Re-imagining History

The New World Re-edit

Directed by Terrence alick

Terrence Malick does not cut his conscience to fit the pattern of the day. No matter how many times he re-edits The New World, it remains outside current trends, obstinately politically unfashionable. Malick’s movie asserts a revisionist’s historical affirmation. Instead of delighting in the superficial, modern negativity of Syriana, Lord of War and The Constant Gardener, Malick offers agape. He recreates the founding of Jamestown in 1607, going back to a more innocent sense of world exploration and conquest than what most contemporary pundits are willing to consider about Western history. This peculiarly personal perspective advances the very God-fearing sense of ambition and possibility that has been politically corrected out of textbooks. 

Observe how Malick’s new edit (15 judicious minutes) streamlines the poetic, stream-of-consciousness narrative. Pochahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) now fully commands the film’s center. (The first version’s Eurocentrism lies on the cutting room floor.) Her wonderment at strange ships on the horizon and the pale-skinned men who disembark complement her youthful thrall with family and the natural world. Malick contrasts Pocahontas’ innocence to John Smith (Colin Farrell) who is first seen in the hold of a ship, locked up for insubordination and unmistakably imprisoned by a cynical, world-weary way of life. He’s an already-fallen Adam, partially redeemed when he discovers the garden continent and a new Eve. 

This romantic concept of America is based on the founding of an unspoiled land, glimpsing its potential prior to the disease of Eurocentrism. (Pocahontas and her tribesman are first viewed from underwater, as if newborn.) It’s the moment when love was possible between people from different backgrounds. 

Malick distills these ingenuous souls’ feelings into quietly spoken interior monologues. Their secret thoughts comprise the film’s voice-over narration. Edited down, they evince two styles of heroic optimism—Pocahontas’ naiveté and Smith’s worldliness—which, when lyrically interwoven, constitute Malick’s most meaningful trope: an audacious series of prayers. 

Pocahontas urges, “Come, Spirit, help us. We rise out of the soul of you.” Smith implores, “Who are you whom I so faintly hear? Who urges me ever on?” Unlike the skeptical philosophizing expressed throughout The Thin Red Line, where individual soldiers mused on war and peace, these ruminations amount to Malick’s fullest embrace of Immanence. The merging of native animism and European Christianity becomes the basis for the film’s new vision of history—a virtually Emersonian sensibility. 

With The New World’s love story, Malick symbolizes the historic America-Europe encounter with a two-sided answer to alienation. Both Pocahontas and Smith explore each other’s beings with mutual hesitation and ardency. It is not only a private idyll of red-to-white eroticism; Malick also makes a larger spiritual and natural exploration combining visual imagery and prayerful thought. His oddly balladic reconfiguration of American experience holds on to the early Protestantism we’re frequently encouraged to distrust, connecting it to an awed appreciation of nature and humankind. Christopher Plummer as Capt. Newport delivers an explorer’s speech that is also a sermon: “God has given us a promised land, a land of the future, a new kingdom of the spirit.” 

Such rejoicing and reverence define Malick’s singular art. He creates uncanny, expressive imagery, such as a pair of hands, turned outward from a praying position so that they are cupped, to scoop a clam out of the fecund sea. It is an image of promise, yet both the pearl and the plundering are implicit. 

Similarly, Pocahontas and Smith’s love is fraught by cultural tensions between settlers and natives. As their love blossoms, it is also stressed. In the first version, these paradoxes meandered; now Malick presents the phenomenon of cultural integration in overlapping phases: hope and peril, curiosity and ruin, love and fate.

To illustrate these tidal shifts of emotion, Malick’s first version alternated nature studies with love scenes and settlement scenes. He hadn’t found his narrative’s core, but it was still possible to appreciate his sensitivity to environment, romance and history. Here, Malick cuts away the fancifulness, such as an assignation where the word “Yes” was whispered over Pocahontas and Smith’s own verbal canoodling. The result is montages that are both ambiguous and ecstatic. Critic Gregory Solman, an authority on Malick, claimed the original version of The New World represented the apotheosis of Malick’s elliptical technique; it’s now easier to see where the artist’s imagination and inspiration converge. His storytelling is half-pictorial, half-spiritual. He has gotten closer to David Lean’s late-career interest in natural phenomena as an expression of character and to Jan Troell’s enraptured view of nature and history in The Emigrants and The New Land. Lean and Troell, the previous reigning visionaries of existential wonder and geographical discovery, never attempted such beatific yet disputatious historical revisionism. In a political climate that has become hypercritical of Western expansion, Malick’s daring seems even more strange and risky.

By paring down his own quizzical amazement, Malick avoids disingenuous infatuation with native habitat. (Smith’s awed comments that the settlers “have no jealousy, no sense of possession” contradict the facts of weaponry and fighting, and that the male warriors’ bodies are ferociously, purposefully, muscular.) Putting new emphasis on Pocahontas relieves Malick of high-minded patronization. Q’orianka Kilcher’s presence authenticates it. This performance should be dominating the awards season—and it would, if critics didn’t scoff at the goodness Kilcher embodies. “She exceeded the rest in beauty and proportion,” says John Rolfe (Christian Bale), the settler Pocahontas marries when Smith is sent away. Kilcher’s oval face, the flat planes of her cheeks and pointed chin, idealize a distinctly ethnic beauty, but this is also an extraordinary portrayal of guileless intelligence. 

Kilcher’s comeliness, paired with Farrell’s roguish intensity, turns his (our) sexual shame into sincerity. The New World peaks when Pocahontas’ innocence is tested—most profoundly during a command visit to English royalty where she must decide her devotion to either Smith or Rolfe. Amidst the obvious contrast of New and Old worlds (where she marvels at the sight of a black African and is, in turn, marveled at), Pocahontas moves from young passion to mature love. (Dressed in a green velvet hat and floor-length dress with white lace collar, she’s a heartbreaking picture of Western capitulation and displacement.) The way she studies these men, scrutinizing what love is and her own life, may seem intuitive, but it is fine, almost silent-movie acting. Kilcher’s Pocahontas progresses from knowledge to feeling and judgment; from forgiveness to fairness and humility.

It took more than commercial instinct for Malick to underscore Pocahontas’ significance. His faith in her grand gestures (saving the Jamestown colony from devastation) denotes a valiant optimism which shouldn’t be overlooked by those who celebrate Malick as the new Kubrickian formalist. Thankfully, The New World climaxes as Pocahontas frolics with her child among the geometrical topiaries and hedge maze of an English estate. Her warmth seems to melt the glacial nihilism of Kubrick’s misanthropic maze in The Shining. It is Malick’s rebuke to artful cynicism, re-imagining—and re-editing—history with grace.