The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is to sexism what Kathryn Stockett's The Help is to racism. Both work less as attempts to grapple with serious topics than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies by those unaffected by the subject matter. For Stockett, a white woman, it was the harshness of the Jim Crow era as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not racist that black people not only trust her but risk their lives to secure her book deal. For Larsson, who helplessly witnessed a gang rape as a teenager, it is Sweden's startling patterns of sexual abuse as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not sexist that the avenging fury of violated Woman herself not only trusts him but screws him. Furthermore, as it was written while Larsson was in hiding over his reporting, the book also addresses his longstanding issues with toothless investigative journalism and Sweden's lingering extreme-right element.

Yet David Fincher's adaptation is not really about any of those things. Tossing out Larsson's self-righteousness entirely, the film also reduces protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's almost comically active sex life—it's amusing that the novel's version of Blomkvist gets laid as much as James Bond, and he's played here by the man himself, Daniel Craig. But Fincher even hacks out the questionable feminist empowerment of Lisbeth Salander, presenting her violence with a coldness that robs her vengeance of its bloodlust. Instead, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acts as a retroactive bridge between several of Fincher's films: it links the religion-tinged carnage of Se7en with the analytical anti-whodunit of Zodiac, as well as that film's painstakingly slow-going, interpersonal analog with The Social Network's ultra-fast, beyond-humanity digital. If Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about the late author's preoccupations, then Fincher's is about his own.

This is evident from the opening credits, which recall the playfully dark titles of Se7en. A music video montage set to Trent Reznor's and Karen O's industrial version of "Immigrant Song," the blackened, fragmentary images not merely offering visual cues to the characters and plot (Lisbeth's various tattoos come to life, and misogynistic violence comes through with an image of a fist shattering a woman's face like a vase) but themes as well. USB cables swirl out like tentacles that ensnare the male and female figures, smashing them together, penetrating them, and suffocating them. The story concerns a decades-old murder that long preceded the digital age, but the constricting credits montage suggests that, now, the problem is not that a murder will go unsolved but that the tools that make such crimes nearly impossible to escape may kill us all.

Despite a healthy running time of 160 minutes, Fincher and writer Steve Zaillian streamline a great deal of the book's diversions. What they don't reduce is the dialogue. Everyone talks, talks, talks in this movie from the start to the stop, with hardly any shots letting Fincher's elegant direction and Jeff Cronenworth's crystal clear, hyperreal cinematography speak for themselves. Yet there's something about the staging of this endless speech that avoids mere exposition, or avoids the manner in which exposition typically operates. As with Zodiac, which obsessed over the solution to its case over the motive, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does not care for the reasons for any given situation. We never learn why Blomkvist cared so much about the story that got him convicted of libel at the start, why the perpetrator behind the 40-year-old mystery Blomkvist is hired to solve truly does what he does, nor even why Lisbeth is so maladjusted. Even when Fincher and Zaillian toss out some kind of motive, it is but half of the equation—a whispered hint of the killer's childhood sexual brainwashing or Lisbeth's muttered admission of the action that got her placed under the care of the state—that avoids full explanation not out of ambiguity but indifference. It is enough merely to know what happened, especially as the question of Harriet Vanger's disappearance is so strange that the what is more interesting, more convoluted, and more surreal than the banal horrors that prompted it.

Fincher's direction matches this emotionally removed attention to detail, and despite the darkness of the film (literal and figurative), the director hasn't been this playful in some time. Insert close-ups tell the audience what each character is seeing without resorting to POV shots, adding to the info dump that Ignatiy Vishnevetsky so brilliantly educed in his own essay on the film. Vishnevetsky likewise sees Fincher's bypass of the "whys" for the "hows," but he goes one step further in describing how Fincher "foregrounds everything," constantly adding new data to the digital image. Montages intricately document every step of a sequence, whether is Lisbeth cooking Ramen or Mikael assembling a makeshift, even cinematic flipbook of static photographs that the camera moves in close to document in almost Godardian fashion.

