Indian Country Today pans Pocahontas flick

While Terence Malik's new Pocahontas movie The New World is getting good reviews on artistic grounds, including from The Chicago Sun Times' Roger Ebert, it got an unambiguous thumbs-down from the publication I think matters the most -- Indian Country Today. Here's ICT reviewer Jennifer Hemmingsen:

There are a lot of reasons not to like Terrence Malick's new movie, ''The New World.'' The melodrama is thick, the internal monologues are endless and the soap operatic overuse of the thousand-yard stare is absolutely maddening.

But probably the best reason is this: The story is tired.

It's not so much the syrupy love story that so infuriated Native people in the Disney animation 10 years ago, Hemmingsen says, as one about how English and Native cultures collided. She adds:

In this latest version of the founding of Jamestown, Malick spins the same tale about the explorer and the explored that white men have been hawking since Shakespeare: he's just dressed it up with historically accurate props.

The production crew says 'The New World' is not a history, but a fictional love story between Captain John Smith and Matoaka, aka Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, the powerful chief of the Powhatan Confederacy of Tidewater Algonquian tribes. But it's not really a love story, either. With Smith playing the colonizer and Pocahontas the 'good Indian,' it's actually a metaphor reinforcing the tragic inevitability of the conquering of America - a story we've heard too often already.

But like just about every other reviewer, Hemmingsen was taken with Q'orianka Kilcher, the 14-year-old (now 15) who played Pocahontas.

Kilcher, whose father is a Quechua Indian from Peru, said she was drawn the Pocahontas story as she learned how much more there was to it than in the Disney cartoon ... and how tragic it was:

When Kilcher began rehearsing for her role, she started at square one.

'Like everyone, I just knew the cartoon,' she said.

But as she learned more about the history of the famous Powhatan girl, and started acting out her struggles, she suffered along with her character.

'I was very emotionally raw,' she said. 'I would go home and sometimes cry for four or five hours straight.'

Unfortunately, Kilcher said, many of those scenes - where Pocahontas is grieving for her lost family and lover Capt. John Smith - were cut from the final edition of the film. She hopes they'll reappear on the DVD release.

So, at least judging by Indian Country Today's review, should we all.