Terrence Malick is something of a legend in Hollywood — the only director anyone can think of who still has a career after taking a 20year break from the movie business. His early movies, Badlands (1974) and Days of Heaven (1978), were key works in the burgeoning ”New Hollywood” of the 1970s, and Malick was the star writer-director in a generation that included Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. And then, after Days of Heaven, Malick didn’t make another movie until 1998, when he directed The Thin Red Line.
Despite the intense admiration of his peers, and his inspiration of later independent filmmakers, Malick (who studied philosophy before getting into film) may have left the movie business for those two decades because he just didn’t fit into the Hollywood system or way of doing things. For all his interest in core American themes (such as the murder spree in Badlands), Malick’s style and sensibility are much closer to those of European filmmakers than Americans. His movies are thoughtful, oblique, atmospheric and intensely visual.
These qualities are all on beautiful display in his new movie, The New World. If you are impatient for a fast-moving plot or even straightforward characterisation, avoid it; The New World is for those who are willing to be patient and let such a movie work incrementally on their senses. It is more a narrative poem than anything else.
The New World tells the story of Pocahontas, the Native American ”princess” — or, more properly, the daughter of a Powhatan chief. Her real name was Matowaka; Pocahontas is apparently a corruption of the Powhatan words ”my favourite daughter”, and Malick never uses that name in his movie. Pocahontas/Matowaka was turned into a legend for helping a group of settlers in what became Virginia — that was in the early 1600s, and she was mythologised as the good Indian princess who rescued one settler, Captain John Smith, from death at the hands of her fellow Powhatan; she later converted to Christianity and went to England to meet King James I.
The historical facts are unclear, though; the alleged rescue of Smith is likely to have been his own propagandist invention. It is established, though, that in 1614 she married another settler, John Rolfe — the man who was the first big tobacco exporter and gave his name to our former president FW de Klerk’s preferred brand of smoke.
Malick is not overly concerned with historical fact, though; he is happy to use some of the Pocahontas legend to tell his story. Primarily, Malick wants to dramatise this encounter of mutually alien worlds, personified by the relationship that develops unexpectedly between Smith (Colin Farrell) and Matowaka (an astounding performance from Q’Orianka Kilcher, then a mere 14 years old — about the age Matowaka would have been). Careful attention is paid to period clothing, weapons and dwellings, but rather than trying to create an account that is historically accurate per se, it seems Malick wants to try to re-imagine what that encounter might have been like, to see the ”new world” afresh, as if for the first time.
And here, in his extraordinary sensitivity to landscape and the natural world, Malick excels. Water, plants, skies — these are glowingly observed, becoming an integral part of the movie’s visual texture. We are made all too aware of what is being destroyed, or will be destroyed, by the colonists.
Malick and (Mexican) cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot The New World entirely in natural light, adding to the sense of seeing an untarnished new world. The camerawork, like the storyline, seems more than anything to flow. Unlike conventionally constructed movies in which the back-and-forth cuts are rapid and help excite the audience as well as structure a scene, Malick lets the camera tell the story as if organically. He does not build scenes in the traditional manner, working to a mini-climax and then nailing them shut; he comes at them from an angle, lets them linger, open-ended, or makes them seem to overlap with and interpenetrate each other. Certainly, The New World lingers in the mind’s eye. The images are important in their own right, with voice-over (drawn in part from Smith’s own writings) flowing over them in turn — and adding to the meditative tone of the film, rather than simply propelling the narrative or explaining matters to the viewer.
In all those ways, The New World is amazing. I don’t want to over-hype it, because it’s not a hype type movie, but it makes one feel like one has genuinely seen things afresh — not just landscape and mythic history, but cinema itself.