This approach, of course, is embodied in Lisbeth, whose photographic memory, mathematical ability and hacking skills link her to The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg (and, to a lesser extent, the similarly obsessive and bright Robert Graysmith in Zodiac) as much as the heavily implied Aspberger's syndrome that afflicts both. Rooney Mara, who stole Fincher's previous film in its first five minutes and absconded with it when she left the frame, makes it obvious why the director fought to cast her in this role. Like Zuckerberg, Lisbeth has everything figured out but people, which she places under her area of understanding by hacking into their personal devices and creating files of every action and transaction of their lives. Unable to read social cues and communication, she instead makes readable documents of people. In this way, she simplifies them, though I doubt even she could reduce herself to a brief synopsis.

Mara plays Lisbeth with the perfect mixture of frail vulnerability and uncontrollable rage. Nursing some unspoken hang-up, Lisbeth always averts her eyes in conversation, cagey and perpetually uncomfortable. Yet when she does raise her head, Mara's doe eyes blaze with such ferocity that even those who win her trust have reason to be afraid. Unlike Noomi Rapace's muscular frame, which suggested the ability to fight back, Mara's lithe musculature emphasizes the physical weakness that places Lisbeth in constant jeopardy, highlighted in her dealings with a sadistic, rapacious guardian, by far the film's most stomach-twisting moments. Her muffled shrieks of fear and anguish as he rapes her made me shake so badly I dropped my notebook, but that same delicacy gives her shows of strength and merciless payback their surprise, and I was nearly as troubled by her getting even with the disgusting Bjurman. The development of a sexual relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael in the book smacks of the aforementioned wish-fulfillment, but here Mara plays Lisbeth's sudden attraction with pure aggression and dominance, an assertion of strength and control to outpace her uncertain, confused feelings. It's still an incurable flaw held over from the novel, but Mara removes the ridiculous motivations Larsson put into the character's head, making her romance all the more impulsive and yet another event to be catalogued.

Pale and detached, Mara looks like death, especially with her bleached eyebrows, which make her face more skull-like and recall the hikimayu style as used in Japanese cinema, where it creates unsettling visages of demons and ghosts. God knows what's going on behind those eyes of hers; if the film is like Mikael, not trying to pry into anyone's subconscious, Mara's Lisbeth is so innately defensive that she still keeps her guard up just in case Fincher gets the urge to try her.

Where the book used the pair's discrepancies of technical know-how as a means of highlighting the ethical gap between Mikael's old-school journalist and Lisbeth's unrepentant hacking, Fincher simply focuses on the technological gap itself. Mikael, no stranger to poring over old documents and conducting interviews, does the legwork, talking to reluctant, even hostile, sources and using intuition to piece together clues into impressive new breakthroughs. But Lisbeth can perform equally admirable work in the time it takes for Google to return however many thousand results for a search term. In minutes, she progresses a case farther than it's ever gotten in 40 years. Fincher characterizes them by their fluidity in laptop usage: Lisbeth can clear an entire screen of snooping in a few keystrokes, while Mikael has to bumble around for agonizing seconds just trying to maximize the screen. In the book, Mikael's final-act acceptance of Lisbeth's illegally obtained files serves only to victoriously resolve an unnecessary bookend plot. Fincher, on the other hand, depicts Mikael's lapse of ethics for what it really is: a sign of the old way dying out after the completion of one last analog case, and a total ceding of authority to the new digital way of being. The director adds in cheeky reminders of our technologically driven lives: early on, everyone in the frame reaches for his cell phone when one rings, all of them instinctively ready to answer a call as if grabbing a gun for self-defense. On the frozen-over island where Mikael investigates Harriet Vanger's cold case, he spends much of his time, like the director in The Wind Will Carry Us, simply searching for reception, and it is that lack of signal, as opposed to the now-unthinkable prospect of people simply turning off their phones as in the novel, that leads to a the film's climactic, suspenseful showdown with the villain.

