The New World (three cuts, 2005-8): choose your own adventure (Review)

Terrence Malick is often caricatured as the Fotherington-Tomas of cinema, whose tendency to wander around saying hullo birds hullo trees hullo skies can appear ridiculous in modern-day films like Lawless [5]. If you want to see Malick’s style and thematic concerns in a world where they make absolute, perfect sense, you need to see The New World, reissued in a three-disc Blu-Ray set by Criterion. Here, Malick’s disinterest in conventional plot is nothing but an asset, defamiliarising a story well-worn enough to form the basis of a Disney movie [1] until the mutual suspicion and uncertainty felt by Natives and explorers alike is palpable. His fondness for voiceover as a storytelling tool is vital in delineating the unbridgeable world-views of his protagonists. [2] And his eye for lush, magic-hour natural beauty argues for pre-colonisation America as “a land where one might wash one’s soul pure”, a Garden of Eden which contrasts brutally with the cold, foggy England of geometric gardens and echoing halls Pocahontas is taken to. [3] It’s the sort of film where someone’s favourite shot might be an epic Steadicam glide through a battle, or it might be an inexplicably monumental image of a stalk of corn silhouetted against the sun. When Pocahontas gifts John Smith a feather, we feel honoured to have even seen that feather.

[1] Malick apparently liked Disney’s Pocahontas, enough to recast two of its stars in his telling of the tale – Irene Bedard, who provided the speaking voice of Pocahontas, is aptly cast as the mother of Malick’s version of the character. Christian Bale, who had a minor role in the Disney film, returns here in the key part of John Rolfe, an English farmer who marries Pocahontas once John Smith is out of the picture. The star, however, is unquestionably Q’orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. The degree to which she carries the film changes according to which cut you watch; if you watch the version released in cinemas, you might initially believe this is the story of Colin Farrell’s Smith. The extended cut, with its longer opening voiceover from Kilcher and expanded scenes of – say – Pocahontas in Jamestown make it very clear that it’s her story. [3] It also provides a usual counterweight to the criticism that Malick’s female leads in films like The Tree of Life are too idealised, too floaty, too devoid of interior life. [5] Kilcher does a fair bit of running through cornfields – how could she not, given the subject matter? – but she provides Pocahontas with an inner life and a yearning, soulful quality that commands attention while bigger male stars come and go around her.

[2] One of the more easily mockable ingredients of Malick’s late style is his fondness for whispered, aphoristic narration, usually contrasted with the more pointed, ironic voiceover in Badlands. Yet Malick’s voiceovers are usually more complex than they seem. In the extended cut, Smith approvingly refers to Native American society as “lawless” [5] and claims they have no concept of lying or dishonesty, yet we also hear Pocahontas wondering “Am I a deceiver?” They cannot correct these misperceptions because they have no shared language, although all the different edits of the film contain a scene where Smith tries to teach Pocahontas English words. The longest cut, though, also features a scene where the medicine man Tomocomo teaches Smith Algonquin words [4], which explains why I think the extended cut is the superior one. There is more room to set up contrasts, more space for dialectic and complexity, and even more of a solid structure thanks to the chapter titles. You can see the flaws in the other cuts by looking at the scene where Pocahontas is sold to the English. In the cut shown at the film’s premiere, the storytelling is so tied to her perspective that it’s hard to know what’s happened until she’s on the boat – an interesting experiment, but unsatisfying. In the shorter theatrical cut New Line insisted on, the plot point is clearer but it doesn’t have the benefit of an earlier scene, present only in the longest version, where Smith warns them of the dangers of money. Pocahontas’s transport to England therefore becomes not just an individual tragedy but a symptom of a whole society falling into avarice [1] – which is unquestionably what Malick wanted to say here.

[3] The story of Pocahontas, the name given by her kidnappers to the Powahatan chief’s daughter Matoaka, has been romanticised at least since 1808, when James Nelson Barker wrote his tellingly-titled musical The Indian Princess, or La Belle Sauvage. The Postal Service issued a stamp of her in 1907; eighty-eight years later she was a Disney Princess. [1] The English settlers allowed her to be taken to the mother country for similarly mercenary reasons; they wished to show that a Native American could be successfully “civilised”, thereby justifying all the time, money and lives they were expending occupying this lawless land. [5] The beauty of The New World is that it functions as an examination of this system and as the American Romeo & Juliet the tale has become over the centuries. The tragedy of John Smith and Pocahontas is not undercut, but it is positioned as a microcosm of the tragedy of colonialism. Tellingly, Malick began work on this script in the mid-1970s, a time when America was simultaneously celebrating its 200th birthday and reeling from Watergate and Vietnam. This duality exists with ease in the finished film, which seems to me to be as full of potential and contradictions as America itself – particularly now these alternative cuts can be seen and compared to each other. It is significant that the extended cut is simply called “the extended cut” – not the final cut, not the director’s cut. The New World may never be finished in that sense, and that feels appropriate. [4] It’s less a story to be told, more a landscape to get lost in, and every time I watch it I find a different path through it.

[4] The language spoken by the Native Americans in The New World is Powhatan, a now-extinct Algonquin variant which was reconstructed by the linguistic professor Blair Rudes especially for this film. After the shoot was complete, he released it to Algonquin schools so it could be reintroduced. The resurrection of Powhatan is the most unexpected fruit of the film’s painstaking production, but the one people will be buying this set for is the three different cuts. The bulk of the film’s extras are focused on the editing and re-editing of the film, with Mark Yoshikawa – the only editor to remain attached throughout production – explaining the differences between cuts, and the entertaining double-act of Hank Corwin and Saar Klein explaining why other editors were needed. Malick seems to believe in a kind of Stanislavski approach to editing, giving the older, more experienced Corwin the scenes that needed a more classical narrative structure, and letting the young wild-card Klein loose on the more experimental, voiceover-led passages. [2] Despite being initially bewildered by Malick’s methods, Klein and Corwin became so attached to him that they gleefully trash-talk James Horner, who warned the director that, by junking most of his score, he had passed up his opportunity to create the next Titanic. In place of a bespoke theme, the finished film keeps returning to the overture to Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which fits perfectly with this vision of Eden despoiled despite being completely anachronistic. Forget Dvořák, this is the real New World Symphony.

[5] Lawless was an early working title for Song to Song, a film born of Malick’s early-2010s spree of activity that also resulted in To the Wonder, Voyage of Time and Knight of Cups. For many critics, this is where Malick became the poet laureate of first-world problems, at a time when directors like Barry Jenkins were using a noticeably Malickian style to address more urgent, contemporary subject matter. Yet Malick’s take on America’s original sin of colonialism is actually surprisingly sensitive and complex, particularly in the longest cut. [2] Any exoticism in its depiction of Native Americans is counterweighed by Malick’s clear identification with them, as well as the painstaking research. [4] The scenes of Native society are clearly more in line with this director’s sensibilities than wet, oppressive Jamestown or the almost Last Year at Marienbad-level alienation of Pocahontas’s life in England. Perhaps the emotional through-line is clearer because, for the first time in his career, Malick is working with a story everyone knows [3], and as such he can afford to downplay the story beats in favour of a more experiential vision of the ultimate clash of cultures. It does whet the appetite even more for his upcoming life of Christ.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of The New World

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