Every film embarks on a hope of discovery because every film begins with the birth of a world -- this is the promise of cinema. It will take us where we have not been, show us what we have not seen and help us discover what we did not know.
In Terence Malick's The New World, the sense of discovery doesn't come from stepping on the edges of distant lands, but from charting the strange waters of the human heart. The only thing more mysterious than what we find in others is what we find in ourselves.
Malick, who once taught philosophy, is a capricious filmmaker, and his life, like his work, remains distant and inscrutable. Though his output is sporadic, it is always anticipated, like a comet whose return is inevitable but with a trajectory that escapes calculation. His films tend to linger in our thoughts, like a memory we can't be sure of.
Often, there is a deep beauty to his shots and sometimes they soar with a kind of majesty. But mostly they tend to drift, as if the camera is trying to find its place in the scenery it wants to document. It's a dreamy feeling to be enveloped by the languor of Malick's imagery, like slipping into a warm bath.
The film deals with the colonizing of Jamestown and the interactions of Pocahontas with John Smith and John Rolfe. But labeling the film in terms of a love triangle would be like asking why the law of gravity is not dealt with in the constitution.
The actual plot is perhaps the least important element of this movie. Little of the film is about narrative and characters seem to blunder through the story rather than live it. This is a film built around moments of discovery and, more importantly, change.
The film begins with two cultures looking at each other's strangeness for the first time. How peculiar it must have felt to a native to have seen a warship for the first time or a British colonist looking at a native with white face paint. The film imagines it would not be so much alarm, as it would be a sense of ignorance: How do we explain something we do not have words for?
The heart of the film is how we deal with discovery of ourselves. In looking outward, we are looking inward -- to search the world is to find where we belong within it. In a defining moment, a character travels across the Atlantic to find a person dear to her. When they finally reunite, she quietly realizes the great changes in herself as much as she has the changes to the world around her.
Much of the time, there is little need for dialogue in this movie, and the characters mostly speak in terms of internal monologues. The words feel unessential like wallpaper or fortune cookies.
Writing about film can be hard, because it is an attempt to transmit the knowledge of one medium in terms of another. One can only hope the two forms share a comparable vocabulary. Yet, New World is especially frustrating. It is the kind of work that makes you reach for a dictionary in desperation, then discard it when you realize its futility.
Language can be a clumsy filter for experience. Perhaps that's the final discovery of this movie. There are feelings in this film that exist purely in terms of cinema, and they would lose their poignancy if we try to abridge them with text.
What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.
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