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As in O Brave New World! Because Pocahontas, the central character in Terence Malick’s new film depicting European settlement of Virginia, has all the blooming wonder of Shakespeare’s Miranda at the end of The Tempest. Pocahontas, played compellingly by fourteen-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher, is the human center of this story, learning the rapture of love with Captain John Smith, the profundity of care with John Rolfe, and the uncanny splendor of London in the three acts of this movie. Like The Tempest, The New World is not history, despite the narrative’s dependence on the events in Jamestown from 1607 to 1609, but a poetic myth about discovery, innocence, violation, and wisdom. How one responds to the myth depends on how susceptible one is to visual rhapsody, how receptive one is to the presentation of Native Americans as Edenic “naturals” living in a timeless harmony, and how willing one is to view Jamestown’s inhabitants as tainted by the arrogance of civilization, moved by greed, and prone to passionate disorder.

Longtime viewers of Terence Malick’s works—fans of Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line—will know what to expect in terms of the filmic poetry. All of the hallmarks of a Malick film are here: the disinterest in narrative cogency, the frequent interruption of forward motion by moments of cinsational rhapsody, the subordination of action to character, and the exploration of tension between scenic environment and personality. In The New World the rhapsodies have to do with the potency of novel sensations, the sight of unprecedented faces, bodies, and clothing, and the sound of strange languages and landscapes. Malick’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, makes the film a visual exploration of the uncanny in three modes—the picturesque (the east Virginia forest), the squalid (Jamestown fort), and the sublime (John Smith captive in Powhatan’s court, Pocahontas introduced to the Elizabethan court). Only the first of these presents problems for the historian. Lubezki’s forest, despite its wild verdure, is second growth—there are none of the titanic trees that stupefied the Englishmen who disembarked on the north bank of the James River and made Smith realize that English shipbuilding would never have to depend upon Baltic mastwood again. 1607 Virginia’s strange beauty had more of the sublime than the picturesque in it, less of Eden and more of the sylvan terror that Werner Herzog manages to evoke in the opening scenes of his cinematic myth about New World exploration, Aguirre Wrath of God. I think particularly of the scenes of the conquistadors wandering out of the mountains of east Peru into the Amazonian jungle. But Herzog is discovering nature as hell, not Eden. And for Malick’s purposes an entrancing natural landscape inhabited by engaging natural people is more suitable to the argument he is visualizing. Instead of history, Malick supplies a concreteness of place, a recognizably beautiful land lit by natural light, whose episodes of light and shade and moods and displays matter more to the movie than, say, dialogue, of which there is virtually none in the first half of the film.

Given Malick’s penchant for lyric rhapsody and his discomfort with narrative, it is not surprising that he chose to center his picture on the person who did not leave a story, Pocahontas. Let’s be clear on this—Captain John Smith, who did provide stories in rich profusion, is not the focus of this film. Played by Colin Farrell, Smith is a brash, insubordinate adventurer, performing the two tasks of Mars: loving and fighting. He is picturesque, yet emotionally unreliable, and prone to poetic voice-over maunderings that sound awkward because he seems to have wandered into this lyric meditation on the enmity of civilization and nature from his proper genre, the epic.

What genre is this film? I’ve called it a poetic myth—but what kind of poetry? Well, it approximates the georgic, the ancient Roman poetic form musing on the war between nature and civilization—agriculture as elegy. Except here there are human victims as well as a violated landscape. The ravage of natural humanity by English adventurers recalls the black legend, that early modern myth relating the ravage of a utopian indigenous culture characterized by “orden y concierto” by Europeans perverted by love of gold and the need to certify their power. Powhatan in The New World is not the historical Wahunsunacock, that unprecedented, ambitious figure who defied the matrilineal authority structures of his culture and built a personal empire. Malick’s Powhatan presides over environmental Eden and a community of eco-Indians. He is also Pocahontas’s personal patriarch, ordering her into exile for her interventions on behalf of the English. A patriarch in a matriarchal society.

