I remember when Terrence Malick’s ‘The New World’ was released in December 2005, there were murmurs of this long gestating movie being overly indulgent, too slow, too long at a 150 minute running time.  Eventually the film was re-released in January 2006  in a re-edited 135 minute version with some additional footage, changed voiceover and score.  I saw the re-released version and was completely immersed in the film as if I were submerged in deep meditation.

The film is a moving, poetic allegory about Pocahontas – her tragic love story with John Smith and journey to England, juxtaposed with the colonial settlement of the ‘New World’.  Few filmmakers manage to reduce the cinematic experience to its pure essence and Terence Malick demonstrates his mastery of the form with this intimate epic.  The film is deeply humanistic – evoking the duality of love and betrayal, innocence and savagery, destruction and rebirth…without reducing the story into polemics or the characters into clichés.

Journalist Mick LaSalle of SF Chronicle could not have expressed it better when he named the film #1 of this decade: “Terence Malick’s one-of-a-kind film, about the life of Pocahontas and the dawn of American history, contains some of the best filmmaking imaginable – some of it beyond imagining. I have seen it at least five times and have no idea how Malick knew, when he put it all together, that the movie would even make sense. It’s difficult to write a great short poem. It’s difficult to write a great long novel. But to write a great long poem that’s the size of a great long novel – one that makes sense, doesn’t flag and is exponentially better than the short poem or the long novel ever would have been – that’s almost impossible. Malick did it. With images.” (Jan 2010).

And yet, this film was only nominated in 2005 for best cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.  At the very least, I believe the film should have won if not been nominated for Best Film, Best Director (Terrence Malick), Best Actress (the exquisite, first-timer Q’Orianka Kilcher who channeled not just the spirit of Pocahontas but the grace and wonder of the new world.), and Best Actor (an underrated Colin Farrell who delivers an honest performance hiding none of the shame and conflict in John Smith).  And, if I could hand over a post mortem Best Score award to Richard Wagner (whose Das Rheingold composition is majestic in the film) instead of James Horner, I’d be a happy camper.

Though, the small screen does not do this film justice and I eagerly await for the day when the American Cinemateque programs it into their Terrence Malick revival series, here’s a short clip of the intro-