The deflation of Mikael's triumph goes hand in hand with the removal of visceral pleasure from any of the film's resolutions. Whether it's Lisbeth dealing a much-deserved but grisly comeuppance to Bjurman or the solving of the film's driving anti-mystery and subsequent confrontation with a killer (himself laughably normal and unremarkable, even putting on Enya to hang and gut a victim), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo never ruminates on its actions. Everything is just more info to be logged and uploaded, objectively recorded with detached but expertly crafted direction by Fincher. Earlier I mentioned Godard, and the use of store-bought surveillance cameras and Web searches recalled Film Socialisme in the presentation of a world without secrets, where everything is documented and privacy is but a distant memory. Well, there is still one secret in this film, which might explain why the discovery of a serial rapist/murder almost comes with a sense of nostalgic wistfulness and regret.

Beginners (Mike Mills, 2011)

As precious as it can be, Mike Mills' Beginners overcomes its occasional indie accoutrements—twee, arty montages à la Wes Anderson abound—to tell a moving story about one man's total emotional upheaval and his attempt to put his life back in order. Based on Mills' own life experiences, Beginners sidesteps as many clichés as it embraces, moving beyond its quirks to get at the real impacts of life's oddities and even avoiding the pitfall of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Like Mills, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) finds himself in a painful spot in the early 2000s. After his mother's death, his father, then 75 years old, came out as gay. Four years later, he died of cancer. Mills fractures the timeline of events so that we receive this information at the start and get constant flashbacks both to Hal's (Christopher Plummer) new life and to Oliver's reexaminations of his childhood in the wake of his father's outing as he puts the pieces together.

The beneficial side effect of this structure is that we get to see Plummer work throughout instead of relegating him solely to the first half. Plummer, at 81, is half a decade older than the character he plays, yet he looks a decade younger. We almost never see Hal not hooked up to a breathing tube or a hospital bed, but he bursts with energy. Plummer intuits the character's mental state, his body falling apart just when he's never felt more whole and alive. Making up for a life not lived, Hal throws himself into queer culture, joining not only gay pride parades and hitting up gay bars but attending gay book and film clubs.  So out of the loop with the LGBT community, Hal assumes other people are as clueless as him and amusingly projects his ignorance onto his son. Hal condescendingly explains that Harvey Milk was the first gay elected official or that the rainbow flag symbolizes gay pride and generally ignores his son's protests that he already knows these things.

Mills contrasts this vision of a kind, flirtatious, electrified old man to a childhood defined by Hal's emotional and physical absence and his mother's quiet acts of rebellion to generate the passion never shown to her. Plummer steals the film, but Mary Page Keller deserves recognition as well as Georgia. The look of muted caged agitation and anguish on her face is tragic, and her stabs of acting out make it clear to her child that something is wrong even as the boy could never guess the true reason for his mom's disconnect and displaced emotions. Believing she could "fix" Hal by marrying him, Georgia only found herself trapped in the same fabrication Hal had to build around his real self. Keller could have played Georgia's whimsical, even obnoxious actions for mere oddity, but she never once fails to express the pain and social imprisonment that defines her pathetic existence.

As Oliver mulls over these memories, we see the split between his take on his father's revelation and Hal's. Oliver sees how the whole family got caught up in Hal's lie, leaving his mother erratic and unloved and preventing a deep connection between himself and his father until late in life. But for Hal, his earnest, if tepid, acceptance of his heteronormative front was a denial of the real man for the sake of his wife and child. Oliver feels pangs of defensiveness with his father's boyfriends, not repulsed by their sexuality but jealous of the doting love Hal shows them, an affection he never expressed for Georgia or him.

