Kritiken

The infinite sublimity of the natural world, a theme common to all of Malick but whose depiction in this film's first hour may never have been surpassed, should have been a utopia within which cohabitation—of beliefs, ideas, skills, and cultures—could thrive. Instead, the corporatist British, believing themselves educators, governed by notions of authoritarian occupation and control, rather than by any American dream worthy of the name, tore it down.

It tells a tragic story: a loss of promise, the end of a dream of a return to a golden age. But the film includes two complementary voyages of discovery: not only that of the English to Virginia but also that of the Virginian Pocahontas to England... Acknowledging the betrayals and exploitation that founded our modern world, Malick's cinema also understands that true tragedy forbids simple nostalgia for a lost world.

The only liberation from this life is death, which Malick films with brio, charting the transmigration of the woman's soul back to her home with the aid of Wagner and a barrage of ecstatic imagery. It remains the single greatest sequence of Malick's career, and the apotheosis of the film's seamless fusion of history, myth, and individual expression.

There are three cuts of The New World and not one other Malick film has any variation the famously reclusive artist needed us to see. This was the work he'd been waiting to paint his whole life, the one he needed to make sure his audience understood the purpose of.

The New World's tone cannot be described as mournful, because beauty, love, and the miracles of life persist even amid death and destruction. Pocahontas dies at the end of The New World, but there are no rending of garments, no efforts to underline the tragedy of her story. The film opens and closes with the same images: water rippling, birds chirping, trees shimmering in the sun. Life goes on.

Its admittedly transcendent powers should, at the outset, be seen as primarily reliant on its three entire repetitions of the dizzying, ecstatic Prelude to Das Rheingold—an infamous, proto-minimalist superposition of arpeggiated E-flat major triads that came to Richard Wagner as an oneiric vision in 1854. THE NEW WORLD uses it as a sort of affective amplifier, around which Emmanuel Lubezki's simultaneously weightless and terrestrial natural-light Steadicam cinematography is artfully arranged.

Malick still has an eye for landscapes, but since Badlands (1973) his storytelling skill has atrophied, and he's now given to transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe. All these things can be defended, even celebrated, but I couldn't find my bearings.

The editing and sound mixing – which form a truly complex weave of elements through the entire film – constantly create detours, enigmas, misdirections that derail the standard attributions or reinforcements of identity within scenes.

I've had reservations about Malick in the past, but THE NEW WORLD seems to me to be a masterpiece. Not simply Malick's finest achievement, but the film that finally makes some kind of overall sense out of his previous work.

Considering the accolades The New World is receiving elsewhere, I wonder if Malick has honed his technique into a kind of "rigorous bliss" I simply find inaccessible, a philosophical resolve to accept fleeting sensations I make a point of avoiding in life... But its insistence that Pocahontas is content with what she's left behind, and its reliance on the non-specificity of everywhere-and-somewhere transcendence... mark it as lazily reassuring, a dime-store haiku, and a master's nadir.

A Malick film is worth waiting for, and The New World validates the anticipation as the most splendiferous profusion of cinematic expressiveness to emerge out of an American studio in many a year... The contrasts between sound and image form Malick's ravishing radicalism, where the connective tissue usually employed for the narrative is dismantled for a procession of visual-aural-tonal shifts, abrupt and graceful, intimate and distanced.

If there's a grand irony in the critical reception of The New World, it is this: the film deals with a people who, arriving in undiscovered country, fleeing strictures at home, recreate the virgin land in the image of those strictures. And critics, feeble from a steady diet of trash, receive this very new manner of movie with the same blasé one might think would be reserved for James Mangold.