Movie Review: The New World

Terrence Malick doesn't make a lot of films. In the past 30 years he's directed four: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and now The New World. His films are not average fare. They are closer to poetry. Rather than full scenes or sentences, you get lingering imagery, suggestive voice-overs and immersive music. The film needs to be experienced and is more about what it makes you feel than telling a particular story.

The New World is the story of Pocahontas (newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher) and the Jamestown colony in Virgina. She falls in love with John Smith (Colin Farrell) and marries John Rolfe (Christian Bale). So what did I feel? The British arrival on the shore was sudden. The film opens with gorgeous shots of a river and then you see several ships arrive with the "naturals" looking on from shore unsure of what they are seeing. The differences in the two peoples were shown in such original ways

The language barrier was often shown without subtitles but the naturals often screamed loudly and their gestures used not just their hands but their whole bodies. When they first meet I was the only one in the theater that laughed at how the naturals popped up from the tall grass as if they were meerkats. The natural village was a part of the woods, lush and green with one large building. The colony was walled in, with substantial looking log cabins and a courtyard of just mud with no grass in sight. I thought at one point it's no wonder that the colony was starving, they spent all their time chopping down trees and building buildings. When Pocahontas goes to England you see London through her eyes and it's even more strange. I loved when her companion said the king wanted him to carve a notch into the sticks he brought for every person he saw in England. The sense of scale was so wildly different.

So how was the love story? Ok. It dragged a bit with the Smith segment and then was a little short on the Rolfe relationship. I didn't really like Smith so I wasn't that engaged in the relationship. In spite of the fact that Farrell does a lot of voice-over, I didn't really feel I understood him and even less so for Rolfe. In the end, I was interested in how different this film was from normal fair, but I didn't love it.