“BEAUTY, LOVE, MOTHER... AND AMERICA”

By Raymond Benson

Filmmaker Terrence Malick has perhaps out-mystique’d the great Stanley Kubrick in terms of his public perception. Famously reclusive, Malick never allows photographs of himself to be used, and he never appears in “making of” documentaries about his films. A Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard graduate, he is obviously a brilliant man. Once he got into the film business, he worked as a script doctor until he made his first feature, Badlands (1973). It was critically acclaimed and established Malick as a hot addition to the “New Hollywood” movement. Next came Days of Heaven in 1978, also critically lauded.

And then... he disappeared. For twenty years.

In 1998, he appeared on the scene again, and Hollywood was more than ready to open checkbooks and fund his third feature film, The Thin Red Line.

It takes a lot of mystique for that scenario to happen.

Malick’s fourth picture, The New World, continued the director’s journey in exploring what has become signature stylistic and thematic traits—to make movies in which the plot is secondary to image, sound, music, and emotion. Malick is more interested in inventing a different kind of cinema—one that is certainly not mainstream. Terrence Malick uses film to create visual and sonic poetry, expound philosophy and existentialism, and touch upon a very basic and primal chord in his audience. He wants us to feel as well as think, and to fill us with awe and wonder. But make no mistake—in a Malick film, the story is not essential to the journey.

The director’s work of late is even more elliptical, impressionistic, and free form. Beginning with The Tree of Life, the Oscar-nominated treatise on the creation of the world and how that spark is inside each and every human being, Malick threw down the gauntlet to audiences, asking, “Are you with me or not?” The believers will follow him wherever he goes. Most everyone else will scratch their heads and... walk out of the theater (which happened a lot when I first saw The Tree of Life!) For the record, I’m a follower.

The New World has more in common with The Thin Red Line than Malick’s more recent works. There is a story in The New World, it’s just told very unconventionally, the same way he freely adapted The Thin Red Line into a lyrical piece about war and nature. The New World is also about nature, and in fact, “Mother” is probably the central character.

The year is 1607, and English adventurers have just landed in Virginia. Among them is Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell). The “Naturals,” as Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) calls the Native Americans, at first cautiously welcomes them. Smith meets the free-spirited Pocahontas (astonishingly well-portrayed by 14-year-old Q’orianka Kilcher) and they fall in love. Then things go sour between the two peoples. A little later, another Englander, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), enters Pocahontas’ life, and she accompanies him back to meet the King and Queen of the United Kingdom. That’s the story in a nutshell.

What Malick does with this is extraordinary. With the aid of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (the first of a collaboration that would continue for the remainder of Malick’s work), the director presents a collage of spectacularly beautiful images that emphasizes how fresh and virginal the land of this “new world” is. In addition, the depiction of the Powhatan people is arguably the most realistic and accurate portrayal of Native Americans in a Hollywood film, compounding the notion that they knew how to live with nature, whereas the newcomers fight “Mother” the entire way. The film is a meditation, like most of Malick’s work, on man’s relationship with the earth.

The Criterion Collection has pulled out all the stops with this new, lavish box set of three disks containing three different cuts of the film. The main attraction is a new 4K digital restoration of the “extended cut” (172 minutes), supervised by Lubezki and Malick. Also included are high-definition transfers of the original “first cut” (150 minutes, released for the first time on home video), which was the version that premiered in L.A. and New York in December 2005 and ran for a week in order to be considered for Academy Awards, and the “theatrical cut” (135 minutes), which was the version most audiences saw during the film’s wide release in early 2006.

Which version is better? Difficult to say. The extended cut is probably Malick’s preferred assembly, and if you’re a fan of the director’s work, then this is definitely the one to watch. The theatrical cut is much leaner, thereby making the storyline stronger. But the first cut, while only fifteen minutes longer than the theatrical one, fills out the gaps of the shorter version quite well with Malick’s elegiac, stylistic choices—it’s a nice compromise between the extended and theatrical editions.

A 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack accompanies all three cuts, and you can hear every cricket and bird chirp as if they’re in your living room.

Supplements include new interviews with Farrell and Kilcher, producer Sarah Green, production designer Jack Fisk, and costume designer Jacqueline West. There’s an informative piece on the differences between the three versions as told by co-editor Mark Yoshikawa, as well as new interviews with editors Yoshikawa, Hank Corwin, and Saar Klein. Making “The New World” is an approximately 90-minute documentary directed and edited by Austin Jack Lynch (David’s son), detailing the production in Virginia and England. The theatrical and teaser trailers are also included. The thick booklet contains an essay by film scholar Tom Gunning, a 2006 interview with Lubezki from American Cinematographer, and a selection of research materials that inspired the production.

The Criterion Collection always produces quality material—their release of The New World stands as one of the company’s most impressive packages.

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