The New World

The New World is a very quiet film, which is appropriate because, in the end, it doesn't say very much. I'm probably going against popular (by which I mean critically) opinion here as most critics seem to think Malick shits gold and roses, but I found the New World to be bad.

And not just bad, but pointlessly bad. We're not talking the "good" bad, like R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet here.

(Quick note: I just checked Rotten Tomatoes and it's only getting a 55%, so apparently I'm not going against the popular opinion here. Anyway...)

The problem with this film is that, although visually stunning, it goes nowhere, and takes a long thime to get there. A film that had the potential to be an epic retelling of the John Smith/Pocahontas story, set nicely in the backdrop of the first colonization of Virginia, flounders in the weight of Malick's pretenstions. It's almost as if he asked himself how he could take a story and turn it into pretty yet meaningless pictures. This is an indulgent film; unfortunatley it indulges only the filmmaker.

Did I believe the relationship of Smith and Pocahontas? No, because it was almost entirely presented in montages that showed no depth or development. Each scene, taken indivdually, had some resonance, but as a whole they failed. And note, a montage is still a montage, even if set to gentle orchestral music and oblique interior monologues instead of the theme from Rocky. And more than one in a film...well that's too much.

Did I care about the English settlers and their struggles? No, because there was no cohesive narrative to describe them.

What about battles between the Indians and the settlers? That must have been cool, right? There was one major one and it was staged with all the awkwardness of a CYO dance.

Certainly there was some intruiging dialogue? EHH! Wrong. In fact, there was probably actually more interior monolgue throught the film than actual dialogue. And not just from one narrator, but from three. The multiple narrator interior dialogue trick was one he also used in The Thin Red Line, however it worked well in that film, as there was no real main character. It this film, where the focus should be....well, more focused, the technique leaves the film with no ground on which to build, and smacks of pretenstion for it's own sake.

The one aspect of Malick's frustrating film-making that worked on this film, was when he portrayed the indians, and the settler's reactions in trying to communicate with them. The obvious language barriers, and the differences between their worlds, make what the indians are trying to say, and their culture, hard to understand, for both the settlers, and us the audience. This makes sense, in the contect of the film, and oddly enough parllels my experience with the film very well. Maybe Malick is trying to communicate something to the audience, but I certainly didn't understand it.