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Nick Pinkerton

ART IN THE AGE OF MYOPIA: TERRENCE MALICK'S THE NEW WORLD
How Critics Have Missed the Boat



Great works, when they next-to-never come, are 
always accompanied by giggles. In the time that 
I've been watching movies seriously - whatever 
that means - I've managed to work out that adage, 
along with a couple others: pop culture-riffing 
kiddie CGI is the anti-art; and engaging 
daffiness always trumps precision - as near to a 
White Elephant vs. Termite as my polemics are 
likely to spawn. I've found empirical evidence to 
corroborate the giggling thing. Zola's The 
Masterpiece (there's that word!) contains a scene 
beautifully summarizing the invariable reaction 
to Something New: art-wracked painter Claude 
Lantier submits his revolutionary canvas to the 
Academy-counterpoint 'Salon des Refusés' and, 
wandering the exhibition to see his painting 
hung, finally locates it by following the sound 
of "laughter growing louder and louder, mounting 
like a tide." The crowd's reaction is a thinly 
disguised retelling of the reception that met 
Manet's Déjuener sur l'herbe, but it could be the 
scene of any historical pivot-point when, before 
an audience of self-defined connoisseurs, an 
artist has sweated to expand the way that we see, 
think, and feel. And somebody just laughed.

Which bring us to Terrence Malick's The New 
World, the fourth film in thirty-odd years from 
the resolutely obscure - both in public persona 
and work - director, and an epochal American 
piece of art. A measure of how good Malick's 
movie is: a few years from now, when those of us 
who love it are re-watching it and wrestling with 
it, we will literally not be able to imagine that 
it once played on thousands of screens, that it 
once was writ large simultaneously in Cary, North 
Carolina, and Middletown, Ohio, and Durango, 
Colorado. It will seem as large and faraway as 
the Cretaceous Era. Of course there'll be 
walkouts and audible "What the fucks" during its 
short time on the screen. Putting aside the 
faux-populism that we film writers seem 
especially inclined to feign, the fact is that 
the vast majority of Americans (or, better yet, 
humans) remain insensate, if not openly hostile, 
to the concept of deliberate, difficult art. So 
that's to be expected.

More disheartening is to see a certain cache of 
movie writers come swarming out to greet Malick's 
latest as an exercise in how arch and unimpressed 
they can act in the face of a work that - 
whatever one's opinion of its qualities - 
shouldn't be denied its singularity. An American 
history written in intimate, undistilled emotion; 
an attentive, tonally precise work with 
blockbuster-big outer margins - trying to place 
it in the context of contemporary American cinema 
is like hanging a J.M.W. Turner canvas in a 
coffee shop art show.

For The New World's detractors, then, the first 
step in diffusing Malick's accomplishment is to 
strip it of that specialness. And so Stephanie 
Zacharek, writing at Salon.com, offers the 
following chestnut to drag Malick down to the 
lowest possible aesthetic denominator: "[It's] 
like a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes: Words and 
pictures are matched up in counterintuitive ways, 
and although the cutting is much slower than in 
Scott's hyperactive showboating, it makes just 
about as much sense." Even more baffling: Dave 
Kehr's blog manages to tie together the "music 
video" cutting in The New World and Domino - I 
feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Zacharek can be 
a great read when she's taking the time to find 
little niches of pleasure in unpretentious 
entertainments that aren't quite swinging for the 
fence, and she's a not-bad writer when her 
Pauline Kael impression is in check (most 
embarrassing is when, aping her idol's slangy 
style, Zacharek borrows Pauline's actual slang: 
"high muckity-muck" or "bamboozled." Is this 
1935?). But her New World review gives full rein 
to her laziest tendencies; there's just something 
about Texas Transcendentalist Malick that brings 
out the blithe, "over it" undergrad in his 
detractors.

The Village Voice's J. Hoberman gives the 
filmmaker an equally unceremonious dust-off, sure 
to drop a snide reference to the Capt. John Smith 
and Pocahontas's "daily regimen of chaste 
nuzzling," the giggly implication being, I 
suppose, that somehow Malick's movie is false and 
flowery for withholding on the sight of Captain 
Smith screwing his "squaw." The New World's 
pretense toward greatness (and everything about 
the movie - its decades-in-the-making inception, 
its bigger-than-big title, and yes, J., the 
Wagner, feels like a grab for greatness) brings 
out the zeal for deflation in critics, ready to 
pop it with a roll of their eyes. Leonard Cline, 
in his wonderful pulper The Dark Chamber, 
probably put it best: "There is nothing in the 
world more devastating and unanswerable than a 
sneer."

Malick's art deserves better. His filmography 
comes closer than any I know to deserving that 
lovely label generally reserved for French film 
of the Thirties: Poetic Realism. He's absolutely 
rigorous with his period detail (none of his four 
films has had a contemporary setting), shoots 
with natural light, and has a tendency to spend 
screen time on odd bits of quotidian fuss, but 
the slack of his pacing, the steady carpeting of 
half-hypnotized voice-over, and the soft stagger 
of his digressive cutting sets his movies off, 
floating. And for at least a handful of cineastes 
in my generation, the 1998 release of his The 
Thin Red Line, in the wake of the orgiastic 
attention granted Saving Private Ryan, was more 
than a serendipitous marketing move by 20th 
Century Fox; it was the presentation of the 
option of an alternative cinema, almost 
completely divorced from the amorphous Hollywood 
tradition. Looking past the cacophony of Red 
Line's celebrity cameos ("Is thatŠ Jared Leto?"), 
those who were wide-to-receive found an avatar in 
Malick, that rare artist using his medium to 
explore uncharted territory.

