I Would Like to See It: The New World

You’d have to be a pretty insightful and knowledgeable artist to do something worthwhile with the story of Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas — her childhood nickname and eventual use-name among early English colonists in what is now Virginia. Terrence Malick is not that artist. As a film his The New World has a few virtues, but at its root it is the most dishonest and repellent kind of historical narrative, twisting the abduction and rape of a native child into a story of star-crossed lovers and the unique charms of the girl herself — a kind of ethereal, nymphish divinity observed with somber adoration by the white men around her. Malick subjects us to multiple whispery monologues on the subject from Johns both Smith and Rolfe, interspersed occasionally with Pocahontas’s own chaste, wondering musings about these men.

A movie with a repulsive premise can, of course, stand on its own merits as a piece of fiction. One need look no further than Breakdown, with its misogynist suburban desk jockey power fantasy, or Diehard with its heartwarming pro-forgiving-cops-who-shot-kids messaging, but The New World has little to offer beyond Malick’s usual gorgeous, meditative shots of nature and meticulous recreations of material life in early 17th century Virginia. It oscillates between sweeping, impersonal grandeur and more prosaic scenes of daily life and conflict between the Powhatan people and the English colonists. Here the history with which Malick plays seeps deeper into the film’s character as he rewrites the historical record to claim Matoaka alerted the men of Fort James to an imminent attack by the Powhatan — in the ethical structure of Malick’s filmography there is no greater sin than physical violence, regardless of its provenance or purpose, and his leading women always know to cast themselves between it and its intended victims — and that her relatives sold her as a hostage in exchange for a copper kettle after her expulsion from her father’s camp.

In reality, no such expulsion occurred. The men of Fort James intimidated and cajoled one of the Powhatan’s subject tribes into turning over Matoaka when she visited their camp. Oral tradition among the Algonquin holds that in captivity among the men of Fort James she was raped at least once, but in the film she is treated with the utmost respect. Malick’s decision to reimagine Matoaka’s story as romance feels especially grating here, butting up against his unwillingness to examine her actual sexual experiences. Even her child with Rolfe arrives without the messy reality of pregnancy or childbirth, simply appearing from one scene to the next with a flourish of composer James Horner’s classical score. In The New World’s fetishistic reverencing of Matoaka, it ironically mimics the same “noble savage” narrative in support of which she was summoned to an audience with King James and Queen Anne, a journey from which she never returned. Malick’s movie is a failure on nearly every level, its natural beauty and sweeping tone serving only to underscore the grubby, insipid nature of his viewpoint.

On a purely practical level, perhaps the film's worst quality is its insistence on depicting Colin Farrell and Christian Bale's interest in a woman less than half their age as divinely sensual. Every shot of Farrell and co-star Q'orianka Kilcher in particular feels physically uncomfortable, fraught with a danger the film refuses to see. Malick is often studiously unsexy in his direction, and here he goes no further than allusion and the aforementioned sudden appearance of a baby,  but even by his standards the dynamic is stale and unpleasant, reeking of a sweaty, grabby uncle cornering a niece at a family function. Now imagine that mental image scored to 'Ma Vlast' and save yourself the two and a half hours it takes to watch this mess.