From "Robinson Crusoe" to "Castaway," and from "The Heart of Darkness" to "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," we've been fascinated with stories of discovery and survival for centuries.
Directors and authors create storylines in which characters are reduced to the basic essentials of mankind, thus chiseling off the thick coating of civilization that impairs us from recognizing our own human nature. Through the accounts of man in his primitive state, we are better able to understand ourselves.
Director Terrence Malick ("The Thin Red Line," "Badlands") follows this age-old trend by bringing the myth of Captain John Smith and the Algonquain princess Pocahontas to the screen as his fourth film in 32 years.
Upon arriving in Jamestown in 1607 Smith (Colin Farrell of "Phone Booth") is chosen to lead an expedition into the Virginian wilderness in search of the infamous "golden city," prevalent in every new-world discovery mythos.
He soon spots the face of a native girl who he later comes to know as Pocahontas. She is played by the sublimely exquisite Q'Orianka Kilcher, who was only 15 when the film was shot.
Smith is convinced the face of this knee-buckling beauty cached amidst rolling wheat fields is a mirage; so ethereal, so untouchable, he's not sure if she's real or an angel sent from heaven.
During his journey, he's taken captive by the local tribe and condemned to death but is rescued by the pleas of Pocahontas.
Some of Pocahontas' lines aren't translated and Farrell's Irish mumblings are at times incoherent. But this doesn't matter because the softness of their touch and the forlorn gazes need no translation. With control and poise, Farrell and Kilcher triumph in their on-screen love affair.
Voiceovers are characteristically littered throughout Malick's films. Similar to how Malick employed the voiceover in "The Thin Red Line," he uses soft, poetically reflective one-lined verses that don't necessarily move the plot, but create a substantive aura of love, pain, desire - universal human emotions that tie the divergent cultures together.
The love story between Smith and Pocahontas works, but the rest of the film doesn't. Smith is ordered to search for a northern passage to the Indies and John Rolfe (Eric Bana of "Hulk") comes abroad and sweeps Pocahontas off her feet, taking her back to England with him.
The Rolfe factor and Pocahontas' voyage to England, though historically accurate, add too many elements that throw the film's chemistry out of whack. Malick would have been better off keeping with the Smith-Pocahontas love saga, rather than crunching himself between the confines of historical accuracy.
It is the interaction between cultures that is so charming about stories of discovery. This is provided to some extent in "The New World," but only briefly through the Smith-Pocahontas romance. The native culture is merely background setting, as the English colony trumps the native village.
Nonetheless, Malick gives a fair depiction of the native character somewhere in between the unforgiving brutality of "Black Robe" and the noble savage in "Dances with Wolves." But in the end, we're left wanting more.
Malick delivers an uneven narrative due to a plot that's thicker than a history book. Also, the poetic voiceovers that worked so well in the film's early stages and in his other films quickly lose their potency as they float around aimlessly like a gull caught in trade winds.
The love story was removed about halfway through and it is difficult to care about the outcome of the Jamestown settlers or the native tribes. The audience is left with no hope and no sympathy, the very human impulses that Malick tries to underline.
The cinematography, sound, score, acting, and the obligatory action sequences are superbly done, but the film sinks before reaching its intended destination.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
