Pocahontas
With the voices of Irene Bedard, Judy Kuhn, Mel Gibson, David Ogden Stiers, Linda Hunt, Russel Means, Christian Bale, Billy Connolly, and Joe Baker.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Of course the romance Disney creates between Pocahontas and John Smith is pure fabrication, but even the details in the movie are often scramblings and distortions of historical records whose truth is itself disputed. The “serious” young Indian Pocahontas’s pop wants her to marry–who winds up getting killed by Thomas, a young protege of John Smith–is named Kocoum. And according to the contemporary account of one William Strachey, Pocahontas was married to an Indian named Kocoum (apparently after Smith returned to England, in 1609, and before she married Englishman John Rolfe, in 1614). “Thomas,” it turns out, is also the name of the son Pocahontas had with John Rolfe in 1615. (She sailed with him to London the following year. There she met the dramatist Ben Jonson–who wrote about her eight years later in his comedy The Staple of News–and attended a court masque he prepared, at which the king and queen were present. Two months later, on her way back to the New World, she became sick, returned to England, and died of unknown causes. Some accounts say it was of a “broken heart,” but if so, it’s hard to trace her heartbreak to Smith; a likelier explanation would be her separation from her family and tribe.)
Whether Pocahontas actually saved John Smith’s life in 1608 is still disputed. Smith failed to mention any such incident in his book A True Relation of…Virginia, written the same year. (The book does mention Pocahontas, but only as a ten-year-old child sent as an ambassador to the white settlement by her father, Chief Powhatan, at some point after Smith’s captivity.) It was apparently only in 1616 that Smith recounted the 1608 life-saving incident, in a letter written to the queen of England that remains the only piece of evidence that the event actually occurred. According to this account, Pocahontas argued to her father that Smith be kept alive but in captivity so that he could manufacture bells and beads for her (a detail understandably omitted in the Disney version). Smith’s delay in telling the story led Henry Adams to conclude that he made it up, but other commentators have pointed out that Smith had nothing to gain by telling the story in 1616, and plenty of reason in 1608 to keep quiet in an all-male settlement about a little girl saving his life.
Pocahontas and Smith are sexier than most Disney cartoon characters, but their distance from their historical counterparts remains troubling. Preaching tolerance is a halfhearted enterprise if accuracy is barely heeded. (According to Bradford Smith, quoted at the beginning of this review, when Pocahontas saved Smith’s life she “was just past the age when Indian girls went about naked with only a bit of moss at their thighs. Her costume for this historic event consisted of a leather apron and perhaps a few beads.” Yet in the movie she and Smith appear to be the same age.)
