The New World: Inness, 1491 and the Return of Silent Films

In his landscapes of a century ago, George Inness captured the vanishing agrarian way of life in America in the most subtle and poignant way. It's always the same theme--a bucolic landscape, but way, way in the background, we see smoke rising from a distant factory or steam from an approaching locomotive. We marvel at the beauty while we project ahead to the strip mall this field will become. In his usual poetic way, Terrence Malick tries a similar trick in the visually brilliant but ultimately disappointing The New World. And if you are someone who might relish the idea of staring at an Inness landscape for two and a half hours, this is the movie for you.

In the film, Malick tries to create a visual correlative to the world beautifully described by Charles Mann in his recent book 1491. And at the beginning, he succeeds spectacularly, with a montage of images of "virgin territory." The beautiful stillness of the images is soon disrupted by the English boats slicing through the water as they approach the Virginia coast. It's as close as Malick, always the most impressionistic of filmmakers, gets to painterly images. From the moment anyone opens their mouth, however, the movie goes straight downhill and becomes a meandering, inadvertently comic and seemingly endless mess. This is not the fault of the actors, although Colin Farrell spends most of the movie pouting and looking wounded. The ever-reliable Christian Bale almost saves the film, and Q'orianka Kilcher is beautiful, touching and always believable as the curiously unnamed Pocahontas. It's Malick's desire to show us pretty pictures rather than actually tell a story that ultimately makes the film so tough to get through. After seeing this film and Thin Red Line and Days of Heaven, one almost wishes that Malick would simply fulfill his apparent destiny and get a job with Discovery Channel.

So Malick can paint with all the colors of the wind, but the result is almost anti-cinematic, in the sense that his elborate composition and technique are not used to advance the story or create a mood; rather, they are there to show off his incomparable sense of composition and technique. But fear not--I have a solution. While I was watching the film, I experienced something I never have seen in a movie theater before. Within the first hour, I could hear four or five people around me snoring, but I heard something else as well: someone was listening to their iPod. I realized that The New World, as with all of Malick's features save his brilliant Badlands, would be much better off as a silent film. Think about it--we could all bring our Mp3 players and create our own soundtracks, and perhaps even make up our own dialogue a la Mystery Science Theater 3000. Without intending to do so, Malick may have created a whole new form of interactive cinema; how ironic that would be for a film that is so emotionally uninvolving and distancing.