A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The New World

Date Viewed: 1/22/06

Details:

Christian Bale (John Rolfe)

Colin Farrell (John Smith)

Q'Orianka Kilcher (Pocahontas)

Christopher Plummer (Captain Christopher Newport)

August Schellenberg (Powhatan)

Director: Terrence Malick

Score: John Horner

Score: +

The Review: The idea of "first contact" between two alien cultures is the stuff of science fiction: cultural missteps, misunderstandings, revealed conflict, mutual and slow attempts at understanding. The number of novels on this theme are legion; sometimes the contact succeeds, sometimes it doesn't. What's often forgotten in our current age, long after exploration has allegedly uncovered all such local aliens, is that first contact situations were quite common in the Euro-expansive period of the 15th through 18th centuries. My history is not good enough to quantitate the situation, but I suspect that the majority of these first contacts did not go at all well for the non-European culture. The New World is a fictionalized version of the Jamestown first contact -- formally, it's probably more like a second contact, a situation replete with its own rules and baggage -- and while the film illustrates both sides, its spirit tends to sympathize quite openly with the native Americans. No surprise.

This is a quiet film, both in a literal and metaphoric sense. There is little dialog and long stretches of moody coastal scenery. The images of contrasting cultures are painted with cinematographic excellence: simple observations, nonetheless quite damning in their own right. No one mentions the squalor of the English settlement near Jamestown; it just is. No one mentions the ability of the natives ("the naturals") to live effectively in their chosen environment; they just do.

The story is well-known, and if nothing else, this version outlines some of the events perhaps a bit closer to historical form. Early 1600's, English sailors attempt to establish a settlement in coastal Virginia, near a neighboring Algonquin culture. Iconoclast John Smith (Farrell) explores, is captured and goes native as emissary, then meets and becomes attracted to Pocahontas (Kilcher), the favorite daughter of the local chieftain Powhatan (Schellenberg). But all does not follow even the Disney fairy tale version, and an inevitable conflict surfaces. The inevitability is quiet and recognizable only from our historical perspective, looking backwards, and lends an air of tragedy.

The dominant mood evoked borders on nostalgia, but of that sub-flavor concerned with missed opportunities, wrong decisions, the road not taken, and lost loves. It worked for me, in this time and place, but it might be a bit too emotionally heavy-handed for some.

However, the score and sound design are problematic. The majority of the background was not Horner -- whose scoring I normally really like (e.g., Braveheart) -- but re-orchestrated Wagner and Mozart. It's hard to decide whether this created cognitive dissonance or emotional dissonance. Opening the movie with Rheingold's opening leitmotif was not inappropriate, and it worked emotionally on several levels, but it also grated. One of the reason it worked was because I recognized it and was familiar with its origin and meanings. But I wasn't able to enjoy the effect without simultaneously thinking too much about the chronological misfit -- the action in The New World was all pre-1620, long before either Mozart or Wagner were on the scene. I only heard Horner's distinctive strains in one stretch quite late in the film, where they were both recognizable and appropriate; perhaps they were there at other times, and their unobtrusiveness was the mark of expertise. Perhaps there was too much concern with the ominous.

One of the problems with being (literally) a quiet film, is that what dialog there is, is unforgiving to the audience. Even in a pin-drop quiet theatre, some of what was said happened too quickly, too quietly, and/or too unexpectedly for it to be comprehended. And because the dialog was so sparse, the missed phrase was not repeated by the other person to help get the point across and provide bridging. There seemed to be little recognition of the fact that single word conversations spread across minutes would be more meta-linguistic than linguistic.

Decent acting, if angst-ridden. Plummer has a minor role; Farrell and Kilcher anchor the film admirably, with Bale's effort coming in later.

(22-Jan-06)

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