The New World

Just saw Terrance Malick’s new film. What an amazing piece of cinema. It’s not quite like any movie out there. I thought it was beautiful. It’s a meditative tone poem that feels more like an epic Zen koan than any neatly packaged movie. This is a film that you need to let wash over you. Images flow with a silent quality that forces us to really look at sunlight glinting off water in a stream, or grasses waving in the breeze. The imagery reminded me of Koyaanisqatsi.

There is a (somewhat) linear story here. It begins with English explorers in 1607 founding the Jamestown settlement, the hardships they encounter and the “naturals” who are puzzled by this new presence. Colin Farrell plays John Smith who finds himself falling for Pocahontas. There’s layers of narration from various character that weave in and out as the images lead us through this meditative dreamscape. The imagery is immediate and we feel we can smell the soil and the rain in the trees. But because of the dreamlike soundtrack and inner thought narration, we are forced to gaze on this hypnotic film from a distance, it never quite invites us in. It’s a strange sensation. I feel strangely intimate with these tortured souls, and yet I don’t know them at all. The film has a quality of being emotionally anesthetized.

I had similar feelings after seeing The Thin Red Line, Malack’s last film set on the Pacific islands during WWII. Once again, that is a dreamlike film that washes over you with it’s beautiful imagery. But I was left emotionally inert. But then, maybe that’s the point. The worlds of these films are so unreal, so impossible to relate to, for us and the characters unfolding the stories, that to view them as a dream might be the only way to approach it.

I’m glad this kind of film is out there. It’s reflective and sublime, like liquid music, a bench mark of what film can be. I feel it stretches the possibilities of cinema and our expectations of what the medium is capable of. It’s definitely not for everyone, but we get plenty of hero’s journeys, or boy-meets-girl standard fare, that it’s a breath of tantalizingly fresh air to sit and pass through a film that we find hard to categorize.