Virginia, 1607. We all know the story of Pocahontas, the Indian "princess" credited by John Smith with saving his life, though in his writings Smith possibly aggrandized events more than once. There were no video cameras and we weren’t there, but director Terrence Malick has chosen to go along with the familiar version of the story. He’s also gone to great lengths to ensure at least the visual authenticity of this telling of the tale -- the clothes, ships, and hair styles all look as they should. But past that point, Malick seems to be saying, he wasn’t there either, and so he will dream it for us.

This sprawling, overlong movie consists of tableaux that are often beautiful to look at but hard to understand. A coherent narrative is missing. There are romantic, gushing interior voiceovers from the main characters about their feelings, but the number of lines they actually speak aloud to each other that might tell us something of their actions, history, and relationships with each other is minimal.

I’m reminded of those medium-budget PBS documentaries that tell the story of some historic character. The producer has enough money, perhaps, to hire a name narrator, but little for actors. So the narrator tells the story as silent re-enactors mime the action. It doesn’t matter that, in Malick’s case, the names are as big as Colin Farrell (John Smith) and Christopher Plummer (Captain Newport) -- for all the acting and lines they’ve been given, their roles could have been played by anyone who could be made to look the part. In fact, until the end credits roll, the only character Malick identifies by name is Smith. Pocahontas, played by a visually lovely 15-year-old, Q’Orianka Kilcher, is never known by her native name at all. We know her only as Rebecca, and only by that name in the last third of the film, when she is renamed, christened, and married to John Rolfe. Rolfe is acted by the incredible Christian Bale, who somehow manages, sans dialogue, to convey a portrait of a noble, honest, long-suffering man.

James Horner’s derivative original score is insipid, but the other, borrowed music perfectly abets Malick’s dreamlike vision. The opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold is used to establish that this is an epic -- we might expect swimming natives to emerge topside as Rhinemaidens. More important, we hear Mozart’s Piano Concerto 23, which reminded me of the 1967 Swedish film Elvira Madigan, which made the composer’s Piano Concerto 21 so famous that it is now called, even in symphony orchestra programs, the "Elvira Madigan." That film was also presented in disjointed tableaux, had minimal dialogue, little natural connecting narrative, and was shot to resemble a television commercial: beautiful visuals and cottonheaded, empty-hearted drama. I wonder if Elvira Madigan is one of Malick’s favorites.

Still, to Malick’s credit, he captures the struggle between the early settlers of Virginia and the natives they eventually displaced, he skillfully puts nature in the forefront of his scenes, and he gets the visual details right. The small ships are wonderfully crafted, and it all looks beautiful. Cut down to 110 minutes from its present length of 135 minutes, it might hold my attention as an interpretation of history, a sort of visual tone poem. But already, it’s rumored, the DVD version will be three hours long. That’s too much gauze and not enough wound. Better to go back to the pattern established in Days of Heaven, Malick’s best four-star film, rather than try to elaborate on it.

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