Less striking and original is the other half of the film, following Oliver as he puts his life back together with the help of a French actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent), whom he meets at a Halloween party. That scene is perhaps the highlight of their whole relationship, with Oliver trying to mask his still-fresh mourning by dressing as Sigmund Freud and "analyzing" the other party guests while Anna communicates with him via notepad as he voice is shot from laryngitis. McGregor and Laurent never fully match the level of chemistry that arcs between them here, nor do they make the inevitable scenes of mutual relationship doubt feel genuine. But Laurent, as revelatory a discovery in Inlgourious Basterds as Christoph Waltz, manages to overcome the dangerously limiting part Anna threatens to be, negating her potential "perfect woman" status with an insecurity and caution evident in her relationship with Oliver from the start. I've seen some dismiss Beginners as formulaic, but while it may end on a conventional note, Mills and his actors don't get there by the usual route.

As a coming to terms with his father's identity and a belated sense of regret that the man had so little time to be himself, Beginners is a beautiful making of amends. As a story of a depressed son mentally recovering through a restorative romance, it dangerously flirts with staleness. But when Mills, McGregor and Laurent can eke sorrow from a cutely arranged scene of the two lovers playacting a conversation between Anna and her manipulative father, they quickly prove their ability to toe that line without falling into mediocrity. Complete with the achingly human performances by Keller and Plummer, Beginners is an elegiac but affirming tribute to our ability to find ourselves at any time in life, and of the worthiness of doing so even if only for the last fleeting moments of one's existence.

Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray & Budd Schulberg, 1958)

[The following is a contribution to the Nicholas Ray Blog-A-Thon for Tony Dayoub's Cinema Viewfinder.]

Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired. As such, it opens up a contentious debate centered on the film's auteurist cred. Budd Schulberg, the film's writer and co-producer, took over for Ray and purportedly discarded a great deal of footage in the editing bay. But if the final product certainly feels to have been put together by another's hand, there are numerous visual and narrative traits common to Ray's oeuvre.
 

Set in the late 19th century, Wind Across the Everglades charts American expansion into Florida, opening up new territory through swamps to Miami. It also creates a market for the plumage of region-specific birds, sparking a poaching frenzy that flagrantly ignores conservation laws, and few people rise to the challenge of monitoring the glades to enforce these laws. But when a nature studies professor named Walt Murdock (Christopher Plummer) steps off a train and immediately gets arrested for indignantly ripping the feathers off a woman's hat, the Audobon Society realizes they have just the man for the job. Unfortunately for the now option-less Murdock, the poaching gangs won't give up their lucrative trades without a fight, and as he ventures into the glades, Murdock finds himself confronted with a way of life at odds with his own even, in true Ray fashion, as he comes to see his rival as an equal not merely in intelligence and capability but almost spiritual connection to their setting.

Murdock's arch-rival is a vicious, almost Kurtz-like demon of the swamp named Cottonmouth for the live snake he casually ropes around his neck. Compared to the fake, Hollywood ruggedness of Plummer, with his chiseled jawline and refined carriage, Burl Ives lumbers like a bearded ogre. Ives plays Cottonmouth like an antediluvian Nephilim displaced and stranded in the great marsh during the Flood. He simply appears before Murdock when they meet and fades away just as quickly, rematerializing back with his band of poachers in time to set off an orgiastic volley of gunfire, birds dropping like rain. Back at the outlaw camp, Cottonmouth presides over the masculine rituals of his compatriots like a tribal chief, his grim pronouncements law among the other hunters. The band of outsiders is of course a core component of Ray's work, and for the antagonists to embody that here adds a fresh take on Ray's approach to outcasts before he would move to different civilizations altogether a few years later.

Murdock, so dead-set on stopping these people from exterminating the birds, does not realize how much he shares with them. They live among nature in muddy hovels and carved skiffs, while he pines for a Thoreau-esque connection to the primitive. "I'm afraid progress and I never got along so well," he says to one of his only friends, and he speaks of the Everglades as if it were a portal to the beginning of the Earth itself, unspoiled and beautiful. The poachers threaten that balance, although Ray and Schulberg also show the romanticized naïveté of Murdock's view of the glades with shots of animals devouring other creatures, especially an alligator that destroys a bird with no less savagery than buckshot. Neither Murdock nor Cottonmouth represents a balance, and they soon become archetypal foes in a cosmically inevitable battle for the soul of the swamp.

