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'The New World' is a film of discoveries

By BOB LONGINO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The New World" is the fourth best feature film the great director Terrence Malick has ever made. Granted, in 30-plus years he's made only four movies, but while the ranking underscores that Malick's latest is certainly not his most ingenious, it still has moments that soar like few other American films of recent decades.

Filmed in Virginia, "The New World" is the nine-year-long tale of the settling of Jamestown in the 17th century, of the love story of English explorer John Smith and Native American princess Pocohontas, of discovery and hope, often good intentions and some not-always-so-good results.

New Line Cinema

'The New World'

B+

The verdict: A cinematic tone poem (occasionally gloriously involving) that doesn't reach the spiritual heights to which it aspires.

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.
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In the lead roles, Colin Farrell instills a little celebrity glitz and newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher, with her Angelina Jolie lips, helps churn a lot of onscreen sexual heat. But neither fully awakens the film's intended spirituality.

Like Malick's three nearly perfect films — 1973's killers-on-the-lam "Badlands"; 1978's Shakespearian-style saga of deceit, "Days of Heaven"; and 1998's World War II head trip, "The Thin Red Line" — "The New World" is more an ethereal cinematic tone poem than plot-driven story.

Malick may be charting the short, important life of Pocohantas, but his aim is to explore the souls of his characters, to connect them to nature and their surroundings.

"Come spirit," Kilcher intones in the first lines of the plentiful narration, "help us sing the story of our land."

"The New World" is ultimately a film of discoveries — on the one hand explorers finding a vast, unsoiled paradise in the west, and on the other a smart young woman having her eyes opened to a newfound world to the east when she's ultimately called to England to meet the king and queen.

We witness Smith embedding himself into an Indian village, learning the culture and spending time with Pocohontas. We see the near starvation of the colonists in their muddy wasteland of a fort. And the bloody battle that ensues when the natives realize the Europeans plan on staying.

No scene is better than the film's extended opening with wooden English ships sailing into coastal waters off Virginia. Ashore, stunned and intrigued Native Americans dart about the trees, mesmerized by a sighting as significant and as dumbfounding to them as would be Neil Armstrong taking man's first step on the moon.

Malick introduces this sighting with the rapturous sounds of the New World itself — the crack of trees bending in the wind, the chirps of birds, the clicks of bugs and the gurgling of streaming water. They give way to the glorious, long-note strains of Richard Wagner's prelude to "Das Rheingold," a piece of stunning music that slowly rises and builds, seemingly from the core of being, before flowering into a stirring blast of brass horns.

In other words, "The New World" is almost like reading a long, descriptive novel. It isn't really a film for the masses weaned on the entertaining, roller-coaster action of "King Kong" or the manic relationship entanglements of "Wedding Crashers."

After the initial ho-hum critical reception when "The New World" was released last month in New York and Los Angeles for Oscar consideration, Malick cut some 16 minutes. The alterations, which shorten the running time to 2 hours, 15 minutes, seem to have involved taking quick slices out of multiple scenes. It's a good cut: The changes make the film move faster without sacrificing content.

The cinematography by two-time Oscar nominee Emmanuel Lubezki is consistently stunning and moving. The makeup on the Native Americans — including swipes of earth-caked color across bodies and faces and intricate tattoos — is equally impressive. Both are worthy of Academy Award nominations.

What doesn't really work is what is usually the bedrock of a Terrence Malick movie — the narration, performed for the most part by Farrell and the teenage, inexperienced Kilcher (the German-born actress is the daugher of a Swiss-Alaskan mother and Peruvian father).

Unlike the moving words spoken so eloquently in "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line," the narration here is almost dispassionately expresssed. Farrell, especially, falls into a near monotone, which serves only to upend a spiritual line like, "What voice is this that speaks within me?"

And as in Malick's original, longer version, the film seems to cheat Pocohantas' life, ending a little abruptly after such a long and studied buildup.

But at least Malick shows her playfully dancing in two new worlds — the intoxicating and beautiful wilds of North America found by European explorers, and the intoxicating and beautiful manicured gardens of England she discovered during her own remarkable voyage of discovery.