"Come spirit. Help us sing the story of our land."

The New World is the sort of lush, lucid, utterly enveloping film that could only originate from the hermit/auteur Terrence Malick, a man who, for all practical purposes, disappeared for about 20 years. It’s a film that sends the phrase “epic lyricism” into retirement. It’s not a movie that you watch so much as one that drifts past and finally washes over you—it's liquid celluloid.

Like Malick's last film, The Thin Red Line, which despite a half dozen or so attempts I’ve never actually been able to finish*, The New World is a lava-wall of molten imagery that creeps and bubbles forward slowly, decimating traditional notions of narrative and dramatic structure. And yet it’s hypnotic, almost eerily so. This may not have been what Artaud was really thinking of when he asked for a theater that worked as if in a dream, but this passage from his essay, “On the Balinese Theater,” seems relevant, if (as is typical of Artaud) somewhat cryptic:

There is something that has this character of a magic operation in this intense liberation of signs, restrained at first and then suddenly thrown in the air. A chaotic boiling, full of recognizable particles and at moments strangely orderly, crackles in this effervescence of painted rhythms in which the many fermatas unceasingly make their entrance like a well-calculated silence.

Malick’s movie is full of well-calculated silences, moments of longing and uncertainty and indefinable beauty, but many of those silences are both helped and harmed by James Horner’s alternately wonderful and irritating score. The score to the opening, which is repeated during Rebecca’s final moments in England, is a minor miracle: it’s the sound of a symphony orchestra warming up, all chaos but full of potential, readying itself for the performance and eventually coming together in a grand aural spectacle. But annoyingly, Horner cribs quite of a few of his motifs from Apollo 13 and repurposes them. Not only is it distracting, but the cues are wrong for the film, all too standard indicators of important moments in a movie that otherwise resists such traditional film devices.

One fairly traditional device (you might it call that) that does work, though, is the leading man, Colin Farrell. Where Farrell’s angsty, juvenile trepidation only added further weight to Oliver Stone’s bloated, pre-sunk disaster Alexander, the actor’s lovestruck sullenness actually works for the film here. He’s not supposed to be a legendary leader here, so his natural self-centeredness makes the very personal drama more potent. Still, true to roguish form, Farrell arrives to pose petulantly at a British royal guesthouse baring unkempt locks and an unshaven beard, wearing fashionable clothing artfully torn and dirtied—ever the 16^th century bad boy.

Most interesting, I think, is the film’s uncynical approach to old-fashioned romantic commitment. When John Rolfe (a stunning, graceful Christian Bale, all careful repression and old-world formal elegance) asks Rebecca to marry him and she balks, he says something quite unusual: “You do not love me now. Someday you will.” This sort of marriage of choice and commitment is unlikely enough to see in a film, and when it is shown (almost always in a historical context), it tends to be seeped in disdain for those quaint ancients who’ve yet to realize that love, as all true moderns surely know, is about individual satisfaction in the current moment. But Malick doesn’t give in to that easy, formulaic temptation.

In fact, the entire film resists traditional formula, easy narrative or any of the modern Hollywood hooey that infiltrates so many period films. By sticking to the truth of the old, Malick has created a truly new world indeed.

*My college roommate and I finally gave up trying to sit through the movie and simply decided that the thing was actively unwatchable. Somehow, Malick had engineered the picture to either induce sleep, send viewers into distracting conversations, or just make them fidget and leave the room in boredom. I’ve seen enough of it to get the gist, but how anyone actually made it through that movie is beyond me.