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THE NEW WORLD (**)
Movie Review by: Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
Directed & Written by: Terrence Malick
Starring:
Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale
Running time: 135 minutes, Released: 12/25/05
Rated PG-13 for some intense battle sequences
``The New World'' is writer-director Terrence Malick's beautiful evocation of the unspoiled American Eden that the first white settlers discovered in 1607, a picture poem of paradise lost. At times, it also appears to be Malick's haunting homage to the perfume commercials of Calvin Klein.

With its whispery voice-overs from explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell), and the breathy, brooding requitements of his Indian princess, Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), the film is always just one gooey, gazing shot of those two a moment away from whispering, Obsession!

Malick's own obsession with the pristine beauty of this new world -- where native Americans had been living in harmony with the land for many millenniums before the English arrived at what would become Jamestown -- is evident in every frame of his strange, gorgeous film. The version that arrives in theaters today is 15 minutes shorter than the one Malick submitted in December for Academy Award consideration. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, that moody maundering through the American primeval seemed to go on for what the Calvin Klein ads recognized as Eternity!

What has been lost in the new ``New World'' are such incantations as Pocahontas' tribute to John Smith: ``He's like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade.'' It's not so much his shade that she's interested in, as it is his darkness; Farrell plays Smith as the classic bad boy that women say they don't want, but really do. If there were Harleys in the 17th century, Smith would be riding one.

Whether Malick consciously meant to do so or not, he has created an opening sequence that closely parallels Stanley Kubrick's ``2001: A Space Odyssey.'' As the English ships sail into sight, fish and indigenous people swim underwater like Kubrick's floating space ships, and other natives jump up and down on the shore like the apes gathered around Kubrick's monolith. Even the swelling ``creation music'' from the prelude to Wagner's ``Das Rheingold'' recalls Kubrick's use of ``Also Sprach Zarathustra'' by Richard Strauss.

Once ashore, Capt. Newport (Christopher Plummer) warns his men not to offend the native people, whom he refers to as ``the naturals.'' Pocahontas is the most natural of the naturals, periodically raising her outstretched arms to the sky as if in communication with the clouds. The first time she and Smith see each other across a field of tall grass, she runs from him like a deer. Kilcher, who is the 15-year-old daughter of a Quecha-Huachapaeri Indian from Peru, brings a beautiful naturalism to the role.

Pocahontas (a name never spoken in the film) is the favored daughter of a tribal king (August Schellenberg), who is wary of the settlers. He assumes they will one day get back on their wooden ships and leave, but when he discovers that corn is growing in the settlement, the chief realizes that the Englishmen, too, have put down roots in his land. He will have to drive them away.

When Capt. Newport returns to England for provisions, he leaves Smith in charge of the colony -- a shivering shelter of mud and despair. After their food runs out, the men eat boiled belts, and when one of them dies, another settler eats his hands.

Compared to the English, the native people are more primitive than savage, although Malick suggests that all men are equally prone to violence, no matter how advanced their civilization. With their painted faces and Tourette-like whoops, these are not unlike the Indians we know from earlier wilderness adventures, but they are not presented as abstractions. Malick moves in close to give us an idea of what their lives might have been like.

The movie's gorgeous pictorialism draws us toward the shore, but Malick often leaves us marooned in the shoals, waiting for a story to arrive. Every scene overflows with matchless images and the sounds of birds cawing, crickets whirring and water lapping at the land. What is missing is any sense of narrative flow. Life unfolds, picturesquely.

After the Jamestown colony is established, Smith seems to tire of urban life, and once again we start to hear his thoughts as a kind of babbling brook. ``Start over,'' he says. ``Exchange this false life for a true one. Give up the name of Smith.''

But it is the princess Pocahontas who is banished -- like Eve -- from the Eden she has known, and forced to dress up in settler's clothes. Soon enough, her lamentations drown out the crickets, and the movie slows to a crawl. A new man (played by Christian Bale) has come into her life, and the first time we hear him speaking, it is in numbing voice-over. By then, what comes to mind is less a perfume ad than the thought that this picture is a slow-moving stinker.

 

THE NEW WORLD © 2006 New Line Cinema.
All Rights Reserved

Review © 2006 Alternate Reality, Inc.

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