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December 22, 2005
Ledeing into The New World: John Patterson's sweet swoon
One viewing wasn't enough for me to sort out Terrence Malick's The New World, but I really, really want to see it again after reading John Patterson's marvelous lede to his essay in the Guardian. (I'm ready to switch to his blend of coffee.) "The finest American movie of the year—the finest, indeed, of many a year—is Terrence Malick's fourth feature, The New World. It takes America's first mythic story—the encounter between Jamestown pioneer Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the Indian maiden Pocahontas (an astonishing performance by 14-year-old newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher) in 1607—and renders it both ancient and modern. The script was originally written during the early 1970s—the era of Vietnam and the American Indian Movement's occupation of the Wounded Knee battlefield—and the movie feels like a time capsule of sorts, having gestated in the director's head for three decades, a message composed in the depths of one terrible war, and reverberating now in the mire of another."
"It is also an attempt to render onto film the concepts invoked in the famous final page of "The Great Gatsby": "a fresh green breast of the new world ... for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." [More ♥ at the link.]
Posted by pride at December 22, 2005 04:06 PM
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