Dean Nicholas
posted 21 February 2006

For a man who disappeared for the best part of twenty years after first emerging in the 1970s (notably with the seminal Badlands), Terrence Malick's second film in less than ten years (following 1997's The Thin Red Line) suggests that with old age he is becoming almost prolific. The New World, despite a clunky title and a trailer that places it close to Last of the Mohicans territory, is quite simply a masterpiece of visual and aural storytelling, as inherently cinematic a film as can be imagined.

Set in early 17th century Virginia, the film depicts the founding of the first British settlement in the Americas - what would eventually become known as Jamestown. A trio of British warships land in a lush cove at the mouth of a river, on a mission to discover a sea passage to the Indies. The mission's leader, Captain Newport (played imperially by Christopher Plummer), decides to establish a camp. Before returning to England he charges a disgraced soldier - John Smith (Colin Farrell), whose life the captain has just pardoned - with taking care of the fort, and also with establishing trading links with the local indigenous population.

The opening twenty minutes in which this takes place establish the tone of the film, and indeed this opening is a microcosm of the startlingly organic approach that Malick takes to his work. The director's great strength has always been his commitment to the utter beauty of nature when captured on celluloid. For aficionados of great cinematography, The New World doesn't disappoint. Impeccably realised shots of verdant forests, deep rivers, waving fields of grass and poignant sunsets, all captured with naturalistic lighting, make this film an astonishing visual experience. It is difficult, indeed counterproductive, to convey the experience in words; it is Malick's tangible feel for the very essence of cinema, the way he overlaps sound and image in confident brush strokes, like an Impressionist painter, that lends the film its quixotic beauty. Each frame feels like a Renaissance masterpiece, such is the detail of composition. This diligence is carried over to the sound design; Malick overlaps dialogue with a personal narration that sounds as if it is being whispered, innocuously, into the listener's ear. A third element - the orchestral score - completes the piece, and the three drift into and out of each other, rising and falling in a manner that echoes the rhythms of nature itself. The overall effect is like waking from a pleasant dream, with the unprocessed images and sensations lingering fresh in the mind.

Malick hangs the relatively thin plot on the emotive faces of his lead actors, carrying the storyline on their features. It is a potentially dangerous method. The grim, sour features of Colin Farrell remain expressionless throughout, presumably to convey intensity and gravitas, yet he soon becomes tiresome; his eyebrows, seemingly inching hair by hair towards each other, don't quite convey the brooding quality that his character requires. The choice of Q'Orianka Kilcher to play his lover, however, ranks as a spectacular success. Her strikingly bold beauty captures every shot, and is incredibly evocative, capable of a range of emotions yet embodying each one with a noble dignity. She is entirely plausible as the daughter of a noble lineage, and her acquiescence to the ways of the colonisers - symbolised by her stuttering walk when forced to don the constricting British dress - is a quiet tragedy, finalising the sense of loss that the arrival of Europeans on the continent heralds.

The only real criticism is the film's length; after Rebecca's assumption of the colonial way of life, the story sags a little, as she marries a Brit (a low-key performance by Christian Bale) and settles into a comfortable, yet essentially loveless, relationship. By the end, however, where the couple visit London and Rebecca is afforded a brief reunion with her one-time lover, the journey is complete: the new world will soon be ruined, and Malick's final shots of the lush, lost Eden only highlight this tragedy.

In a world in which directors are feted for making films that even slightly challenge an audience's intellect (I'm talking about you, Mr Clooney), it is both surprising and ultimately inspiring that a film as simple, beautiful and as uncharacteristic as The New World can still be made.