The legendary love affair between Captain John Smith and Pocahontas has remained largely untapped by Hollywood, with a short list of versions that includes a forgettable 1953 movie by Lew Landers and an animated take by Disney in 1995.
And while it may yet make a wonderful film, sadly, director Terrence Malick's textured and visually exquisite but listless and long-winded The New World is not it.
Colin Farrell stars as the storied English adventurer, along with Q'Orianka Kilcher — making her acting debut — as his Native American princess paramour. (At 14 at the time of filming, Kilcher was slightly older than the real Pocahontas.)
Long percolating in Malick's mind, the film opens in 1607 with a trio of English ships dropping anchor off what would become Jamestown, Virginia — the first permanent English settlement in North America — while befuddled members of the indigenous Powhatan tribe monitor the flotilla's approach from the wooded shore.
With its swelling score and building sense of anticipation, the artfully orchestrated sequence is among the film's most enthralling. The shots of virgin forests masterfully convey a sense of unspoiled splendor, giving viewers a hint of what it must have been like to look upon the pristine new Eden through the explorers' eyes.
Smith arrives in shackles — having been thrown in the brig for insubordination — but is spared the gallows by lenient expedition leader Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer), who sends the rogue on a food-gathering mission upriver to the local chief, Powhatan (August Schellenberg).
Smith is captured, but his life is saved by Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, who is smitten by the dashing, but considerably older, Englishman.
Against counsel, Powhatan allows Smith to stay the winter with the tribe, naively believing that he — and the rest of the bearded foreigners — will return “across the waves” come spring.
From that point, the story unfolds like Romeo and Juliet in buckskin, as the two fall deeper into forbidden love, with Pocahontas eventually banished by her tribe as the hostilities between their two peoples escalate.
The film is basically a series of beautifully composed tableaux — realistically gritty while impressionistically poetic — held together by the star-crossed romance but saddled with pretentious voiceover narration and underdeveloped characters.
As a grand, tragic love story, The New World is dull, with long stretches without dialogue and seemingly endless shots of Smith and Pocahontas wandering together through fields of tall grass. The story gains traction in the third act with the introduction of the genteel John Rolfe (Christian Bale), a widowed tobacco farmer who competes for Pocahontas' affections.
Having previously directed only three films — Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998) — the enigmatic and reclusive Malick has developed a reputation for authenticity, a trait on display here in his meticulous attention to period detail.
That same fussiness, however, does not extend to the story, which takes dramatic license with history, romanticizing the central relationship that many contend was more platonic than passionate.
The New World avoids the usual movie Indian stereotypes. If anything it is the fetid and rapacious English who are depicted as savages, while the “uncorrupted” Native Americans are presented as peace-loving, “lacking in all guile and trickery.” (Late in the film, Pocahontas — who converts to Christianity — must give up her Arcadian existence and embrace “civilization,” symbolized by a constrictive corset.)
In fairness, no character, European or otherwise, is painted as wholly villainous or virtuous, and it is actually Rolfe who comes across as the most sympathetic in the end.
If you can endure its languid pacing, the film's eye-filling richness and timeless themes of love and loss make this New World still worth exploring.
The film contains intense battle violence, therefore restricting it to older adolescents and up. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 — parents are strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
(This review appears courtesy of US Conference of Catholic Bishop's Office for Film and Broadcasting.)
