Browse all reviews by letter     A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 - 9

The New World

USA 2005
Directed by
Terrence Malick
155 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3.5 stars

The New World

Synopsis: The story of Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), a Native American princess, and Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) after he arrived in the New World as part of an English expeditionary force in the early 1600s.

“Captain Smith and Pocahantas had a very mad affair” sang Peggy Lee back in 1956 and so with admirable brevity (two short verses in fact) Fever twinned this pair of star-crossed lovers with Romeo and Juliet in the Pantheon of romance. Terrence Malick, a director not known for his economy, manages to stretch the self-same story to over 155 minutes and visually beguiling as it is, it is not even remotely likely to attain the same longevity.

In every respect The New World is a marvellously crafted work, with beautiful cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki (it was shot on 65 mm stock), an effective score by James Horner and superb production and costume design. Malick amply demonstrates that as a director he has few peers in American cinema but…...... Yes, The New World is a “but” film. For all its wonders it is dramatically flat and at two and a half hours, overdrawn. This flatness impinges in various, cumulative ways.

Structurally the film is divided into two parts. The first part, which occupies two-thirds of the time tells the story of Captain Smith and his Indian love. The second half tells us what happened to Pocahontas after being abandoned by Smith. Many will wish that Malick had not been so thorough. As written by Malick, the characters are inert and performances by the three main actors, Colin Farrell, Christian Bale and Q'Orianka Kilcher, do nothing to alleviate this. Even the film’s more eventful moments are devoid of tension. David Thewlis is dispatched early on in the film with a wasteful perfunctoriness, the battle sequences are odd start-stop-start again affairs and there is a recurrence of various varlets (including Noah Taylor) yelling direct to camera that add nothing to the supposed desperate state of affairs the infant colony is in.

Malick opts for a very graceful, understated approach to performance which is perfectly in keeping with the overall pace of the film and beautiful in itself but this leaves the audience wanting for involvement. Partly the problem is that Malick uses the voice-over to give expression to the inner life of each protagonist. We thus understand their emotions clearly but we do not actually see it and thus, by the laws of cinema, feel it. Colin Farrell is unconvincing in his character as a mix of dashing action hero and sensitive romantic figure and seems oddly disconnected from everything around him. Christian Bale who has the misfortune to enter the story just as it loses puff is so meek and mild as to be virtually anonymous. Q'Orianka Kilcher (who, remarkably, was 14 years of age when film began) is an attractively protean presence who shines as a kind of woodland free spirit but such spirits are not known for their manifestations of human passion. Partly here perhaps the story itself unduly demanded restraint. Historically, Pocahontas was 12 years old, and even though Q'Orianka Kilcher looks older than that and her age is never made clear, it is not the sort of thing any mainstream film-maker could play too freely with.

The main aim here is clearly to tell an epic love story/tragedy but Brokeback Mountain this is not. Unlike that film, despite doing many extraordinarily good things, Malick does not manage to get the balance between story and character right.

 

 

back

Want more about this film?

search youtube  search wikipedia  

Want something different?

random vintage best worst