The New World is Malick's movie about exploration 
- clear from its opening credits, in which 
waterways branch and spread across a parchment 
map - though it approaches its amorphous theme 
from an ever-drifting vantage. And though the 
movie's subject, the romance between Pocahontas 
(Q'Orianka Kilcher) and Captain John Smith (Colin 
Farrell) in the fresh-founded Jamestown Colony of 
1607, does hinge on discovery in the most literal 
"Land ho!" sense, there's an awe of things 
first-seen that carries into its intimate moments 
as well. Kilcher's performance as Pocahontas is a 
splendidly worked-through invention; she's 
developed a new physical vocabulary for the 
Princess - fresh, fleet, and playful - that makes 
a lost civilization tactile, like the sound of a 
dead language (and thanks to UNC Charlotte 
linguist Blair Rudes, a reasonable facsimile of 
Virginia Algonquian is heard once more).
Or consider the singular broke-backed structure 
of this "rapturous and romantic" "historical 
epic" (sure, the pull-quote praise can be just as 
reductive as the pans). Has on-screen amour ever 
grown with a quiet, organic hum like Pocahontas' 
second love, for middle-class farmer and solid, 
stolid citizen John Rolfe (a humble, perfectly 
pitched Christian Bale)? When brooding Capt. 
Smith -- nearly a figure from a harlequin novel 
jacket, ready to wrench a bodice - disappears 
with guilty ambition into the white north, 
effaced, quiet Rolfe just grows into the 
foreground, and discovering him as his bride does 
is a sweet, solemn joy.

What any critic who goes after Malick's 
meandering cut-aways (Todd McCarthy in Variety: 
"There is also a feeling of pictorial 
repetition...in the reliance on nature shots; 
more than once, one is made to recall the old saw 
about how, if a scene isn't cutting together, you 
cut to a seagull flying overhead.") profoundly 
does not get is that these details don't exist at 
the expense of character or narrative - that 
telling the story of these two civilizations, and 
of their people, takes its emotional heft from 
environment. Nothing speaks more deeply of the 
contrast between the settlers and the Naturals 
(as the Europeans call the members of the 
Powhatan tribe) than John Smith's first view of 
the Jamestown settlement - a wasteland of 
pestilent puddles traversed by a skeletal dog, 
lorded over by a squatting cannon - after having 
lived on the lush banks of the Chickahominy River 
with Pocahontas's people. The foreigners have 
discovered paradise but, through force of 
civilized habit, are living in a trough; the 
contrast is as crushing as the jump from 
celebratory "let's go swimming" island life to 
the sweltering guts of a troop carrier in The 
Thin Red Line. Most miraculous is that The New 
World, despite a population of nasty, 
snaggle-toothed settlers who contrast rather 
badly to the handsome native populace, never 
becomes anything as simple as a screed on the 
superior Noble Savage. If it were, how could we 
explain the film's last chapters where 
Pocahontas, along with other Powhatan tribe 
emissaries, crosses the Atlantic and discovers a 
New World of her own?

Stephen Hunter, in a nearly-unreadable chunk of 
snark for The Washington Post, cries "easy" at a 
scene where a displaced tribesman wanders through 
the geometric French-style garden of an English 
estate "cruelly cut into box hedges, perverted 
into something monstrous and different." The only 
thing easy about this scene, one of the movie's 
richest and strangest, is the way Hunter 
approaches it; far from an impressionistic 
nightmare, it's a strange, quiet, laconic 
interlude, a detour I could watch a dozen times, 
in rapture, without "getting it." Hunter's 
simpleminded reading of The New World as a 
simpleminded, lopsided essay in racial comparison 
is even more baffling when he expounds upon 
Malick's alleged visual preference for Native 
architecture - "the interior of a tribal lodge is 
filmed as if it's a cathedral bathed in radiant 
light through a stained-glass window" while 
failing to note a counterpoint scene on 
Pocahontas' voyage to England which takes place 
in a cathedral bathed in radiant light through a 
stained-glass window! Give this man another 
Pulitzer!

What's so disarming, in fact, about The New 
World's England, as opposed to The New World's 
Virginia, is just how equal-if-different their 
beauty is. We could be forgiven for anticipating 
the Powhatan Princess in some tavern, surrounded 
by sloshing mugs and red-faced, thick-armed 
sailors playing grab-ass - we're used to a dumber 
breed of movie. Instead we get rich, dusky 
moments in the royal court; Pocahontas's face, in 
wonderment, craning out of her carriage; that 
extraterrestrial garden; and that same luminous 
sense of seeing everything, by proxy, for the 
first time, which makes the film's first passages 
glow.

If there's a grand irony in the critical 
reception of The New World, it is this: the film 
deals with a people who, arriving in undiscovered 
country, fleeing strictures at home, recreate the 
virgin land in the image of those strictures. And 
critics, feeble from a steady diet of trash, 
receive this very new manner of movie with the 
same blasé one might think would be reserved for 
James Mangold. Zacharek insists: "the story is 
essentially as straight as a pine tree." No, it's 
not. The cardinal sin of The New World is taking 
a cue in structure from Wagner's "Das Rheingold," 
the film's sort-of theme: it doesn't have the 
good sense to satisfactorily resolve itself - it 
just rises, and rises and rises.

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/archive_detail.html?id1=502

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