FILM (DVD)
By Terence Malick, 2006, £19.99
Reviewed by Megli
Come
spirit…
help us to tell the story of our land
You are our mother
we, your field of corn
We rise…
from out of the soul of you.
Terence Malick’s The New World is
my single favourite film. I can't watch it too often, as it is in some ways too
painful. I started crying minutes into it, and was kept at a pitch of rapt
emotion until the end. This from a film in which more action-orientated viewers
might say that nothing at all happens, and in which almost the only words the
heroine speaks are ‘I like grass…’
It is a mystical film. No critic picked up on this when it was released, citing
instead its dreamy, poetic form, lush cinematography, and spartan dialogue. Set
in the first decade of the 17th century, the film is framed as the spiritual
journey of the daughter of the Algonquin chief Powhatan, played by Q’orianka
Kilcher, as she falls in love with a European settler, John Smith (Colin
Farrell), loses him, is baptised, and marries an Englishman (Christian Bale).
The film is punctuated by her yearning, solemn prayers to Mother Earth. It is
indeed the Pocahontas story, but she is deliberately never named as such.
The life of the woodland-dwelling Powhatan tribe is lyrically represented, with
every effort at authenticity made. At the beginning of the film, we see the
young woman and her sisters swimming in a river, from underwater. The hypnotic,
unmodulating prelude to Wagner's Das
Rheingold, based on the chord of E flat major, swells behind the
scene, the girls' bodies in the water echoing Wagner's Rhine maidens. We are
back at the primordial beginning of humanity. Faces are painted with patterns
of grey ash and black mud, bodies decorated with feathers and beads. A
gentleness and a strange, unsolemn stillness hangs over this pristine, unfallen
world.
Mother…where do you dwell?
Are you in the sky?
Are you in the sea?
Colin Farrell plays John Smith, sent upriver to trade with the natives, whom
the settlers call 'naturals' (which could mean 'fool' or 'simpleton' in
Elizabethan English, as well as 'native'.) Farrell's performance is unusually
subtle and introspective: his expressive dark eyes and physical grace hint at a
similarity between himself and the native people. Fifteen-year-old Q’orianka
Kilcher (herself Quechua) is in turn an extraordinary, luminous presence.
Straight-backed and supple, she gives a performance of powerful simplicity as
the grave and inquisitive favourite daughter of Powhatan. She saves Smith’s
life by throwing herself on top of him when he is captured and is lying
terrified in the chieftain's hut. Smudge-bundles drift smoke under the eaves. A
shaman stalks the rafters, undulating his arms to which long feathers are
attached to resemble the wings of an eagle.
Smith and the girl form a tentative romance. They barely touch one another.
Long, tender scenes show them learning words of each other's languages, or
swimming, or lying in the grass looking at the sky. There is a profound state
of grace here. Paul Arendt of the BBC said, rightly: 'The editing of these
images is so strange - seductive and elliptic, and completely unlike the
grammar of everyday movies - that it feels like listening to poetry in another
language.'
Critics found the film ponderous. I found its delicate and sombre beauty
heart-rending. Malick's camera lingers on the patterns of raindrops falling on
great silver-grey coils of river; on water-fowl in flight; on the shifting
light caught in the leaves, and the soft susurrus of wind through endless
grasses.
Smith is deeply impressed with the natives' way of life, stunned by their lack
of competition, guile, and jealousy. But conflict is inevitable, and the
daughter of Powhatan is expelled by her father for helping Smith. 'I should
have you killed', he says to her, in Algonquin. 'But I cannot. I am too old. My
heart could not bear it.' The girl goes to live with the settlers, but Smith
abandons her. Her scenes of elemental grief are terrible to behold. She rubs
her face in ash and dirt, becomes a solemn and silent figure in the settlement,
a broken person.
In time, the colony's new governor, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), takes an
interest in her, and tenderly accompanies her as she goes about her tasks.
Almost totally silent, graceful and dignified in her heartbreak, she consents
to marry him. She begins to wear English clothes and shoes for the first time;
she becomes a tobacco farmer's wife, as she and her new husband build a little
cottage. She is seen converting to Christianity and taking the name 'Rebecca'.
The last part of the film is, in part, about her return to life. The scenes
between her and Bale are achingly poignant. Patiently, he waits for her heart
to turn towards him, understanding her pain, himself a widower. A little boy is
born to them; the girl raises her arms to give thanks to Mother Earth and to
the great sun. These scenes are shot in exquisite autumnal light. Woodsmoke
drifts over the couple's tobacco fields, and the horsetail in the fens and the
tawny grasses shiver in the low sun. Bale's character loves his mysterious
silent wife devotedly, understanding that her composure hides tremendous sorrow
- the loss of her people, her family, an understanding that this is the
beginning of the end for their ancient way of life.
The couple are summoned to the English court, and Powhatan sends several
members of the tribe to accompany them. They bow solemnly to the woman who had
once been the daughter of their chief. One is carrying a bundle of twigs; he
explains that Powhatan has instructed him to make a notch on them for every
Englishman he sees, to estimate their numbers.
With the English scenes (Oxford's Merton Street and the Bodleian Library doubling for
Jacobean London) the film enters a more symbolic mode. One of the ‘naturals’
who is brought to the English court finds himself in a formal topiary garden,
each tree and hedge clipped to be identical with its fellow. With utter
incomprehension, he vanishes away into the English mist. Before King James, the
girl, dressed in English finery, is radiantly beautiful. Numerous tokens of the
new world have been brought to show the King and Queen; 'Rebecca' looks at a
caged skunk with sad-eyed recognition of kinship.
The sad end of the woman known as Pocahontas is well-known; she never saw her
homeland again, dying of fever at Gravesend. But the film has a strange, hauntingly cathartic
epilogue: we see her spirit running joyfully into the garden of the Elizabethan
house, sprinkling herself with river water, cartwheeling among the trees, and
raising her arms to the sun. A return is enacted, a home-coming into wild
nature.
Mother…at last I know where you dwell
Available from Amazon.co.uk
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