Pocahontas in Love
BAYLES, MARTHA
Pocahontas in Love Sex, betrayal, and New Age mush in colonial Virginia. by MARTHA BAYLES On a misty April morning in 1607, three tall, square-rigged English ships glide up the wide, luminous...
...And it is possible that Pocahontas, by all reports an extraordinary individual, was a Kierkegaardian animist before she became a good Anglican...
...In his first successful feature, Badlands, about a killing spree carried out by two aimless teenagers in South Dakota, he had a headline-grabbing story to tell...
...Historians also note that such staged reprieves were a customary form of hospitality among powerful Algonkian chiefs...
...Which makes sense, really: If your host has the power to crush your skull but refrains from doing so, then you are all the more likely to follow your visit with a thank-you note...
...Having learned that her first love is still alive, she grows cool toward Rolfe, prompting him to risk everything on an arranged meeting between her and Smith...
...Here, by contrast, there is no clear guide, only multiple, conflicting, obscure sources...
...But it was the truth, the only truth...
...Great, if this means further development of the clash between the English and the Powhatan, and more lingering visions of strange worlds...
...Things stay on the right track until the dramatic peak of the story, which is the return of Captain Smith...
...He gives her a long look, then says, "I may have sailed right past them...
...Rather it floats behind their backs, offering a detached perspective on the whole majestic scene...
...In Days of Heaven he had the idiom of his native Texas to set a wry, laconic tone...
...The New World, by contrast, commits one major anachronism, but also works to correct it...
...No need for Smith's next line: "I thought it was a dream, what we knew in the forest...
...But surprise, surprise—the English matron put in charge of "civilizing" Pocahontas turns out to be a wise and kindly soul whose lessons are eagerly absorbed by her pupil...
...Interestingly, he does so without ceasing to be thoroughly, and unapologeti-cally, English...
...Smith is much the same, but through some alchemy of voice and expression, Farrell makes this man who was wild and romantic amid the tall grass of Virginia seem shrunken and coarse amid the London topiary...
...Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan, when pale-faced aesthetes sought transcendence through sexual intercourse, Native Americans, and (where possible) sexual intercourse with Native Americans...
...At any rate, Malick wastes little time on this legendary scene, choosing through blinding chiaroscuro and tortured camera angles to make it appear less a historical set piece than a reject from the Stoned Otter Indie Film Festival...
...Pocahontas, by contrast, has grown in stature...
...It's Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com...
...The soul of beauty is distance," wrote Simone Weil, and Malick's best work bears this out...
...For a fleeting moment, my eyes felt as though they were gazing not at another movie set version of Merrie Olde England but at the amazing apparition London must have been to Pocahontas...
...If you want the historical imagination strangled in its crib, see the 1953 clunker, Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (Peyton Place in deerskin) or the 1995 Disney cartoon Pocahontas (Barbie and Ken in a canoe...
...But, please...
...There is only this...
...Romance isn't the only truth here...
...Believing Smith dead, held captive by the English, Pocahontas loses her spark until the sweet-faced Rolfe (Christian Bale) delicately rekindles it...
...Yet wisely, the camera does not presume to plumb the Powhatans' reactions...
...Why does Smith leave...
...It is possible that the hard-charging Smith was stopped in his tracks by unexpected tenderness for this almond-eyed Lolita...
...No other living director can touch him when it comes to natural panoramas, filmed here by Emmanuel Lubezki entirely on 65mm stock (the first time this has been done since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet...
...For example, the female of the English species arrives in Jamestown looking cold and pasty, quite the unappealing dish compared with our heroine...
...Powhatan) not to purée Captain Smith's head...
...that's the whole point...
...In the sky, the clouds, the sea...
...From this fact, sober historians deduce that the two could not possibly have been lovers...
...Malick is respected for his screenplays...
...In several such glorious sequences The New World gives something like a God's-eye view of that first, fraught encounter between the Old World and the New...
...In The Thin Red Line he had James Jones's World War II novel to adapt...
...But let us not go there...
...And while Malick has hold of a terrific yarn (at least, Captain John Smith thought so when he invented parts of it), this film tangles the spinning of it...
...In brief, it goes from overripe romanticism to something more sober and ultimately moving—then (unfortunately) back to romanticism...
...It should have quit while it was ahead...
...Father, where do you live...
...By now, everyone knows that Pocahontas was only 11 when she begged her papa, Chief Wahunsonacock (a.k.a...
...But please, cut the New Age mush...
...When Malick re-edits this film for DVD, the word is that he plans to make it longer...
...Somewhat, not totally...
...But never before has he attempted anything quite this ambitious...
...Instead of discovering the land from the ships, we discover the ships from the land, as a band of Powhatan Indians trot along a ridge, marveling at what must have been the 17th-century equivalent of alien spacecraft...
...by MARTHA BAYLES On a misty April morning in 1607, three tall, square-rigged English ships glide up the wide, luminous estuary of what is now called the James River...
...Film critics who do not thrill to such achievements should take up another line of work...
...she asks Smith before they part...
...This is Virginia...
...And for all his cinematic gifts, Malick seems somewhat lacking in the one thing most needful: historical imagination...
...The romanticism comes first, in the form of a prolonged sunlit dalliance between Smith (played broodingly by Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (played brilliantly by 14-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher, the striking daughter of a Swiss mother and Peruvian Indian father...
...The encounter, which takes place in a formal garden, is both subtle and powerful...
...also a narrative art...
...When such characters speak, they need to sound as though they are living in their own time, not ours—or worse, the time of D.H...
...We rise, we rise...
...I gag, I gag...
...In a dark corner of my mind, a little voice squeaks, "Why not...
...This is not Dances With Wolves...
...In a mar-velously depicted voyage to England, Pocahontas (baptized Rebecca) lends her charm to what is essentially a PR campaign on the part of the floundering Virginia Company of London...
...Show me your face, give me a sign...
...It's important when you have a great story not to sail right past it...
...Eventually Smith leaves, and a bereft Pocahontas allows herself to be wooed and won by John Rolfe, the man who taught the world to smoke...
...not all the virtue is on the Indian side...
...But Pocahontas is troubled...
...These love scenes are served just the way a certain middlebrow audience prefers, with a dollop of Mozart on top and a sprinkling of bad poetry: Love, . . . shall we not take what is given...
...At this point, the film takes a turn for the better, not because it favors the English way of life over the Powhatan, but because it does not, for the sake of political correctness, grossly distort the choice that Pocahontas did, in fact, make...
...The reasons are not entirely clear in the 135-minute version now showing in theaters, but it seems he has difficulty sustaining the proper romantic mood through a winter of starvation, relieved only by the generosity of the Indians and a summer of warfare, ignited when Powhatan (August Schellenberg) and his brother Opechancanough (Wes Studi) realize that the English are planting corn and planning to expand their holdings...
...Best of all, writer-director Terrence Malick decided at the last minute to accompany this scene not with the pretty noodlings of James Horner's commissioned score, but with music that is truly sublime: the murmuring, rising, surging prelude to Wagner's Das Rheingold...
...Cut, that's a wrap...
...These scenes are magical in their ability to evoke a sense of astonishment similar to that found in the abovementioned scene of ships on the James River...
...Did you find your Indies...
...All the rest is unreal...
...But film is not just a visual art...
...Elegant and restrained, she takes Smith's measure and, almost before she realizes it, she has decided to stay with Rolfe...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 22
