The New World<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\nSometimes the editing continues long after the film has been screened for critics. The New World<\/i> was about two and a half hours long when it opened in late December for a one-week run in Los Angeles and New York, to qualify for last year\u2019s Academy Awards. But this week, the studio is releasing a somewhat shorter version. And the tweaking doesn\u2019t stop there: some members of the film\u2019s cast say it may be as long as three hours when it is released on DVD.<\/p>\n
So, this article is based on a version of the film that might never be seen again. But it should be safe to say that The New World<\/i>, in whatever form, is of a piece with Malick\u2019s other films, which emphasize visual poetry over more conventional forms of drama or narrative. For Malick, plot and character are less important than memory and experience.<\/p>\n
Malick\u2019s dream-like visual style, and the way he holds seemingly unrelated images together through contemplative voice-overs, make for challenging viewing. But in some ways, The New World<\/i> is one of his more accessible films. The story is rooted in the legendary \u2014 and almost certainly unhistorical \u2014 romance between Pocahontas (Q\u2019Orianka Kilcher), the teenaged daughter of a Native chieftain, and John Smith (Colin Farrell), an Englishman struggling to maintain control of the nascent English colony of Jamestown.<\/p>\n
Malick is notoriously reclusive and almost never does interviews, and Farrell checked into rehab just a few days before the film\u2019s press junket. So it falls to Kilcher, a 15-year-old sitting down for the first round-table interview of her entire career, to be the film\u2019s public face \u2014 and she says working with Malick was just as challenging as watching his films, but also somewhat liberating.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a very spur-of-the-moment kind of director,\u201d she says. \u201cIf he saw the wind blowing in the grass a certain way, he would all of a sudden start filming it. You would have to be ready for anything, and that was really great, because I love acting on my impulses, at the risk of being wrong or Terry not liking it. So it was really like, as he said, two artists making music together.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe stayed pretty close to the script,\u201d she adds, \u201cexcept almost all the dialogue was cut out. He was like, \u2018Oh, Q\u2019Orianka, maybe just say this one line and don\u2019t say anything else.\u2019 And that, in itself, was almost a whole new language, because you had to really internalize what you were saying and think about it and try to convey it through expressions and movements.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the film, as in history, Pocahontas eventually converts to Christianity and marries an English tobacco farmer named John Rolfe (Christian Bale) \u2014 though the significance of these actions is debated by historians and even by the people who collaborated on this movie.<\/p>\n
Kilcher says she identified with Pocahontas\u2019s struggle to find and hold on to her true identity, because teens like her also have to cope with competing cliques and social standards. And, she says she thought it was \u201csad\u201d when Pocahontas switched religions and began to live like an Englishwoman.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the only thing left to her in a sense, because her family cast her out, John Smith left her, and so she was left, really, with nothing,\u201d says Kilcher. \u201cAnd that was the next thing to do, to get married to John Rolfe, because it was a stable thing, and it was kind of an instinct of survival. She had nowhere else to go. Once she decided to put on the English clothes and she was living with them, it was expected of her to become a confined English woman named Rebecca, and become baptized, and speak proper English.\u201d<\/p>\n
Producer Sarah Green has a slightly different take on Pocahontas\u2019s conversion, though. \u201cShe absolutely voluntarily chose\u201d to convert, says Green, who adds that the length of the movie didn\u2019t allow the filmmakers to explore that aspect of the story in more depth.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was interested in Christianity, and she converted not just to marry John Rolfe, or not because she was a victim, but because she was drawn to that. I mean, that\u2019s not the case obviously with many Natives \u2014 it was very different \u2014 so we simply show her in that process as much as we could really explore in this movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask why the Pocahontas of the film continues to pray, in voice-over, to the sun and to an unspecified \u201cmother\u201d \u2014 her human mother? mother Earth? \u2014 even after her conversion, and why the film offers no indication that Pocahontas has internalized her Christianity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s an interesting question,\u201d says Green, \u201cand I, not knowing enough about her in reality, I can\u2019t say how she [dealt with that]. But I imagine she melded those two. That\u2019s what often happens in Native cultures with conversion, is that they meld what they know as their spirituality with this new spirituality that they\u2019re learning, and I believe that she just found a way to integrate them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Malick\u2019s films often use Edenic imagery to suggest that his characters yearn for innocence yet destroy it whenever they think they\u2019ve found it. Few images in recent films are as striking as the moment when Smith, who has been away, returns to Jamestown and walks from an outside world of trees and grass into a fort that is paved with mud. What\u2019s more, Smith finds that the colonists are starving, and have resorted to cannibalism.<\/p>\n
