Malick's New World Is Fake

The New World – What’s Wrong With the Truth?

The New World represents the long-awaited return of Terrence Malick to the screen.  Writer and director Malick, whose hauntingly beautiful Days of Heaven introduced me to the likes of Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, is arguably one of the finest filmmakers this country has ever produced.

He missed the mark with this one and I wonder why.

As the story allegedly goes, during the spring of 1607, the dashing explorer John Smith was saved from certain death at the hands of her father by the beautiful Indian princess Pocahantas.  Nice story.  Made a great animated feature a few years back with pots of money generated through product placement and endorsements.  

Trouble is that the Pocahantas story was mostly made up.  

That does not mean that the true story is any less compelling.  

Told mostly in annoyingly whispered voiceovers of imagined thoughts and intentions, Malick weaves the tale of a 13 year old Pocahantas and a 27 year old John Smith falling madly in love and consummating their union during a variety of idyllic gambols in lush woods and riversides.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I think Colin Farrell is just about the most pleasant-looking, charming, charismatic actors around.  His scenes with the teenaged Q'orianka Kilcher were lovely to watch, but I wonder why Malick’s slavishly meticulous attention to the physical and cultural details did not extend to relationship between and among his protagonists.

Surely, even in those Elizabethan times, a match between a 27 year old and a 13 year old would be considered at the very least unseemly, if not downright wrong.  Indeed, according to his own written account of their meeting, Smith pegs her age at 10.  Enchanted by her beauty and her wit for sure, the real-life Smith never harbored anything more than a fatherly interest in the young princess. Was our dashing captain a bit of a pedophile? No way.  

It was a gunpowder explosion that sent John Smith back to England and the desire for the wealthy "exploration contracts" from King James, not noble concern for the love that could not be, as suggested by Malick's screenplay.  While true that the young princess was told that her friend, Captain Smith was killed by the explosion, it was hardly more life-altering than hearing that a favorite family friend had died.   She was sad. Death was no less tragic but certainly more an accepted fact of life.  

The very people she trusted, later captured and enslaved her.  That’s how she met her future husband, John Rolfe.  Theirs was probably the true love match.   Rolfe insisted that she convert to Christianity before he would marry her.  She was baptized in 1614.

In the meantime, in 1614, while Pocahantas was beginning her married life in the Tidewater of Virginia, John Smith had returned to the New World to claim New England for the crown.

In what amounts to a clever publicity stunt of the day, King James summoned Pocahantas and several of her tribesmen to court.  While in England, the princess stayed long enough for a tender reunion with John Smith, sit for that famous portrait of her in that silly pork pie hat, and contract some European germ to which she had no resistance. She died in 1617, at the tender age 22.

As for Smith, by this time a very wealthy man, he spent the rest of his life embroidering this legend until his death in 1631 at age 51.

Why didn’t Malick tell that story?