Reduced to a 1:85:1 aspect ratio after years of CinemaScope, Ray cannot capture the wildlife with the same panoramic capability of Scope. But then, Ray never used Scope to make panoramas, either; his most expansive landscape films, at least before his late-career 70mm work, were in tight framing, from Johnny Guitar's acidic canvas to The Lusty Men's almost unbearable sense of fate pushing down on the characters. Likewise, he captures the Everglades with gorgeous shots that make up for lost width by pushing back into the z-axis, adding depth of field to give a sense of space to this area. Of note, however, is the rapid editing of many of these bridging scenes, broken up—most likely by Schulberg—to show close-ups of animals in a less poetic, color recollection of the ethereal pillow shots of The Night of the Hunter's river trek. The choppy rhythm of these inserts robs them of some of their grace, but the shots nevertheless work to show a more intimate approach to the landscape, softening shots of the movements and behavior of animals as the characters move through this rich ecosystem.

Various touches make Wind Across the Everglades compelling for more than just these nature shots and the fine acting of the two leads. In a twist of cruel irony, a Seminole guide hired to lead Murdock to a slow death is put to death for his mercy and respect for the conservationist. That in itself is standard, but Cottonmouth perversely sentences the man to death by Manchineel, a tree that exudes a poisonous sap capable of seeping through a man in tortuous agony. In effect, the tree can exact revenge upon those who trouble this sacred, untamed land. On the other end of the spectrum is a showdown between Murdock and Cottonmouth that undercuts the villain's psychopathic capacity for violence with a drinking game. That was a bold move on Schulberg's part, and were it not for the steadiness of the actors and the sure footing of Ray, that might have been nothing but a silly, even narratively debilitating joke. Instead, it works as a comic high point, a well-paced scene that reveals much about both characters even as everything devolves into sloppy chaos.

Having been fired from this production, Ray would finish a kiss-off to Hollywood by the end of the year and take independent projects until his full collapse in 1963. Wind Across the Everglades may lack the frenzied passion of Party Girl—a film that feels like the cinematic equivalent of a bankrupt shop owner sloshing gasoline around his tax shelter after dark and fumbling for a match—it is as much an indication of where Ray would go outside Hollywood. More so, even, as it shows his interests broadening from archetypal settings (one of which, the conformist suburb, he helped craft) to new territories and different perspectives. It also shows Ray once again getting ahead of everyone else, tackling ecology well before it became a popular subject matter, even before Rachel Carlson kicked off the modern environmental movement. It's not a great film by any means—pretty much the whole of the ending is unjustified and forced—but Wind Across the Everglades boasts enough memorable images and trademark flourishes to feel like a proper Nicholas Ray film even when it's unmistakable that someone else led it to the finish line.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

Thus far in his slim corpus, each Terrence Malick film has solidified and purified Malick’s transcendentalist belief in the connection of man and nature, even when he shows horrible, destructive acts. The murder spree in Badlands fits with uncomfortable harmony with the flat plains and scattered, gnarled grass lining the sides of Midwestern country roads. Days of Heaven moved deeper into that territory to bask in the glow of our amber waves of grain, yet the mangled love triangle and plot to steal the farmer’s wealth contrasts to the invasion of locusts naturally laying waste to the area. The Thin Red Line builds further on this contrast, presenting even the monstrous environmental and human cost of war as an exaggerated of the destruction inherent in an ecosystem even as it pushed gently and spiritually for an end to such horrors.

