Rapturous 'New World' casts new light on America's myths

January 20, 2006|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

''The New World" is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's ''Badlands." A revisionist telling of the Pocahontas story, it also gets its knuckles dirty in the myths that have sustained America since the very first landfall, draining them of romance while measuring a new and clear-eyed sense of national identity. It is a thing of wild beauty.

And many people will hate it. Historians, for one, since ''The New World" paints an impassioned love story that never actually occurred between the 27-year-old Captain John Smith and the 11-year-old Algonquin girl. Malick is working with the stuff of metaphor; he turns Smith into a rough, idealistic dreamboat with the face of Colin Farrell and casts the rangy 15-year-old newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas (even though that name is never once spoken in the film). The girl is all that America promises to an adventurer -- all the hopes of new beginning and noble savagery -- and Smith never sees her for who she is until too late. That's his tragedy; the movie's point is that it's probably ours as well.

''The New World" is also assuredly not for those who like their epics action-packed and moving with due appointed speed, despite arriving in local theaters in a version 20 minutes tighter than the one that premiered in New York in December. As with ''Days of Heaven" (1978) and ''The Thin Red Line" (1998), Malick has made a sprawling cinematic tone poem that paints the characters' thoughts on the soundtrack in the form of inner pensees. This approach has its pretensions (and then some), but when it works the result is a rapture of a sort the movies always promise and almost never deliver.

You'll know which camp you're in during the long opening scene, a visual crescendo that depicts the arrival of the European ships scored to an intensely beautiful fanfare of horns. The Jamestown colonists are led by Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer), who lands his men, issues a few high-flown bromides about destiny, and skedaddles back to England for reinforcements.

The film proceeds to paint the Europeans' first winter with horrific attention to detail: Outside the fort is a harsh, plentiful wilderness peopled by ''naturals" whose bearing, customs, and language are unfathomable, while inside the gates civilization quickly gives way to madness. As usual, Malick strands any number of gifted actors in small roles -- Noah Taylor, John Savage, David Thewlis all come and go -- as he attends to the big picture of Western idealism wrecked on foreign shores.