David O'ConnellThe New World
May 31st 2011 02:56
Aesthetically pleasing it may be but perpetually bathing itself in self-importance Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) becomes mired in impressionistic visions of its own preciousness. The ever-silent, enigmatic, more-myth-than-man director has attempted to shine an instructive, sumptuous light on the story of ‘Pocahontas’, the man who fell for her and the colonisation of Virginia through Jonestown. Indeed, there’s a compelling history lesson here but Malick allows his infatuations with nature and beauty to get the better of him, thus stifling this disjointed, would-be drama.
What we get are endless shots through sun-splintered trees, dancing over light-dappled leaves and of the central figures of Captain Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), the imperilled and his saviour, circling one another before they realise they’re in love.
The tedium that besets the film less than thirty minutes in can’t compare to the droning voiceover which is nearly constant. Its effect is utterly deadening, with empty philosophising and rhetorical questions intoned in reverential whispers that are often barely audible – perhaps thankfully for its mostly consists of musings a romance novelist would assign to a non de plume.
Farrell is probably miscast but then his always cleanly appearance and coiffed hair are irritants that deliberately unbalance portrayals of the English. The fine shape Smith is in, when juxtaposed against the reminders of how his misshapen, unkempt comrades are faring, does the film’s credibility no favours.
Christian Bale’s pale contribution as the secondary love interest comes across as an afterthought, like corrective punctuation - loose change tossed into the ring long after the millions have been squandered on thin air. Similarly, Kilcher has the minimum to offer in the way of presence; she offers a certain level of physical beauty but little else.
The cut-and-paste feel of the film is another anchor weighing this dud down into the Virginian woods. Malick’s legendary excess in the shape of a freeform shooting style that deposits hour after hour of raw footage into the editor’s lap has serious ramifications for any project’s need for coherence.
Here, like in the far more successful The Thin Red Line, dreamy abstractions are soldered between moments of stark clarification. The result in a ponderous sprawl contaminated by the ego of its creator - a too ambitious project fatally damaged by Malick’s soap-opera treatment of the love story.
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