The New New World

Colin Farrell and Q’Orianka Kilcher as Smith and Pocahontas.

The Pocahontas story is one of America’s favorite creation myths. The story of the virtuous young Indian maiden who saves an English adventurer and thus paves the way for white settlement and migration was told and retold in novels, poems, and paintings all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for an incisive critical study, see Robert S. Tilton’s Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative), and it’s still very much with us today, thanks to children’s books and Walt Disney.

One reason the legend has proved so durable and a focus for national discussions on race, miscegenation, and colonialism is that there are few verifiable facts to discredit any interpretation. Despite more than three centuries of historical inquiry, we probably know less about the North American Indian culture of the period then we know about the pre-Columbian Incas; in truth, historians are divided as to whether Powhatan’s daughter actually saved John Smith from ritual execution or Smith misunderstood what was happening and was in fact being made part of some adoption ceremony. If the former, we have no idea what Pocahontas’s motives were, whether she acted out of personal feelings for the English captain or merely compassion. We don’t even know how old she was, though most historians believe she was between 12 and 14.

Terrence Malick’s The New World is the latest in a long line of works that use the Pocahontas-John Smith story as a starting point for a metaphor of the birth of the New World. In early Pocahontas narratives, devised when white Americans were sure of themselves and of their glorious future, this first meeting of white and native cultures was considered a good thing. (Many leading Virginia families openly boasted of their blood ties to Pocahontas, virtually the only native American to be so honored.) Now, of course, we’re not so sure, and Malick’s film reflects our national ambivalence as we approach 2006.

It would be nice if it reflected a little more, but Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography, while presenting us with some striking images of the forest primeval, is often depressingly dishwaterish. This isn’t his fault. Malick is as quirky a director as America has produced over the last four decades, and he has given us such fascinating but only half-realized works as Badlands (1973), Days Of Heaven (1978), and The Thin Red Line (1998). This time he chose to film entirely without electric lights, which may make the world look more like it did to people in the early seventeenth century but makes it less like anything to us in the present, as we can see so little of it. Malick still directs like a film-school student more than 35 years after his first feature, and he has made other strange decisions too. Having hired James Horner, probably the most popular film-score composer now working, he inserts excerpts from Wagner’s Das Rheingold onto the soundtrack. Why, exactly? Wouldn’t Dvorak’s New World Symphony have been more appropriate?

The New World has terrific actors, and they are all well cast, though some of them, such as the great Christopher Plummer as the British Captain Newport, aren’t given enough to do. At the center of the first half of the film, fortunately, is Colin Farrell. Farrell’s characters have always had a quality of wildness and unpredictability just below the surface; he’s at his best when the script doesn’t weigh him down with all sorts of baggage about the past, as it did in Alexander. His John Smith seems to blossom in the New World, particularly when he encounters Pocahontas, played by Q’Orianka Kilcher, who was 14 when the picture was shot, two years ago. There is an intriguing eroticism to their relationship that never quite moves into the realm of the carnal; the suggestion is that Farrell’s Smith is as overwhelmed by the Eden-like atmosphere of early Virginia as he is by Kilcher’s Pocahontas. Or, interpreted another way, she is for him the manifestation of the virgin continent. Their early scenes where both work past the problem of language are the best in the movie.

One of the challenges for Malick, who also wrote the script, is to make the next hour or so dramatically interesting after the grand romantic beginning, and he never quite does it. Pocahontas, of course, did not wind up with the peripatetic Smith but with the much more husbandly John Rolfe (played by Christian Bale, who makes the most of an underwritten role). The film picks up briefly when the couple returns to England, and we see England, briefly, through the eyes of Pocahontas, in scenes that beautifully contrast with the beginning. But the real problem at the core of The New World is scarcely addressed, namely how we are to accept the contradiction that is Pocahontas. More a heroine for feminism than for Indian ideals, the poor girl died of tuberculosis in England in 1617 after choosing European civilization and rejecting the people she was born into—especially rejecting, it seems, their culture of male supremacy. How amazed she would be to see what an icon we have made of her.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.