Awenydd

An hour and a half into the film, Tim, Matt, and I leaned forward to check the digital reading on the DVD player.  I looked at the back of the DVD case to see what the runtime was.

“Another hour and a half!”  Great.

One more hour and a half of Colin Farrell’s pointless, half-baked, and barely audible monologue interspersed between ridiculously random scenes of frollicking in the fields of Virginia with an unnamed American Indian princess of non-descript age.

Colin Farrell’s character, at least, has a name.  He’s Captain John Smith. So I assume we are meant to simply understand that the Indian princess (played by one Q’Orianka Kilcher) is Pocahantas. Her so-called character is obviously intended to be portrayed as innocent and at one with nature, but instead she comes across as painfully daft and just generally uninteresting.

John Smith gets himself lost in an early scene (and by ‘early’ I mean it only felt like we’d been watching for an hour), and maintains the deer-in-the-headlights look for the remainder of the film, even when he finally arrives back in England.

Christian Bale plays John Rolfe, who Pocahantas eventually marries.  When John Smith’s monologue exits with his return to England, Rolfe takes over.  He does seem to at least know what his own name is, though it would be nice if the viewer was clued in on that count…

But in all honesty, at this point one just wishes the whole thing were already over.

Instead of employing the usual devices of dialog and plot to drive the film forward, director Terrence Malick elects instead to use random shots of scenery, long silences, and unexplained, sometimes incomprehensible actions.  The result is a film that is not about its own story.  It has no emotional arc, and seems to consciously avoid creating one.  Rather than make the viewer feel for the characters of the story, Malick would rather his viewers feel numb.

This end would have certainly been achieved if not for the inexplicable jump cut editing and James Horner’s magnificently inhumane score.  Usually one knows what to expect from Horner.  And admittedly there are moments of the typical Horner self-plagiarism.  These are uncommonly welcome, since the alternative is a very subtle, very annoying theme of a single chord, which is sustained as it grows and grows in volume until you want clap your hands over your years and yell, “AHHHH!!!  Make it stop!”

Sort of like the movie in general, except for the volume part.

Well, I’ll spare you all.  Enough said.  If you are looking for a trial in patience and endurance, this film might be for you.  But I would recommend you try Chinese water torture instead. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 2:35 am and is filed under Film and Television, History, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.