luka said:
half the audience walked out before the film ended, the others shatted away amongst themselves with, significantly, no one asking them to be quiet. couples kissed and fondled, others slept. noble savage bollocks, crap acting, ridiculous dialouge, pitiful awful
I expect people walked out because they were hoping to see a mainstream Hollywood historical epic, something like Last of the Mohicans. Thats certainly what the ad. for the film promises, an image so at odds with what you actually get its like having the poster for 2001 advertizing King Kong.
One of the things that interested me was the way in which Malick took the cliches
of the birth of a nation type movie - big stars, widescreen cinemascope, obsessive historical detail, lenghty running time - and mixed them up with his trademark longuers, non-narrative shots, disembodied voices, abstract musings etc. He kind of burrows into the epic, fills it full of holes, delibidinizes it to produce something very very strange.
One of the ways he does this is precisely through the acting and the dialogue. Sure, these are at odds with what you get in conventional films, but they're no more stagey or abstract than in, say, Throne of Blood. Its the context, the elements of conventional production values that draws attention to it. I liked the dialogue and thought the acting was fantastic: if you want the method, well, there's plenty of that around.
And yes there is a large dose of noble savage bollocks. But there is also a real desire, and a successful one, to try and portray the native american culture in the kind of anthropological detail which to some extent balances out the potential stereotyping. And anyway, even if he is idealizing the other, so what, at least he's got some convictions.