The Frame

from the pen of Jandy Stone

The New World

By Jandy • Jul 24th, 2007 • Category: Capsule Reviews •

I was not initially very excited about watching this John Smith-Pocahontas film. I’ve heard amazing things about director Terrence Malick, though he seems to be one of those directors people either love or hate. He’s made four films over the last twenty-odd years, all of them apparently fairly idiosyncratic (I haven’t seen any of the others: Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line). The trailer did nothing for me, since it looked like just another “Indians good, English settlers bad” type of leftist guilt-inducing film. And I must admit that as long as I was trying to make it work as a narrative film, I had trouble getting hold of it. Because it isn’t primarily a narrative film. It’s a visual poem. Once I realized that, and let myself go to its rhythm and beauty, I suddenly understood in a flash why people who love Terrence Malick love him. And at that moment, I fell in love with this film. The scenes with the settlers don’t work quite so well as they should, I admit. Mostly because they’re more narrative-driven and kept interfering with the poetic bits, and I just wanted them to go away. (This from someone who readily proclaims not to even like poetry. This is different, somehow.) Overall, though, the film is so beautiful in terms of cinematography, mise-en-scene, and sound design that I really didn’t care if the narrative didn’t totally work. It probably isn’t a film that everyone will like (and, heh, those who don’t will probably hate it), but it captured me completely.
Superior

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Jandy is a twenty-something recovering academic (English literature), she now devotes more of her time to catching up on film studies on her own, as well as being a music junkie, gamer girl, and TV addict.
Email this author | All posts by Jandy

  • Glad to hear it! I still like Mulholland Drive the best, but INLAND EMPIRE is an easy second. Interesting that you mention Bordwell - he's one of my favorite academic film writers, and while he's very good at nailing down traditional film structure, I never thought of him as limiting film to the rational and analytical. He brings that approach to bear, certainly, but do you think he does so to the exclusion of poetry? I'll have to think about that some more. Plus, I'm not sure that Bordwell sets out how film "should" work but just how it "does" work in the majority of cases. He had to create a whole separate chapter for Godard in Narrative in the Fiction Film simply because Godard's films don't work the same way as most films. (I think he went a little far in that chapter at times in trying to nail Godard down to some structure, which could be what you're talking about as well.) In The Way Hollywood Tells It Bordwell almost specifically excludes Lynch from discussion, again because he doesn't follow traditional Hollywood storytelling, but he doesn't seem to judge that in any way. And we've now exhausted my reading in Bordwell. :)

    It does seem to be very true that the people who fail to appreciate INLAND EMPIRE (and to a lesser degree Mulholland Drive) do so because they can't stop trying to make it fit into a very rational, left-brained sort of narrative logic. But I think INLAND EMPIRE does have narrative logic - it's just far more abstract than we're used to. It's thematic and spatial rather than temporal and event-driven. I surveyed dozens (maybe hundreds) of reviews of INLAND EMPIRE soon after the DVD came out, planning to write about it as a right-brain film - I never got that post finished, but every review (from major critics to casual moviegoing bloggers) bore out the idea that enjoyment of the film depended almost entirely on whether the viewer tried to make it fit into some existing understanding of narrative structure or allowed the film to create its own.
  • rot
    INLAND EMPIRE is my favorite Lynch film, was my favorite film of 2007 in fact, and it was only after getting that experience that I was able to rewatch Mulholland Dr and everything clicked. I blame it on the fact that when I saw Mulholland Dr. and the Thin Red Line it was about the same time I was taking film courses and I was kind of conditioned to think with preset ideas of how film should work a la Bordwell and it was only after I was out of school that I started to really get out of my rationalist analytical phase of art appreciation and let the poetry seep in.
  • I haven't, actually. The New World remains the only Malick film I've seen, though I have a copy of Badlands sitting on my TV stand. I did happen to turn on IFC the other day while they were playing The New World, right at the scene where the ships arrive and the Native Americans are "dancing" at the edges of the woods. That was the moment the film caught me, and it completely mesmerized me again - such an organically beautiful sequence that most filmmakers wouldn't even have thought of.

    Interesting that you didn't initially like Mulholland Drive. I loved it almost instantly, and my respect for it has only grown over many rewatches. Easily my favorite Lynch film. Did you see INLAND EMPIRE, and what did you think?
  • rot
    Tell me you have remedied your Malick gap since this, for me he's probably, no definitely is, my favorite director, and the only one who has a perfect record. I think with each film he improves upon what was then the standard fo excellence, and New World extended cut is in my top five films of all time, and look forward to his Tree of Life coming out this year. You hit upon the key to enjoying Malick, you need to embrace the poetic, or it is impossible to accept the film. My first encounter with Malick was The Thin Red Line abd I didn't like it, I found the voice-overs pretentious and how nothing connected to what I expect a typical war movie arc film to be bgged me. Only when I revisited it on dvd, it was like a completely different movie. Hench why I did the Crash post, sometimes I need to rewatch films to get them, same happened with Mulholland Dr, which I originally loathed, and last year now deem one of Lynch's best films.

    anyways, in sequence of importance watch The Thin Red Line and than Days of Heaven and than Badlands.
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