Two-and-a-quarter-hour history lesson, trimmed down from two and a half after its initial release, on John Smith and Pocahontas, and the latter's marriage to another, John Rolfe, and her intended sojourn in England which became instead her eternal rest. Terrence Malick's account is not a love story, or not just ("Love -- shall we deny it when it visits us?"), but rather a vision of utopian idealism ("I shall make a new start, a fresh beginning") and the ineluctable progress of America from its native innocence ("They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile or trickery") to its imported corruption ("Lord, they're gone away from You, they have not hearkened to Your voice"). No one could deny that Malick has a vision, or at the very least a favorite shot: a solitary person adrift in a sea of tall grass or grain, engulfed by nature, enraptured in a state of childlike wonder, wandering around confusedly as if trying to remember where he might have mislaid his script. Large chunks of the words in a very sparse screenplay have been dubbed onto the soundtrack later, in murmurous, barely audible voice-overs from more than one narrator. (Most, if not all, of the parenthetical quotations above come from these first-person ruminations.) The employment of multiple narrators is of course a modernist storytelling device which Malick seized upon in The Thin Red Line -- an advance on the solo, subliterate female narrators of his Badlands and Days of Heaven -- and it sounds all the more anachronistic, all the more pretentious, in a setting of the early 17th Century than in one of the Second World War. Despite the bigness of the budget (the excellent set of the frontier fort must have cost a mint by itself), this is a bona fide art film, one whose jump cuts -- very tiny jumps -- cannot juice up its stagnant pace, one whose integrity is declared most clearly in its ineptitude. It's too earnest, it seems to say, to be bothered with entertainment. Colin Farrell, Q'orianka Kilcher, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer, David Thewlis. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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