On the desk beside my keyboard lies one of my most prized possessions: a ticket stub from the January 21, 9:30 p.m. showing of “The New World” at BAM-Rose Cinemas in downtown Brooklyn.
At this showing of this movie, at this time on this day, in this theater, in this borough of this city, I bore witness to American commercial cinema's ability to astound, move and inspire masses of people - an ability that reached its fullest realization during the heyday of the blockbuster art film, the 1970s, but has rarely been exercised since. The history of American studio blockbusters includes a handful of indisputable high watermarks, moments when entertainment and art merged to create not just a hit, but an origin point for new ways of thinking about, and making, popular cinema; a rallying point for anyone who still believes in the blockbuster’s ability - and responsibility — to deliver more than escapism; a secular house of worship for anyone who prizes ambition, mystery, and beauty over familiarity and neatness; a transformative experience that can be had for the price of a movie ticket, and that anyone who ever called him or herself a movie lover must seize now, or forever regret having missed. “The New World” is a new watermark.
It is a $50 million epic poem made with Time Warner’s money; it is an American creation myth that recontextualizes our past, present and future as fable, as opera, as verse. It is this era’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a musical-philosophical-pictorial charting of history’s slipstream and the individual’s role within it. It is nothing less than a generation-defining event.
When your descendants ask you to describe the popular art called movies, this is one of the titles they'll ask about. Go on and debate the politics of “Munich,” the social significance of “Brokeback Mountain,” the elliptical menace of “Cache,” the narcotic romanticism of “2046,” the pulpy genre freestylings of “A History of Violence,” and have a grand time doing it. They’re films worth seeing and fighting over.
But they are hills in the shadow of a mountain. I’m sure that many people reading this will think I’ve come unhinged, or that I am, at the very least, overselling this movie, or responding to something besides the movie, or (the most meaningless objection of all!) reviewing the movie I wished that I had seen rather than the movie I saw.
And I know anyone who loves this film as much as I do doesn’t care either. “The New World” has disciples. To the disciples of “The New World,” each viewing is a new experience; a new opportunity to humble oneself in the presence of a great work of popular art; a new chance to immerse oneself in the richness of an artist’s mind, and by immersing oneself, to lose oneself, then discover or rediscover oneself, and perhaps emerge a changed person.
We disciples of “The New World” consider ourselves lucky to have identified this treasure when it appeared before us and then seized it and made it a part of our lives. We will see it again and again, as often as time and money and New Line Cinema permit. We love this movie more than words can say.
Some of us love it so much that at some point during our daily routines, we have to make a conscious decision to quit thinking about it for a while, because there is a chance we may be moved to tears. This re-cut of “The New World” is is different enough to necessitate a fresh reponse and a rundown of key differences in style and pacing. My nutshell reaction: this is not a "better" cut, necessarily, but a leaner, more efficient, and frankly more commercial cut, and in many ways a more powerful cut.
It somehow manages to preserve most of the ideas from the earlier version while placing them in a context that non-Malickites can grasp and enjoy. Comparatively few shots have been snipped entirely, and I didn’t notice that any major setpieces had gone missing. (I hope that my colleague Keith Uhlich — who’s currently writing an exhaustive comparison of the two versions for Slant Magazine, and who generously shared his observations with me earlier in the week — will feel free to correct any misimpressions I have.
) Viewers of both versions will likely be struck by differences that seem small when you’re watching the movie, but prove pivotal in recollection. For starters, there’s the timing of Malick’s narration. The first version of “The New World” started and ended individual monologues in odd, Malicky places.
For instance, you might have seen images of Powhatans or English settlers or images of the forest or the shore and heard John Smith speaking, but not actually seen Smith until several shots into the sequence. This strategy, employed consistently by Malick throughout the first theatrical cut, contributed to the film’s feeling of collective consciousness, collective memory. As I've noted in previous articles, it represented the culmination of Malick's pictorial/narrative voice, and made “The New World” feel like a companion piece to the ensemble-narrated “The Thin Red Line.
” This re-cut version starts and ends narration in more conventionally sensible places, so that viewers can more easily link particular thoughts to particular characters at particular moments. As a result, the re-cut feels less like "The Thin Red Line," "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "Wings of Desire" and other cosmically ruminative films, and more like “Days of Heaven” and "Badlands," or perhaps a fusion of those films and “2001.” It’s still an interior/exterior journey film, a poetic/visceral spectacle, but one that’s more strongly anchored to three characters — John Smith, John Rolfe and Pocahantas — with brief detours into the minds of supporting players.
Is this a concession? I don’t think so. While preserving the essence of Malick’s Transcendental temperament, the re-cut gives “The New World” a compactness and forward motion that was missing (but not necessarily missed) in the previous edition.
Like the monoliths-as-evolutionary-stepping-stones trope in “2001” (Malick is Kubrick with a smile) and the journey upriver in “Apocalypse Now,” Pocahantas’ gradual transformation from Powhatan princess to corseted English wife gives this still-poetic film a strong but not-too-prosaic spine. In this cut, Pocahantas’ evolution is at once plainer and more mysterious than before. We see ourselves more clearly in her story and in the stories of Smith and Rolfe, who adore her but can never really know her, much less possess her.
The sense of Pocahantas-as-symbolic-representative-of-the-unspoiled-continent still comes through, but with a welcome caveat: Malick has etched Pocahantas more sharply as both a character and a symbol, and that makes both her private narrative and the larger, clash-of-civilizations story more moving. This version illustrates the central thesis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "History", which holds that all human history is encoded within, and replayed by, each individual life. Yet it's still possible to enjoy "The New World" on less rarefied level, as one woman's story, or as the story of a woman, two men and two worlds.
This is a remarkable achievement. To paraphrase Uhlich, in the first cut of “The New World,” Malick gave himself permission to leave the central narrative river and meander along particular branches that fascinated him; if he hit a dead end, he turned around and went back. This relaxed, ruminative, philosophical approach, coupled with Malick’s contrapuntal narration and his mix of documentary-style snippets and sinuous long takes, made “The New World” feel less like a story than an experience, a vibe, a particular way of thinking about history and drama.
As Uhlich points out, Malick’s trims keep the movie flowing forward, always forward. There are still tributaries, but they pull you away from the main river more fleetingly and then drop you right back into the thick of it. This seems a clear example of a great director giving up something important — that sense of time-and-space-suspended one-ness that he’s been chasing since 1973’s “Badlands” — so he can gain something even more important: momentum.
This cut's muscular grace may seduce people who aren’t otherwise inclined to give Malick the time of day. Which means that Malick has not made a concession, but a smart aesthetic/tactical manuever, one I frankly wouldn’t have expected a bird-watching recluse to embrace with such gusto. This new "New World" is not a retreat, nor even a revision, just an alternate version -- a more accessible but still daring work.
And it will reportedly be joined on home video by a third version -- a three-hour cut that presumably will let Malick indulge scratch his Transcendental itch without fear of exhibitor backlash. For disciples of "The New World," this is the best possible outcome. Chronology and creativity are rivers to Malick.
He dips into them as deeply and as often as he wants. His art, like Pocahantas’ life, like the New World’s history, has no beginning, no end. It’s a rush of feeling.
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