Recommended

The New World begins with John Smith (Colin Farrell) locked in the hold of a ship on its way to North America, but if you were to trust your ears instead of your eyes, you might think you'd stumbled into an orchestra pit. As the camera explores the contours of this strange new place, the score burbles and churns, circling obsessively around a single note as if trying to form a melody out of inchoate sound. Although James Horner generally provides the Glass-meets-Copland score, the opening is taken directly from Wagner's Das Rheingold. Yet Terrence Malick's movie is more symphonic than operatic—which is to say he's more interested in the interplay and overlap between different points of view than a single, overwhelming voice.

At first, The New World seems to be filmed exclusively from Smith's point of view. A rebellious soldier who's been clapped in irons for insubordination on the voyage over, he is doubly freed in this "new world"; the first words spoken are "Let him go." "We shall make a new start, a fresh beginning," Smith tells his fellow sailors, to whom the Virginia of 1607 is an overflowing cornucopia. But before Christopher Plummer's captain, who serves as the movie's voice of authority (and occasionally, less grandly, as its expository motor), has said the words that set Smith free, Malick has already treated us to a disembodied polyphony of lovers' endearments, the voices of Smith and Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), whose cross-cultural romance occupies much of the movie's first two-thirds. The New World's ostensible subject is nation-building in the most literal sense, beginning as it does with the landfall of the first English colonists and closing with Pocahontas' visit to the court of King James. But Malick concerns himself equally with the way lovers colonize each other, each constructing a version of the other that diverges, sometimes catastrophically, from their visions of themselves.

The New World is never so clumsy as to make Smith and Pocahontas' relationship a symbol for the colonists' rape of native land; like motifs in a symphony, the stories dance around each other, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes contrasting. Unlike his fellow soldiers, Smith is inducted into the native culture, although the movie remains ambiguous as to whether Pocahontas saves him from death at her father's hands (as in the myth) or whether his seeming near-death is, as some historians surmise, an initiation ritual. While the colonists proclaim their desire to "live like kings"—a statement followed by quick shots of hands extracting shells from the water and an axe hitting a tree—Smith muses, "Shall we not take what is given us?" This is a stance that, depending on your point of view, either represents a more modest alternative to the colonists' plunder or a crafty justification for it.

Like The Thin Red Line, The New World seems to exist in a constant state of flux—quite literally so, since the two-and-a-half-hour version that opened in New York and Los Angeles in December has already been withdrawn and replaced with a recut that clocks in 15 minutes shorter. Malick has also announced his intention to release a three-hour-plus cut on DVD, which makes it difficult to know how to regard this particular version, especially since a screening of the new cut was not arranged before press time. (The online version of this review will include an addendum with reactions to the new cut.) Is this merely a fragment of a larger story, as was painfully the case with The Thin Red Line? Has Malick, as the critic Dave Kehr suggests, become so seduced by the fluidity of digital editing systems that he's lost his ability to craft a rigorous narrative? Perhaps, but then narrative has never been Malick's strength, and aren't all stories, particularly those drawn from history, fragments of a greater whole? Wouldn't the greater lie be to suggest that a movie, whether two or three and a half hours, can make more than contingent sense of human experience? More than ever before, Malick in The New World traffics in the ecstatic experience of the natural world. The movie's detractors (who, unfortunately, are many) apparently feel that Emmanuel Lubezki's dazzling nature photography is no more than calendar art—padding that swells the movie well beyond its necessary length. But the tactile richness of Lubezki's images (captured on doubly-dense 65 mm stock) reinforces the sense that Smith and Pocahontas are both on virgin territory—seeing the world, as it were, for the first time. To think such shots superfluous or random is, it seems to me, to willfully miss the point of Malick's rapture.

The New World isn't all reverie, especially when winter sets in and the colonists start to starve. The lovers' starry-eyed voiceover contrasts notably with a line like, "Attlee's dead. Somebody ate his hands." And inevitably, the movie sags when Smith vanishes and dull, staid John Rolfe (Christian Bale) takes his place; like Pocahontas, who swaps bias-cut buckskin for a cocoon of cotton and wool, the movie feels swaddled. But the transcendent purity of its first two hours leaves your head swimming as you walk out the door, its loss keenly felt and its presence treasured.

The New World

Written and directed by Terrence Malick A New Line release Opens Friday at Ritz East