‘The New World’ Makes For A Very Malick Thanksgiving

A few years ago, in the publication our 45th President likes to call “the failing New York Times,” I gave an account of what used to be my Thanksgiving movie ritual, back around the Nixon administration (speaking of colorful chief executives). As a New Jersey resident, I watched the local NY station WWOR Channel Nine an awful lot, because it showed an awful lot of movies. On Thanksgiving, it would often program the 1933 American monster classic King Kong, a lurid, groundbreaking movie that combined two of my favorite things: stop-motion animation and Fay Wray in sheer clothing (not necessarily in that order). The picture was often paired with subsequent monster attractions by the same filmmakers, more or less — Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. And then supplemented with King Kong Vs. Godzilla, which replaced stop motion animation with a guy in a rubber suit — no, TWO guys in rubber suits — a lot of awkward optical effects, and Mie Hama and Akiko Wakabayashi in skimpy if not sheer clothing, a little before both of them turned up to shintillate Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice.

As I noted in that piece, in my household, or that of whichever relative we were visiting, eventually the grownups in the Thanksgiving living room stopped indulging me and “took back the television to use it as God intended on Thanksgiving, which is to watch football.”

As I also noted in that piece, Thanksgiving movies as such are not really a “thing,” although I gave it the old college try in recommending Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Home for the Holidays, both actually set around or on Thanksgiving. Decider, too, has a list of Best Thanksgiving Movies on Netflix to impart to you. And while I myself might take advantage of a just-the-two-of-us Thanksgiving this year to persuade my wife to get reacquainted with the Big Guy (Kong, I mean), there is still another Thanksgiving cinema option. Maybe.

Terence Malick’s 2005 film The New World doesn’t feature a Thanksgiving feast (it’s set between the years of 1607 and 1616, while the first Thanksgiving was celebrated, as we are informed, in 1621), but in its expansive telling of the American legend of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith it does explore the cross-cultural currents that Thanksgiving ostensibly celebrates, and is hence thematically apt. And it’s also unique among potential Thanksgiving movies in that you can adjust its time window. The deluxe Blu-ray set on the Criterion Collection, for instance, offers three distinct cuts of the movie: one a relatively trim but still epic two-hours-fifteen, another an early cut of  two and thirty, and finally, an expansive “Extended Cut” cut of nearly three hours, depending on how long you wanna sack out on the couch.

And then there’s the question of whether you want to sack out on the couch with this movie at all. The damn thing sure is beautiful, you have to admit. Composed in a wide 2.35 to one aspect ratio, shot by the remarkable Emmanuel Lubezki, it is suffused in visual lyricism that doesn’t try to gussy up the natural muck that sometimes attaches itself to the human personages treading through its meadows and forests and swamps and such. Its narrative moves slowly, and does not just recount the John Smith/Pocahontas romance. It also takes in Smith’s besottedness with what would become the colonies, and then the United States. And it takes Pocahontas’ story further, delving into her little-recounted second marriage to another Englishman.

But it recounts these events in a manner that many have found confounding — slowly, deliberately, with little regard for conventional story “beats.” It’s a bit glib to say that Malick’s style might be best appreciated while allowing your body to be invaded by the soothing powers of tryptophan, the turkey narcotic, but by the same token, there may be something to it. This movie, beyond historical resonances, has a lot to offer the receptive.

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In the Thin Red Line-and-beyond phase of his filmography, Malick’s characters are always looking for God, and they generally search for Him or Them or It, particularly in his period films, in nature.

“How shall I seek you?” So Pocahontas — played by Q’Orianka Kilcher, who’s of indigenous South American background and also the first cousin once removed of singer Jewel — asks of “the great mother” over Malick’s montage of young women, swimming naked, like nymphs, or more to the point of the Richard Wagner music (from Das Rheingold) playing, like Germanic mermaids.

Why does Malick liken these Indigenous Americans to German myth and epic opera? As Alex Ross points out in his excellent new book Wagnerism, “the three female swimmers are Native American versions of Wagner’s Rhinemaidens: the gold they guard is unspooled nature.” Ross’s further extrapolations demonstrate that the use of Wagner in much of Malick can be used to construct a unified field theory of Malick metaphysics.

Malick’s immersion in the natural world often takes him very far from plot, and from human characters; not even the Russian cinema genius Tarkovsky, he of the very long takes of flowing water, ever meandered so much.

Which could mean, perhaps, that Malick is not meandering but rather exploring a new way of structuring cinema. In his Chicago Reader review of The New World, the critic Dave Kehr, like many of his colleagues a former Malick admirer, complained “his storytelling skill has atrophied,” and been replaced by “transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe.”

If you don’t take the sense of awe as pie-eyed, though, it can pay off dividends. Malick’s structure here is linear — he divides segments into chapters of sorts, and even gives them names — but it’s more musical than conventionally cinematic or literary. Indeed, taking Pocahontas to England isn’t just true to the reality of the story, it sets up a symphonic variation on the initial theme presented in John Smith’s awe-struck landing in the new world. “Here the blessings of the earth are bestowed upon all,” Smith, a rugged, earnest Colin Farrell, muses of the new world early on. In England, now married to Christian Bale’s John Rolfe, Pocahontas shows a quiet veneration on being received by a British court.

In John Ford’s Stagecoach, the ostensible “blessings of civilization” are scoffed at; Malick, with his steeping in European philosophy and culture, cannot be so glib, although he certainly more than recognizes the shortcomings inherent in them. It’s in this quiet tension — more fully realized here than perhaps in any other Malick film — that The New World finds its enduring fascination and ultimate profundity. Something worth contemplating as the day of Thanksgiving wanes.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream The New World