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'The New World': Brooding, beautiful telling of the Pocahontas tale

'The New World" is a dark, strange, beautiful film, entrancing with the sensual lyricism that has made director Terrence Malick as much a hypnotist as a storyteller. With majestic quietude, Malick tells the story of the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia and the curious relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas. Nature's splendors — grass, trees, sunlight, water, the echoes of forest birds and insects — are great communicators in Malick's art. Some viewers will approach the film's unhurried rhythms, slideshow imagery and Zenlike narrative with the bewildered trepidation of the English settlers shown landing in the pure wilderness of Virginia in 1607. And they might want to get back on the boat.

New Line Cinema 'The New World' 4 out of 5 stars The verdict: Terrence Malick gracefully conquers an American legend. Director: Terrence Malick Starring: Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Wes Studi, August Schellenberg, Raoul Trujillo, Q'Orianka Kilcher Run time: 135 minutes Release date: Jan. 20, 2006 Rating: PG-13 for some intense battle sequences. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'The New World'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Revisiting a script he began in the 1970s, Malick, a sometime Austinite, brings his dream-poet's sensibility to a piece of speculative history loosely based on writings by Smith and others. No one knows exactly how that first encounter between Smith's party and the American Indians went down, yet Malick's vision bears an arguable authenticity, creating a dizzying mood of alien wonder and exotic bedazzlement. This, you think, is how it must have been.

Swaddled in myth, the relationship between Smith (Colin Farrell, who reveals a trembling sensitivity) and the teenage Pocahontas (striking newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher) — whose name is never uttered in the movie — coils below the dramas of the settlers' struggles and their erratic relations with the natives. The love affair is one of gentle glances, held hands, frolics in the grass and tender caresses. Erotic heat is absent, but Malick and the fine performers find emotional urgency in the movie's impressionistic mists.

Their star-crossed love is worthy of Romeo and Juliet, and Malick, whose films are heavyhearted with loss, underlines the impossibility of the affair. While Pocahontas rescues Smith from her father's blade, the English settlers resent Smith's romance with a "savage." Smith follows his heart. "Love — shall we deny it when it is given us?" Farrell mutters in blank voice-over, a standard Malick device revealing that often replaces dialogue.

The director has remarkable trust in the power of a single image; he is a cinematic purist. He is mesmerized by the natural world, fixing on forest canopies, sloshing water, skittering bugs and swaths of windblown grass, an emblematic image from his 1998 war epic "The Thin Red Line." Malick's movies are concerned with figurative Edens despoiled by human folly, and these visual reveries are a mode of deification. When the story shifts to 1616 England, where Pocahontas is the king's guest, the film offers a meditation on the natural order of the New World versus the imposed, manicured order of rigorous civilization.

Malick's films brood. Only his fourth movie in a 33-year career, "The New World" has soul mates in "Days of Heaven" and "Thin Red Line," violent, mournful works whose dour musings come through characters' koanlike voice-overs. Bereavement triumphs.

The result is a long, important-feeling film constructed of dichotomies. It is both understated and overly stately. It contains both lyric restraint and grand strokes. From the ravishing costumes to James Horner's evocative score, Malick is a meticulous, idiosyncratic artist who seems determined to make a masterpiece. With "The New World," he has again come very close.