Terrence Malick may be the unofficial poet laureate of American cinema, but his latest film, The New World, puts our patience for poetry to the test.
This is beginning to look like an unhappy trend for Malick, a director whose ravishing but increasingly undisciplined films appear every decade or so (Badlands in 1973, Days of Heaven in 1978, The Thin Red Line in 1998). Malick's new movie is every bit as exquisitely visualized as his others but so loosely attached to any sort of narrative that it often feels fluid to the point of formlessness, a series of gorgeous landscapes for its characters to wander through.
Take those opening shots, for instance, of lean, sinewy Native Americans, their perfect, glistening bodies frolicking in a pre-industrial paradise. It's all a bit like some Leni Riefenstahl production beamed in from an exotic alternative universe, an effect amplified by the thrilling strains of Wagner's Das Rheingold swelling up from underneath the images. Malick marries sound and vision in an elegant one-two punch, telling us in no uncertain terms that something significant is about to happen.
And so it does. The time is 1607, the place is that parcel of land now called Virginia, and what the filmmaker is showing us is that historical moment when Native American and European cultures first collide.
The New World takes an ethereal, almost mystical approach to this cataclysmic event and its aftermath, although in an apparent effort to keep the film from completely flying off into the stratosphere, Malick also gives his movie a human face. The director filters his poetry through the celebrated cross-cultural romance of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the chief's beautiful young daughter, Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), although the film treats them more as abstract symbols than fully fleshed characters.
The love story helps ground things, but The New World's naïve mythmaking and metaphysical meandering is still often a touch-and-go proposition. Walking a fine line between mesmerizing and monotonous, the film revels in long, trance-like passages of newly arrived Caucasians exploring an alien landscape every bit as breathtaking and foreboding as the one Klaus Kinski navigated in Herzog's Aguirre. Even when the inevitable battles begin between the settlers and Native Americans, it's action Malick-style, complete with mid-combat soul-searching and whispering choruses of multiple voices layered over the fray.
We've heard these voices before in Malick's other films (most notably in The Thin Red Line), but the effect seems just a wee bit strained this time out. And although it's often not exactly clear what these stream-of-consciousness murmurings mean or even to whom they speak — to us? themselves? God? — it barely matters. We're all linked, all one, the voices seem to say, as Malick conjures up such a dense profusion of off-screen narration that it becomes impossible to tell who's speaking at any given moment.
There's politics here as well as poetry and, structural doodlings aside, the filmmaker makes it clear which side he's on. The New World consistently depicts early Native Americans (called "Naturals" by the white men, which presumably makes them "Unnaturals") as noble savages in an Eden spoiled by foreign interlopers to whom they are morally, spiritually and even physically superior. The settlers, for their part, aren't inherently evil, but their dreams of a commonwealth built on self-reliance are brought low by their own greed and bad judgment.
Everybody loses here, and Malick is so consumed with poetizing the sublime tragedy of it all that he forgets about some basic minimum requirements for engaging an audience, including coherency, conciseness, and the little matter of that love story he promised to tell. Pocahontas and John Smith drift in and out of the proceedings even as the film's heartbreakingly beautiful images continue to overflow for nearly two-and-a-half hours, looking almost too perfect for this world we're living in.
Terrence Malick may not care much about giving us a romance to sink our teeth into, but that doesn't mean moviegoers can't get their fill of earthiness this week, even if it does come from an unlikely source. Amazingly enough, our provider of lusty pleasures is none other than that old nebbish Woody Allen, whose new movie Match Point positively gushes passion (!), murder (!!), sex (!!!) and even a ghost or two.
Opera is used as a running motif throughout Match Point, with the film itself unfolding like one of the Verdi tragedies that its characters are constantly listening to. More precisely, the film's take on Verdi is crossed with a little film noir, although these two brand names were never that far apart to begin with.
There are a handful of lighter moments here as well, but as with most Allen flicks (and all of his recent stuff, most notably Melinda and Melinda), one person's tragedy is another's comedy. Essentially, though, the glass is not only half-empty but decidedly smeary in Match Point, with a tough, engrossing, pretense-free story the likes of which we've really never seen before from this famous filmmaker.
The film is set in London, far from Allen's usual Manhattan haunts, and concerns a young working-class stiff named Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who, like all good/bad noir protagonists, understands that life is almost entirely dependent on the vagaries of chance, on pure dumb luck. The plot is set in motion when Chris lands a job as a tennis pro at a posh club and ingratiates himself with one of its upper crust families, first befriending the male heir to the fortune (Matthew Goode) and eventually becoming engaged to his plain-jane sister (Emily Mortimer).
There's a kink in the works, though (as if you didn't know), in the form of Chris's uncontrollable urge for his future brother-in-law's fiancée, a husky-voiced American femme fatale named Nola (Scarlett Johansson). And since the feeling is mutual, and whatever Nola wants Nola gets, Chris quickly get sucks into a covert and highly risky affair that necessitates his spinning an ever stickier web of lies.
Allen seems to be having a good time tinkering with time-honored noir conventions, but by the time the movie's unpredictable and literally explosive third act rolls around, Match Point becomes something that neatly transcends the genres it plays with. It's a smart movie, of course, but smart in ways we don't typically associate with Woody Allen. And not a single stammering neurotic in sight.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2006.
