Popcorn With a Side of Guilt
By Josh Larsen

Why is shame considered a necessary ingredient in appreciating Native-American culture?

 

The destruction wrought upon Native Americans by European explorers is one of history’s  reatest cultural tragedies. Yet all too often, arbiters of our collective social conscience demand that recognizing this means feeling personally responsible. The near obliteration of the Native-American way of life may be this country’s original sin, but is it one for which contemporary Americans should continue to pay?

 

The New World, director Terrence Malick’s lament on the Pocahontas-John Smith saga, plays like an installment on some sort of guilt-ridden payment plan. Malick goes far beyond acknowledging that the birth of our nation depended upon much death; he sees the colonization of this new world as nothing less than the fall of Eden.

 

A darling of critics (he enjoys a certain mystique for making just four films in the last 33 years), Malick trains his ostentatiously impressionistic camera on the story of the Native-American princess and English explorer, whose cultures—according to legend—romantically clashed in 1607. The movie dramatizes Smith’s part in founding Jamestown; his capture by the local Algonquian tribe and supposed rescue from death by Pocahontas; their Romeo-and-Juliet romance; and her eventual travels to England. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and at nearly two and a half hours, Malick’s languid style makes for an occasionally trying journey.

 

Like Malick’s previous pictures—Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line—The New World is actually a nature film in a drama’s clothing. His is a cinema of gently blowing grasses, burbling waters, and softly chirping insects. Considering that The Thin Red Line envisioned a WWII battlefield as a natural paradise lost to men and their guns, you can imagine how Malick presents America at the onset of English exploration. If this is Eden, then the British are invading snakes bearing apples (emphasized by Christopher Plummer’s slithery portrayal of Captain Christopher Newport).

 

Nature lovers might take to Malick’s camerawork—one doesn’t mind getting lost in his visual reveries for a while. If The New World has an indisputable virtue, it is the movie’s celebration of our country’s wild beauty. When the English explorers take their first wandering steps through this unfamiliar land, the dazed looks on their faces suggest they might as well be astronauts visiting Mars. Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make this new world seem positively otherworldly.

 

If only they had stopped there. The director’s presentation of the Algonquian “naturals,” as Smith’s party calls them, passes from poetic license to pure silliness. In keeping with its emphasis on utopian biology, The New World presents Native Americans less as people than as perfect animals—peaceful members of the grand circle of life. Indeed, Smith’s dreamy voiceover narration (a signature of Malick films) observes, “They have no jealousy. No sense of possession.”

 

Smith himself, played by Irish actor Colin Farrell, only becomes an acceptable hero in Malick’s eyes once he has “converted” to the Algonquian way of life (until then, he and all of the Europeans are portrayed as grunting cavemen). And so we get to some of the movie’s most laughable scenes, as Pocahontas’s indoctrination of Smith comes across as a form of foreplay. Much frolicking in those aforementioned blowing grasses ensues—Pocahontas, played by newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher, does a lot of caressing of trees—so that The New World often seems to have turned into some sort of overripe perfume commercial.

 

These may simply be ill-advised artistic choices, ones Malick has made before, but they’re indicative of the movie’s underlying attitude. America’s bloody beginnings, the picture suggests, should negate any contemporary sense of pride. At its heart, The New World argues that we live in a fraudulent nation, and that the only way to continue to do so is with hanging heads. The movie projects a strong sense of disgrace—your popcorn comes with a serving of guilt.

 

 

Josh Larsen is TAE's movie columnist.