Popcorn with a side of guilt.(Now Playing: film reviews, diamonds to dross)(The New World)(Movie Review)

Why is shame considered a necessary ingredient in appreciating Native-American culture?

The destruction wrought upon Native Americans by European explorers is one of history's greatest cultural tragedies. Yet all too often, arbiters of our collective social conscience demand that recognizing this means feeling personally responsible. The near obliteration of the Native-American way of life may be this country's original sin, but is it one for which contemporary Americans should continue to pay?

The New World, director Terrence Malick's lament on the Pocahontas-John Smith saga, plays like an installment on some sort of guilt-ridden payment plan. Malick goes far beyond acknowledging that the birth of our nation depended upon much death; he sees the colonization of this new world as nothing less than the fall of Eden.

A darling of critics (he enjoys a certain mystique for making just four films in the last 33 years), Malick trains his ostentatiously impressionistic camera on the story of the Native-American princess and English explorer, whose cultures--according to legend--romantically clashed in 1607. The movie dramatizes Smith's part in founding Jamestown; his capture by the local Algonquian tribe and supposed rescue from death by Pocahontas; their Romeo-and-Juliet romance; and her eventual travels to England. It's a lot of ground to cover, and at nearly two and a half hours, Malick's languid style makes for an occasionally trying journey.

Like Malick's previous pictures--Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line--The New World is actually a nature film in a drama's clothing. His is a cinema of gently blowing grasses, burbling waters, and softly chirping insects. Considering that The Thin Red Line envisioned a WWII battlefield as a natural paradise lost to men and their guns, you can imagine how Malick presents America at the onset of English exploration. If this is Eden, then the British are invading snakes bearing apples (emphasized by Christopher Plummer's slithery portrayal of Captain Christopher Newport).