smith’s spunk to use by sending him on a mission upriver to meet with a Native American king and work out some kind of trade agreement. After the long voyage oversea, the English explorers were left very short on supplies.

When Smith finds the King, he is kidnapped and about to be executed when princess Pocahontas steps in and asks that his life be spared. They develop a friendship that quickly turns into a romance, but then Smith has to return back to his men without her. When Smith returns to the colony, the situation has drastically changed and tensions are high. There’s about to be a fight, and loyalties keep coming into question.

I thought this movie was just shy of being on par with Dances With Wolves in how in portrayed cross-culture romance when it conflicts with military duty and matters of the heart. This is more of a love story than an action movie, though the one short battle sequence was very well done. I really loved how a combination of onscreen and voice-over dialogue was used to show us what the characters were thinking as they spoke. The language barrier between Smith and Pocahontas was brilliantly portrayed this way. They could only understand a little of what each other was saying.

I think this movie might have done better at the box office had it not come out the year after Colin Farrell’s horrible misfire Alexander. Audiences didn’t want to see him playing a bisexual conqueror in that bad Oliver Stone movie, and so the next year audiences mostly ignored Farrell trying to do another historical epic. This movie had a relatively low budget (@ $30 million) but didn’t even clear $13 million at the box office. Colin’s latest movie, the Miami Vice remake, isn’t doing so hot right now, either. He better pick his next couple of roles carefully or the rest of his movies might end up going straight to video.

Colin Farrell’s performance was great as Smith, but the real star of this movie was the previously unknown Q’Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahantas. She was discovered after an exhaustive eight-month search to find the right actress for the role, and she was only 15 years old when this was made. There is absolutely no excuse for why the Academy did not nominate this young woman for an Oscar for her performance. It’s a shame that Felicity Huffman’s ridiculous character in the horrible Transamerica got an Oscar bid while Kilcher was completely ignored. Christian Bale (Batman Returns) has a small role as another Englishman who gets caught up in the story, but he didn’t have much to work with.

If the Academy did at least do one thing right, it was to nominate this film for excellence in Cinematography. Director Malick insisted that the film be shot entirely in natural light and with mostly handheld cameras, so this film has a very authentic look that puts you right into the middle of the story. I think the attention was to make the viewer as if they were a ghost there in the middle of the whole situation. Emmanuel Lubezki, a native of Mexico, is credited for his excellent work here. He’s been nominated twice before.

Besides being almost 2.5 hours long, the biggest fault I found in this film was the editing. When the opening credits listed four different people as editors, I think that was a tip-off that some people couldn’t agree on how to put this movie together. It uses some weird cross-referencing points that I thought should not have been used. There also was a lack of transitional material between timelines and seasons, so it makes the movie seem to jump around just a bit. These are only minor annoyances that are easily forgiven when you consider the picture as a whole.

The New World is a great movie despite being incredibly slow. I think the ending went on for too long, but the story and all else was excellent. This isn’t a movie for everyone, but I found to be very enjoyable. I was so disappointed by The Thin Red Line that I had discounted Malick as a hack, but now he’s got my attention again. This is the kind of movie that you sit back and enjoy for all its worth, but don’t expect any cheap thrills.