The New World

Been watching Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). Again with the underwater shots! Not so many as in Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, but unmistakable there at the beginning. And the sun-streaming-thru-the-trees shots.

This time the grasses, especially the grasses. Mostly tall grasses, often man-or-woman high. Of course, I simply can’t see such shots except as I've come to know grasses. I’d like to think my own work had helped me better to see Malick’s, or that of his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. For that matter, I see Malick's woods through the woods I played in as a child. There's the look of innocent adventure, even as the innocence clashes two worlds.

It’s a sneaky film. Within minutes you can see it’s strong on historical accuracy. Not that I know enough about the Jamestown colony to judge, but it has the look of “we’re going to be authentic.” I trust Malick to be so.

As such, the titular new world is what that noun phrase means in most contexts, America. Europe ‘discovers’ half the world and the people thereon. Malick’s measured deliberate pace does indeed—the grasses!—make it new, but in a different sense. And yet that’s only the beginning.

Cpt. John Smith gets captured by ‘the naturals’ (as they’re called) and is saved, as in the old familiar story, by Pocahontas (though her name is never given). He lives among them for awhile. We’ve seen this one before, white man goes native. But not in quite this way, not with all the quotidian horse-play, nor again the deliberate pace. Now “new world” has a more specific focus. No longer the continent ready and waiting for the plundering, it’s John Smith among the naturals in THEIR world.

Malick’s setting us up, setting us up good.

The nameless Indian princess is kicked out of her tribe and has to live among these English colonists. Wearing European dress. Learning to read. For her, a new world.

See what he’s doing, this Malick.

She marries John Rolfe, believing her captain dead at sea. Has a child. Learns that her captain is not dead. And goes to England. The English see, and bow to, her. She sees the King and Queen, they show her off to the court. She sees her captain. Returns to Rolfe.

A New World, England. Really. And she acts it, this Q’orianka Kilcher, she carries the film. Without her, none of this newness would mean jack. Well, there is the grasses, but . . .

A year later Clint Eastwood showed Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), a story of that battle told from the Japanese perspective.

Maybe we’ll learn.