The New World

The Secret Diary Of Tara Brady, film writer, age 33 and a half –
7.30am Smoke two cigarettes. Get out of bed. Spend fifteen minutes looking for other shoe. Wave goodbye to family. Miss train.
9.45 Arrive at hotpress towers with first two lattes of the day.
9.47 Go outside for cigarette break.
10.05 Make mental note to swipe Talking Heads reissues on Roisin’s desk when she’s not looking later.
10.20 Get another latte. Cross the road to the IFI. Sit down for movie.
1pm Where have I been? I was such an awfully long way away. And Colin Farrell was there. And Christian Bale was there. And parrots were there. And Native Americans. Oh wait. It’s a Terrence Malick movie. That would explain a lot.
Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days Of Heaven), one of cinema’s most unique creatures, doesn’t do car-chases. The New World, his reworking of the Pocahontas legend, is less a film, more a sublime visual poem, with the colonisation of America re-envisaged as the expulsion from Eden. Like The Thin Red Line, Malick’s most recent film, much of World plays like a beautiful stoner daydream, romanticising the material even further than the Disney rendition.
Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), arrives on American shores with an expedition only slightly less demented than Aguirre’s, and falls for the impossibly beautiful native princess (Q’orianka Kilcher). They court in the usual Malick fashion – utilising interior monologue and tender sensual stroking. Meanwhile, tensions mount between the natives and their would-be colonisers.
Happily, the film has a more coherent narrative shape than Thin Red Line and feels about twenty minutes long, not two-and-a-half hours. But then, like with dreams, you lose all sense of time passing with Malick’s sensorial approach. Just breathe it all in, kids…