Malick’s films, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry, make me want to walk in a field, palms outstretched, letting leaves and blades of foliage brush against my fingertips. When I experience their work, I feel that I can go outside and be jolted by the current running through nature, running through us as well if we’d stop breaking the circuit. Their conceptions of the universe are heady, allegorical and concerned less with what’s before their transparent eyeball than its spiritual essence (even the romance between Smith and Pocahontas feels like an encapsulation of the pure love of nature for those who can tap into its grace). Yet they also are some of the most tactile artists to ever live, offering intoxicating panoramas of nature and the past, present and future it contains. Unlike Emerson, however, Malick lacks the self-absorbed narrow-mindedness that undercuts his own idealism. Malick seeks to capture it all, even when he leaves out one side entirely (as he did in The Thin Red Line). His view of destruction as but one facet within nature is but one example of his more universal belief in the force that connects us.

That Malick would make a film about Native Americans seems so obvious it’s a wonder he didn’t find the inspiration to do it about 30 years before he released The New World in 2005. Perhaps it was for the best, though: by building off the moral, philosophical and natural themes he’d refined to that point, Malick crafted unquestionably the most singular film to chart the English settlement of America and the interaction with the tribes already there. It is not about environmentally indifferent white settler vs. the attuned native, though certainly conflict and discrepancies exist, as do moments of horrific violence that destroy so much that nature csually covers over in a season. Nor is it a Disneyfied version of John Smith’s romance with Pocahontas, a symbolic union of an open-minded Englishman bonding with a purer spirit, though elements of that exist as well.

What The New World is instead is an attempt to come to grips with the awesome power of a new, seemingly limitless region. Relative to the Europeans, the Americas may as well have been a new world entirely, a place totally unaffected by the influence of the world as it was known. Likewise, the Native Americans come into contact with a new people with a wholly different cultural perspective and social ethos (not to mention virulent diseases).

After all, the first shots of wonder belong not to the Englishmen, who view land with a combination of dehydrated delirium and relief, but the Indians, who regard the great ships drifting to coast with stunned curiosity and awed apprehension. The settlers disembark and immediately set about building camp, scarcely stopping to take in their surroundings, the sound of the first felled tree echoing in a nearby field teeming with inspecting Powhatan warriors like the dying screams of a fallen comrade. Only John Smith (Colin Farrell), a mutineer brought to shore in shackles and freed under probation, explores this uncharted land with reverence.

Smith innately understands the future of America, sensing in its vastness the principles of democracy and republicanism that will take root in its fertile soil. As his comrades back at the rudimentary Jamestown squabble over rank and class, Smith finds himself sent to negotiate with the Powhatan king against protests over his low social status, which morphs into tacit enthusiasm as the men consider the likelihood of the natives not pummeling him with a club. Ironically, it is because of their caste system that Smith finds himself thrust into the nature he loves, where he can ruminate “Here the blessings of the earth are beloved by all.” Later, however, Smith comes into some authority, and he immediately imposes dictatorial control over Jamestown when it looks as if he might help the ailing settlement incorporate with the Indians. Malick’s universality flirts with the political here, laying out not only the ideological foundation of America but the contradictions in its actions.

Nevertheless, this preemptive insight into America’s political future factors into the structure of the film, which democratizes the image as much as Godard’s Marxist camera in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. This is especially true of the extended edition released on DVD and Blu-Ray, surpassing even the original “Italian” cut of the film before Malick trimmed it for “commercial” considerations, relatively speaking. That film was poetic to its core, but this longer cut breaks up the stricter focus on Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher, in a mesmerizing performance that should have translated into a much busier career than it did_ to allow for greater contributions from all its players, not just Smith and Rolfe but supporting figures who drift through Malick’s more ambient tone poem like vague trills, ever quite themes or motifs but always distinctive.

