By grabbing the abstract and eschewing an obvious Hollywood polish, director Terrence Malick's Pocahontas epic The New World strengthens his reputation as an artist.
Like the explorers in this film, Mr. Malick has made a career of tromping through undiscovered country, avoiding standard film technique in favor of a storytelling style that relies on mood, metaphor and the emotional resonance of incongruous imagery. Like an abstract expressionist faced with an empty canvas, Mr. Malick is less concerned with getting from plot point A to plot point B expediently than finding ways - through image or music or an improvised performance moment - to capture the essence of a story and the larger questions it attempts to answer.
With The New World, that story is the initial contact between English explorers and the Powhatan Indians in the early 17th century. While most of the highlights of the famous story are hit - John Smith is still spared execution by Pocahontas, for instance - the object of this film is not to rehash history but use it as a framework from which questions of man's relationship with the natural world, the nature of exploration and cultures in conflict might be examined.
It's hard to make this kind of esoteric material engaging, but Mr. Malick wins his audience over with unsurpassed visual acumen.
Faces and places, shot in the most forgiving natural light, seem to take on an otherworldly glow. Shots of ripples spreading across calm water or tall grass swaying in a gentle breeze become tone poems, representing not only the natural world but also man's disruptive presence in that world.
Just as an angry red line slashing across canvas allows the painter to express complex emotional ideas with a single stroke, so does Mr. Malick's use of light and location. A master of layered metaphor, he uses visual metaphor within the structure of his film, which is itself a metaphor. It's a challenging and ultimately affecting piece of work that reinforces and reinterprets what film can be and mean.
NOTE: Many like Mr. Malick's particular style, but others find it ponderous and pretentious. Although I loved this film, my wife could not have hated it more. Mr. Malick, it seems, is an acquired taste.
Reach Steven Uhles at (706) 823-3626 or steven.uhles@augustachronicle.com.
HOME SCREENING
TITLE: The New World (New Line Home Video; $27.98)
THE VERDICT: * * * * out of * * * * *
DVD EXTRAS: The making-of materials are particularly interesting, not just for their explanation of the Malick method but also for the absence of the man himself. Mr. Malick shuns being photographed and interviewed about his work.
