Indian Comics Irregular #136

Some reactions to Terrence Malick's "The New World," a retelling of
the Pocahontas myth that premiered in December.

The Good

Malick is an artist with a singular vision and the skill and support
(one hopes) to realize it, and to apply conventional Hollywood
standards to his films is to miss their point. He uses sound and
imagery to create a vast sensory universe unfiltered through received
notions, current politics or moral judgments and historical hindsight.
He doesn't attempt to re-create a period so much as he tries to
experience it for the first time, drawing human-scale characters
against the enormous and cataclysmic backdrop of nature and history.

The brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki captures the grandeur
and luminosity of the 1607 Virginia landscape in all its sensual
glory, and Malick allows the experience to unfold like a slow dawn.
Watching as scenes such as this one convey the strangeness and
magnitude of human history and individual experience simply by pausing
to observe, it's hard not to realize how little regard most
contemporary films have for both. (Los Angeles Times, 12/23/05)

The Bad

Notorious for delays and last-minute alterations--the movie was
supposed to appear in November, for example--Malick here appears to
have edited with an axe, cutting out whole lines of plot that he then
papers over with cryptic, artificial exposition. He repeats so many
sentimental shots of the lovers and so many phrases of the portentous
interior monologues that the long, slow film seems even longer and
slower than its actual two hours. (Rochester City Newspaper, 1/25/06)

"The New World" is stately almost to the point of being static and
thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange
itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.
(Washington Post, 1/20/06)

The Ugly

The production crew says "The New World" is not a history, but a
fictional love story between Captain John Smith and Matoaka, aka
Pocahontas. ... But it's not really a love story, either. With Smith
playing the colonizer and Pocahontas the "good Indian," it's actually
a metaphor reinforcing the tragic inevitability of the conquering of
America--a story we've heard too often already.

[Wes] Studi, who is also a spokesman for the Indigenous Language
Institute, said he got involved in the "The New World" because of the
original script (the final cut of the movie is missing most of his
character's development) and the historical research that went into
it. The production team hired language expert Blair Rudes to research
the indigenous language and use it for much of the film's Native
dialogue. The resulting lexicon is being used by the Pamunkee tribe.
Unfortunately, it wasn't much used by Hollywood. (Indian Country
Today, 1/11/06)

"This film isn't history," notes Karenne Wood (Monacan), Chair of the
Virginia Council on Indians and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the
University of Virginia. "It's harmful, because it portrays our people
according to stereotypes about American Indians that we've worked for
years to dispel. Our women appear as either princesses or squaws, and
our men are either noble or warlike. 'The New World' is old hat, to
us. It's the same story, this time with Native actors and
consultants. But it's still wrong."

"Mr. Malick had the opportunity to make an epic film about the merging
of two dynamic cultures and their contributions and survival in the
New World, yet the main focus remained the mythical love affair
between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. This film does not portray
the true traditional values that I want conveyed to the world about
the Virginia Indian people." (PR Newswire, 1/16/06)

Rob Schmidt
Blue Corn Comics