The narration too shifts, moving off more identifying visual accompaniment to borderline free-associative impressionistic collage of sight and sound. It’s never difficult to tell who’s speaking, but the images often move entirely out of the perspective of the narrator into that of another character (or characters), moving beyond even a vaguely political aesthetic into a deeper, more spiritual connection linking everyone.*

That is not to say that the film presents a trite, hippie “We’re all the same deep down” message. Malick, for all his poetic abstraction, has always had a realistic side, and he plainly delineates the two cultures through their interactions with each other. When the Englishmen set down on land, one of Capt. Newport’s (Christopher Plummer) first order is to level trees in the surrounding area to build a fort and to ensure clear vision against any attackers, already exploiting the land for gain. Smith’s time with the Powhatan, learning their customs, their social interactions and their innocence, becomes all the more stunning when he returns to Jamestown and his blissful time with the Indians is thrown in sharp relief against the misery, backstabbing and animalistic savagery within the starving colony.

What Malick finds, however, is a spiritual link binding all these players to each other, as well as to nature. The longer cut contains more microscopic gestures between characters, tiny mirror movements that close circuits to let the current flowing through everything pass between them. Even by Malick’s standards, The New World is a film comprising almost nothing but grace notes, interspersing playful interaction, aching rumination and pillow shots of trees and rivers into each segment until distinguishing between them becomes futile. The narrative takes on a sort of shared consciousness, an impressionistic voyage that ultimately reveals an objective truth about us, an objective truth no one can articulate, not even in Malick’s flagrantly literary internal speech.

Framing that objective connection are the ubiquitous shots placed at such a low-angle that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki practically has to aim the camera straight up to capture any action. This only exacerbates the film’s unabashedly spiritual and religious nature: some of its first shots are of characters looking up to the sky, Pocahontas beckoning to the cosmos with open arms and Smith, hands shackled in forced penitence, gasping up at rain dripping through his hot brig cell on the ship. Sunlight beams down on these characters, illuminating their attempts at sovereignty and collaboration, and smoke and fog always obscure the more violent battles and atrocities like Adam and Eve trying to hide their sins from the Lord. What Malick seems to be suggesting, however, is not the connection of the Indians and/or the Englishmen to God but that humanity is God.



Malick sets all of his films in the past; his most “recent” pictures take place in or after the WWII era. But all of these films feel current, and temporal states often seem beside the point in Malick’s work. This transcends Emerson’s, well, transcendentalism for omniscience, albeit gained through unification and oneness with the world. The aforementioned hints of politics in Smith’s internal monologues and the film’s structure cast Smith as both the symbol of arriving British colonists and for the future revolutionaries who will make a new nation of these settlements. He experiences the present but represents the future, though his actions and thoughts tie him to that distant time so closely that the split becomes less contrast than contrapuntal. The New World may, even judging from its title, concern immersion in the unfamiliar, but it demonstrates how every person has the whole of Earth’s history and future coded into intermittently and involuntarily accessible places within us.**

A common misconception concerning Malick’s films posits that they juxtapose man with nature. Both The Thin Red Line and this film show warfare, while Badlands and Days of Heaven use their Midwestern amber waves as backdrops to killing sprees and intrigue, respectively. However, Malick positions the brutal actions of humanity as a part, however exaggerated and senseless, of the turbulence inherent in nature. Note the preference of ambient noise over scored music in the extended cut and how natural sound nevertheless proves an adequate soundtrack: when Smith loses his Powhatan guide to the chief early in the film, his on-guard wandering through an overgrown field is punctuated by the shrill buzz of crickets, a natural glissando ratcheting up tension. Nature herself starves out the Englishmen, who only truly set upon themselves and the natives when hunger drives them to desperation.

Everything has its contradictions, which is why The New World is so hard to pin down: it captures so much (too much, for some) of the messiness of life. Charting Pocahontas’ evolution from cherubic, mystical savior through romance and diplomacy and ostracism and, finally, comfortable life as the toast of the English court is interpretive and realistic, a fitting split for a film that combines painstaking historical accuracy with outright myth.