The effects of Malick’s myth? On a philosophical level—elegiac regret that such splendid encounters between different peoples should turn into such sordid disharmony. On a personal level—filtered through the experience of Pocahontas—a wistful wisdom that when one opts for the new and lives in the light of hope, the costs may color the joys profoundly. One does not leave the theater with passionate indignation at the crimes of the West or pity at the fates of Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and Smith. Malick’s aim was not to roil an audience’s passions so much as to deepen the audience’s sensibility. Some critics regard him as a cinematic intellectual for his disavowals of passion and action. But he doesn’t traffic in ideas so much as moods. He is one of the rare lyric poets who works in visual forms and labors in an age when narrative predominates and lyric languishes.

I left the theater puzzled at the fixation on Pocahontas. In 1907, when the tercentenary of the Jamestown settlement was celebrated, there was much the same artistic emphasis on the Native woman rather than Smith, Rolfe, or Newport. The stage saw productions of Robert Barnet’s musical, “Miss Pocahontas,” Florenz Ziegfeld had her serve as the interlocutor to the first of his “Follies,” Kate Tucker Goode published the closet drama “A Princess of Virginia,” and “Pocahontas, the Virginia Nonpariel” by Norfolk poet George Frederic Viett was performed at the Jamestown Exposition, close by the locale where the $10,000 statue of Pocahontas by the Pocahontas Memorial Association now stands. (Viett’s play featured dances by the Ponca Indians in Act II and a scene with William Shakespeare personally hymning the departure of the English for Virginia.) At any rate, there were no plays with Captain John Smith as the headliner and no literary treatments of any sort (the 1607 novel John O’Jamestown and its ilk) that did not feature his romance with the “woodland princess.” In 2006 must the old story of the power of heterosexual attraction to bridge cultural and linguistic difference still be the glue to hold an audience’s interest? Since there were only seven fellow patrons in the theater the Thursday night I viewed the movie, perhaps that glue has lost its grip.

My own suspicion is that the way to go with Jamestown 1607 is action, not lyric musing; Clint Eastwood directing, not Terrence Malick. With Captain J. S., one has ready-made one of the great early modern action heroes. Indeed, Smith’s exploits appeared on the London stage during his own lifetime, in Richard Gunnell’s The Lion of Hungary. That drama celebrated Smith’s actions in the Christian war with the Turks. Virginia did not figure in the piece. How postmodern it would be to begin a movie of Smith’s career with him witnessing that play. Perhaps the scene could be shot from behind, his body a dark silhouette, twitching with a scarcely restrained impatience at the play’s celebrations of his manly valor—impatience because his own manly equipment had been blown away by an exploding powder bag in 1609, and he was desperately trying to become a man of letters in order to insure an intellectual posterity to replace a fleshly progeny. Think of the action sequences: privateering in the Mediterranean, beheading three Turks in a single tournament combat outside Alba Regis, suffering capture and enslavement by the Turks, seducing his master’s wife and colluding in his murder, escaping across Anatolia and southern Russia, reappearing like a resurrected warrior at the banquet of his army in Europe, being invested in the order of the Teutonic Knights, becoming a sylvan hermit and taking solo martial arts training under a descendant of the last Byzantine emperor, saving the Virginia colony twice—once by gunning down the ringleader attempting to have the settlers sail back to England, encountering the Native supermen, the Susquehannas, and surviving the powder explosion (possible assassination attempt?). End Part One. Part Two: the failed New England venture and capture by pirates, the attempt to become a man of learning through his maps, histories, and glossaries, and his adoption as a kind of pet Beowulf by antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton and the Parliamentary circle resisting Charles I’s attempt to rule without Parliament. Maybe Pocahontas could appear once in the Smith movie, at the very end, pockmarked and distraught at the exploitation of her people in Virginia; Smith hobbling from a lifetime of injuries, his political friends all under arrest, powerless. The film would reproduce the dialogue Smith gives— Pocahontas pleading that he return to Virginia to restore order, Smith replying that it is beyond his power. This movie too could be elegiac, with Smith dying powerless, childless, impecunious, his friends in chains, with only the consolation of his books and papers, yet not tragic, because he had managed to win a fame and a posterity.

Or . . . maybe we need a filmic treatment of that other, more successful man of action in eastern Virginia in 1607—Wahunsunacock, the man who formed the great Confederacy. Title: Emperor of the Wilderness. Title Role: Adam Beech, supported by Benjamin Bratt and Graham Greene (the actor). Director: Chris Eyre. Oh yes, and another go-round for Q’Orianka Kilcher as Matoaka.

University of South Carolina