Those who are as old as I am may remember being young in 1967
when Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan made such an impression
on us impressionable youths. Up until only a few years ago, and
maybe still, for all I know, you couldn’t buy a record, cassette or
CD of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, without seeing images
from the film and reading the notice that its now-familiar slow
movement made it the “Elvira Madigan” concerto. Terrence Malick was
24 in 1967, and the movie must have made a big impression on him
too, for now in his 60s he has brought out a new movie, The New
World, in which he has chosen to portray the first arrival of
the English in what was to become the United States through
Widerberg’s lens and Mozart’s music.
To be sure, he’s made a couple of changes. He’s jumped 21
Koechel numbers to No. 488 to give us the slow movement of the 23rd
Piano Concerto as the accompaniment to his lovers’ dalliance in the
forest. And he alternates it with a passage, almost as often
repeated, from the Prelude to Das Rheingold by Richard
Wagner that is meant to suggest momentous discovery. Oh, and
instead of making the lovers choose, tragically, to stay together,
he makes them choose, tragically, to split up. It doesn’t matter.
Either way, the message is essentially the same as Widerberg’s. As
Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) says in one of his endless
interior monologues, rendered in voiceover, “There is only this” —
meaning idyllic sex with Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher) — “all
else is unreal.”
Well, not as such. Once he’s back among the English he changes
his mind. “It was a dream,” yet another voiceover monologue tells
us. “Now I am awake.” Later, he comes to regret this flip-flop, and
when he meets Pocahontas again in England, long after they have
split up and she has married John Rolfe (Christian Bale), he tells
her: “I thought it was a dream, what we knew in the forest, but
it’s the only truth.” Except, of course, that it’s all a lie and
nothing remotely like it happened or could have happened in fact.
But say that it did. Even Elvira Madigan knew better than
to suppose that making love in the forest was the only truth. There
was also that other truth, the truth of work and family and
responsibility on which the two lovers deliberately turned their
backs. They knew they were opting for unreality, in other words,
where Captain Smith, like Terrence Malick, seems more than a little
confused about where reality actually lies.
All they know is what they want to believe. And this also comes
across in what turns out to be little more than the incidental
“encounter” of Old and New Worlds. You’d think this was an
important enough historical event for the film to be about
it, as the title seems to suggest. But it’s not. Instead,
“the New World” turns out to lie within us — now there’s an idea
no one can have thought of before — and what is arguably the most
momentous discovery of the last thousand years is turned into the
backdrop for a love story. Perhaps because it is only a
backdrop, and because the reality he is focused on is an interior
one of thoughts and feelings, Mr. Malick thinks that he has no
obligation to historical reality. At any rate, insofar as there is
any of the historically New World in this movie it is a hippie
fantasy rather than the real thing.
The Indians, so far as we see them, never work. They take their
ease and play all day, apparently, while living in peace, harmony
and plenty. Meanwhile the settlers work and slave constantly and
yet are reduced to eating shoe leather and each other. The latter
seem to have no idea of hunting, fishing or agriculture and to be
utterly dependent on getting game and corn from the Indians — or
supplies from England. They are only interested in searching for
gold, even if they starve in the attempt, and in fighting each
other. Similarly, the Indians are all attractive graceful,
well-proportioned and handsomely decorated with tattoos, like Allen
Iverson. The English are all dirty, ugly, toothless and bedraggled,
or all of them except the obviously Irish Captain Smith, and their
gold-lust — or is it God-lust? — makes them hate-filled, vicious,
and constantly at one another’s throats.
This easy schematization of complicated events only increases
the basic incoherence at the heart of the movie. When Smith is
saved from death by Pocahontas — who, by the way, is never named
in the film until she is re-named Rebecca — he is presented with a
stark choice: live the hippie life in peace, plenty, and sexual
freedom among the Indians or go back to the English settlers and
return to a life of nothing but hardship, treachery, bitterness,
and celibacy. Which would you choose? Why Captain Smith goes back
remains a mystery, as is his subsequent jilting of Pocahontas when
it looks as if he could have her without going native. But Mr.
Malick has little time for linear narrative and questions of
motivation and plausibility. His film is organized as a series of
tableaux vivants to which we must supply our own context.
Even the rescue of Captain Smith by Pocahontas’s throwing herself
upon his body is not portrayed except in its aftermath, as the
bodies are all tastefully arranged. Mr. Malick seems to have a
positive distaste for action.
Likewise, in the battles between the English and the Indians,
the latter always appear to be getting the better of the former,
but all is chaotic and aimless and impossible to make any sense of
militarily. There is just a series of pictures. Watching them you
feel as if you are trying to make sense of a book in a language you
don’t understand from looking at the illustrations. Drama is also
purged from the dialogue. There is more voiceover, meant to be seen
as interior monologue and even prayer, God help us, than there is
verbal interchange between the characters. Moreover, long passages
of Indian speech are not subtitled, though shorter ones sometimes
are. Pocahontas is soon speaking English like a native, but none of
the English, even Captain Smith, appears to speak the Indian
language. And Pocahontas’s English is more often employed in
voiceovers — you mean she’s already thinking in English?
— and solitary prayers to the Great Spirit, or “father” or
“mother” or sun or moon — than in communicating with the English.
When Rolfe comes on the scene, blow me down if he doesn’t
start in on the voiceovers.
The result is that the characters are as detached from the drama
of their own lives as we are, always ruminating about their
feelings rather than living, and lead an unreal, almost disembodied
existence. The love story, instead of bringing us closer to the
almost unimaginable strangeness of the world inhabited by settlers
and natives alike 400 years ago, actually makes it more unreal and
incomprehensible. This is a film, like Elvira Madigan,
with lots of pretty pictures and lots of pretty music, but the
world it portrays goes back only 40 rather than 400 years. It is
New only in the sense that it is Mr. Malick’s own.
