Stately Epic

By JAY COCKS

THE NEW LAND

Directed by JAN TROELL

Screenplay by BENGT FORSLUND and JAN TROELL

The New Land concludes the chronicle of Swedish settlers in America that was begun in last year's The Emigrants. Together, the two movies make a single work of sweep and visual majesty, an attempt at a lyric-epic poem on film that is almost daunting in its reach.

What was clearest, most careful and most lovely in The Emigrants is present here again in The New Land, along with what was most troubling and most mysteriously unaffecting. Troell, who photographed and edited both films as well as directed them, is a master of penumbral lighting. Every image is lush and splendid: bounteous summer wheatfields, silent frozen lakes, farmers harvesting a meager crop. Beauty abounds, and sometimes overwhelms. Poverty, deprivation, the most desperate kind of human trial, all look terribly picturesque as rendered here, almost suitable for clipping and framing.

The pioneer experience was harsh, often perilous, yet The New Land does not have much vigor. It is stately, almost reserved. Perhaps this is because the scope of the film is so wide. It covers closely the first twelve American years of Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and his family, ranging from their Minnesota settlement to the Southwest and a search for gold. The Emigrants had a smaller focus in time and therefore accumulated relatively more force and tension. The New Land sprawls a little.

There are moments of humor, but they are brief and grudging. For all its dappled visual beauties, The New Land is insistently dour in its personal drama. Karl Oskar and his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann) endure so many hardships, miseries and tragedies that their life becomes unnaturally and almost implausibly grim. With unplanned additions to the family, murderous Sioux Indians, severe natural setbacks, and a constant struggle just to make a home, the pioneer experience becomes too Sisyphean in its frustration.

Eventually the farm becomes more prosperous, the home larger and more comfortable, yet no one seems especially happy about it. Kristina weeps in her bed at night for Sweden. Karl Oskar's younger brother Robert (Eddie Axberg) returns from his gold-hunting expedition with a pocket full of worthless paper money, and dies soon afterward of the cumulative effects of disappointment, exposure and a bad ear. Karl Oskar endures, however, maybe because he has the kind of spirit that is honed by constant catastrophe.

Schoolbook images of the pioneers show strong, clear-eyed people standing tall and proud in verdant fields, gazing at a perennial sunrise. At least the Troell films are an excellent counterweight to that sort of fairy-tale chauvinism. But they also represent its polar opposite. Because they are so dramatically narrow, they tend to color the whole experience in another way, to make the viewer a little skeptical about the unrelieved misery of the experience. A little modulation is called for. Couldn't there be a moment of satisfaction--a time, however short, of happiness, a moment, even fleeting, of contentment?

One wishes Troell could have dealt with the pioneers the way Willa Gather wrote of them, without minimizing their trials but without underscoring their defeats either. His style limits the scope and richness of his history. When Karl Oskar has to kill his only ox in order to save his small son, who is freezing in a sudden blizzard, we watch him place the tiny body inside the animal's still warm and oozing carcass with no feelings stronger than curiosity and an admiration for his resourcefulness.

Once again there are superb performances, by Axberg, Von Sydow, and by Ullmann, who has one scene trying on a large, fancy hat that could stand as a whole course in the art of acting. At first she is shy and clumsy under the loudly elegant thing, then enchanted, then, for just a moment, a little sad. She makes the viewer understand from just a look that this woman is coming into contact with a whole style of living that is destined to remain forever alien to her. In spite of all these fine actors, the visual possibilities of the script remain of paramount interest to Troell, and the human potential goes greatly to waste. - Jay Cocks

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