“That fort is not the world,” Smith says at one point, subtly critiquing the Western bent even of films sympathetic to the Indians at the centuries of hardships they would soon endure. It’s a lesson Smith—and, later, Rolfe—forgets, seeking to bask in Pocahontas’ unique energy even as he molds her into someone he can make his own. This is more true of Rolfe than Smith, who does try his best not to let the other Englishmen “contaminate” her with their base, simple needs in their starved madness, but both men see her spiritual power through Western lenses. Each sees in her a chance for a new start: Smith sees her as the path to becoming a new, good man after his pirating days, while Rolfe views her as the only means to heal his broken heart from his English wife's death. Their desires for individual new lives, of course, serve as a microcosm for the second chance America represented to those who could brave the voyage; in that sense, tying together colonial idealism with the romantic longing between the two Johns and Pocahontas is not only artistically valid but logical.

Pocahontas herself learns Smith’s message when she eventually goes to England with John Rolfe (Christian Bale), arriving in an Old World that’s new to her. Malick thus expands on his view in a cyclical fashion, returning to the same shots and motifs with different players, altering the meaning. Reflections of actions, ideas, even of nature mirrored in the waters of the Virginian swampland visually prefigure the cycle of birth, death, separation, reconciliation and exploration that gyrate through the film. The director even subverts visual expectation by not only beginning on a ship arriving but ending on it too, even if the former accompanies birth imagery and the latter death knells. Additionally, ending with another arrival suggests that the story is not done, that a new iteration of the cycle will begin with new players, using our modern awareness of the repeated atrocities of colonial and native exchanges to fill our imaginations as to the outcome. However, if this film is so rooted in what came before, not only in terms of its cyclical movement but in the context of all cinematic depictions of colonialists meeting and battling Native Americans, how is it that everything in it feels as if it’s being viewed for the first time?

This extended cut, adding 22 minutes to the debut Italian cut and nearly 40 to the theatrical version, pushes the film over that hump separating it from loose-narrative romance into the purest embodiment of Malick’s Emersonian ethos, as well as the best response to the ethnocentrism within Emerson’s and Whitman’s supposedly universal view, never shying away from the contradictions in Smith’s ultimately trite interpretation of the magnificent world around him. By incorporating more of the characters and finding the right balance between human and nature (which is not to say that they are evenly split, only that we get a better sense of place within this gorgeous and intimidating world), Malick finds a more holistic view of our connection to nature and the history and future each of us carries inside.

I do not mean to say that the extended cut is “better” than the theatrical: both have their strengths. I find in the theatrical cut a certain thrumming force that vibrates to my frequency and lapses me into a trance. But I have a better idea of what’s being communicated in this longer cut without being sucked out of the experience of Malick’s film, and in fact I feel more connected to its pulses than I was before, more able to get my bearings inside its hypnotic flow and see where I’m going instead of being swept along. I shall be interested to revisit the theatrical version to see just how much the elongated shots and deeper levels of personal interaction alter the meanings, to see nature confounding these people, even those stereotypically placed at one with it. Malick can get seemingly infinite mileage out of this film, his tweaks opening up whole new connections and altering entire perceptions.

One of the tattoos on Smith’s body says “Carpe Diem,” which may be the simple moral at the heart of this story. When the characters surrender not only to the power of nature but of each other, they become one with the present and experience life in all its beautiful chaos. Death is always the least poetic aspect of a Terrence Malick film, a tragically blunt act that disconnects that figure from the force tethering all flora and fauna and leaving those alive to reel at the shockwaves. (This supports the idea that Malick frames his religious reaches around a God of man and nature and not a conventional Judeo-Christian reading). The New World, a film set 400 years in the past, resides more firmly in the present than just about any film I can name,*** and if it hits dead-ends at times and has to reverse out of them, isn’t that a byproduct of living in the moment and following the flow wherever it leads?


*And by filtering its semi-idealized aesthetic through the innocent eroticism of Pocahontas’ mesmerizing effect on all those around her, Malick recalls Whitman as much as Emerson.
**Though I’ve resolutely avoided as much Tree of Life chatter as possible, that film appears to expand on this point even further, moving beyond the planetary scope of this film into the universal.
***Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is all that comes to mind; it too works with a cyclical intimate epic of life and death.