The New World

The New World is just another Pocahontas story. If this movie is about anything, and it never seems like it is, it’s about the transformation of Pocahontas from Indian princess to English maiden. At the beginning of the movie, she frolics in Virginia forests. At the end of the movie, she frolics in English woods. There’s lots of frolicing in this movie, in fact, and lots of pining–John Smith is crazy in love with her–but little else. Ostensibly The New World‘s subject is the English colonization of Virginia, beginning with Jamestown in the first decade of the 1600s. Had the movie stuck to the interesting points of history–English contact with the Powhatans and their subsequent interactions–it might’ve worked, but every time it tries to go that way it steers backwards into the Pocahontas myth and a fabricated love story about her, which made us hit the FAST FORWARD button repeatedly.

If there were compelling characters and a plot, The New World would’ve been a visual masterpiece. The scenes and sets are stunning. Our director, Terence Malick, has done much reading and consultation to get the Jamestown colony and Powhatan villages to look as authentic as possible. In effect, Malick shuttles us through a multi-million dollar period village, so we congratulate New Line Cinema on wasting capital on an introductory video for Jamestown Museum tourists. It is true that, in the movie’s first fifteen minutes, the costumes and settings are visually awesome (particularly the Powhatans), but the story goes nowhere afterwards and so eventually we don’t care at all what it looks like. We suppose a history class could benefit from watching these early moments, which present first contact between English and Powhatans and the erection of the English settlement. To supplement these early scenes, Malick plays Wagner’s stirring “Vorspiel” to “Das Rheingold,” the key musical theme throughout the movie. It is also played at the end, when Pocahontas dies and gets a strange sort of movie resurrection, but there’s no rhyme or reason why Wagner should be played during a tour of the Powhatan village.

The New World is totally ruined by voiceover narration, most of which sounds like lines taken from a Transcendental Meditation guidebook. We rolled our eyes when the movie opened with Pocahontas’ voiceover saying “Come, Spirit, blah blah blah.” In fact, Malick–in no big shock in these ridiculously politically correct times–characterizes the Powhatans before first contact as being “without guile, deception, or forgiveness.” They don’t know forgiveness because, apparently, they don’t know how to be bad until the English teach them. John Smith gets that line about the untainted Indians. He is to the historical Smith as the fictional Gandhi is to the historical Gandhi. Instead of a fizzled love affair between a hunky Smith and a nubile Pocahontas, which is the major story line of The New World, the historical Smith was a hardened warrior and self-promoter and Pocahontas (if she really saved him at all) was probably no older than 10. The historical Smith’s biography is beyond belief–a real whirlwind of adventure–but Malick chose to make him an introspective mope in the middle of a love story. Go figure.

Perhaps the movie’s greatest atrocity is its representation of the English, who all might as well be secularist pigs. Besides the lunatic who shouts verses from Jeremiah and the brief shots of St. Paul’s in London (which Pocahontas visits), there’s no evidence of the Christian faith of Englishmen. Instead, London looks like a bigger freakshow than the Powhatan village. But we don’t feel upset about this, knowing that The New World–with its poetic tedium and blubbering voiceovers–will rightly fall down the memory hole of film history.

Entertainment: 2 (tremendous visuals though)
Intelligence: 3
Morality: 3 (clean overall)