At times, it may seem that Malick\u2019s creative visual technique is just a cover for a trite and clich\u00e9d mythology, little different from Disney\u2019s version of the story, in which the Native Americans are pure-of-heart noble savages while the Europeans are evil or clueless defilers of the earth. But Green notes that Malick\u2019s film is more complicated than that, and that it doesn\u2019t necessarily advocate the utopianism expressed by some of its characters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are accounts from that time,\u201d she says. \u201cMost of our referents were written accounts of that time from colonists, whether they were journal entries or letters home or whatever, and several of those exact words were in those accounts, whether it was Smith or several of the other colonists.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it reflects the naive way that they saw the Native community in the opening, and you\u2019ll notice that that\u2019s only in the beginning, when Smith is enamoured of this world. We\u2019re in his mind, experiencing what he\u2019s experiencing, that this is complete bliss, and as you see, we show very quickly that that is a much more sophisticated culture, and that he was in fact naive to think that there is no jealousy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the film depicts Pocahontas\u2019s eventual husband, John Rolfe, as a decent and truly loving man, and it follows their story as they journey to England together to meet the King and Queen. Bale, who provided one of the voices for Disney\u2019s Pocahontas<\/i> over ten years ago, says he had never even heard of Rolfe until he read the script for this film \u2014 and he says his research into the character led him to believe that Rolfe was \u201ca progressive man, spiritually.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHere was somebody who had a great deal of money in England, and a great lifestyle, who chose to leave that and go and live in a place where cannibalism has been taking place, and survival is not assured in the slightest. And the bravery, that he acts on his love for his Pocahontas and created the first union between the locals and the new arrivals \u2014 yeah, I find him to be a very impressive man,\u201d says Bale.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd also the fact that he has such maturity and true love for her, that he\u2019s prepared to return to England, knowing that she may well see Smith and still be in love with him and leave him, but he loves her enough to know that he would never want to stifle her or live in any kind of lie between the two of them. He would rather be in pain himself, and heartbroken, but see her doing what she truly should be doing in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part love story, part historical epic, and part poetic rumination on the relationship between humanity and nature, The New World<\/i> certainly isn\u2019t for every taste. But it\u2019s one of those rare major-studio movies that happens to be quite artful, and beautiful \u2014 a feast for the senses and the spirit alike.<\/p>\n
\u2014 A version of this article was first posted at CanadianChristianity.com. You can also read \u201cbonus quotes\u201d from Kilcher, Bale, Green and Wes Studi here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 Terrence Malick movies take a long time to gestate. Malick typically shoots hours and hours of footage, much of it improvised, and he then spends months editing it together. And in a career that goes back 33 years, he has directed only four films: Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,3532],"tags":[762,443,1542,3613,3614,488,3612,2691,3615],"class_list":["post-44552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bcchristiannews","category-interviews","tag-christian-bale","tag-colin-farrell","tag-new-world","tag-pocahontas","tag-pocahontas-1995","tag-qorianka-kilcher","tag-sarah-green","tag-terrence-malick","tag-wes-studi"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>LOS ANGELES \u2014 Terrence Malick movies take a long time to gestate. Malick typically shoots hours and hours of footage, much of it improvised, and he then spends months editing it together. And in a career that goes back 33 years, he has directed only four films: Badlands<\/em>, Days of Heaven<\/em>, The Thin Red Line<\/em><\/a> and, now, his version of the Pocahontas legend, The New World<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n