The Mission (1986)

Proof that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is well demonstrated by Roland Joffe's follow-up to his highly successful The Killing Fields; also that Robert Deniro's reputation as the "world's greatest actor" (cough cough) is as over-inflated as the reputations of several of those current directors who like to style themselves as "great" or "greatest" when hardly able to deliver a decent movie twice in a row and even more seldom able to give a movie without twenty or so minutes of superfluous footage. Unnecessary footage takes away from a movie; it's not more of a good thing. OK?   

The Mission concerns the conquest of South America by the Spanish and Portuguese and the exploitation of the natives by both, based on a line drawn by some European on a map of land he had never seen, but the crux of the matter is demonstrated by the difference between the Spanish whose missionaries teach the innocent natives about religion whereas the Portuguese just want to enslave them and exploit them physically.  After the movie f - i - n - a - l - l - y concludes we are not sure the brutal Portuguese are not the more honest of the two.

The movie starts out showing a white man being tied spread eagle on a cross and floated down a swiftly moving river where he finally flies over the edge of a very high waterfall and disappears from view to the strains of Ennio Morricone's score. 

We learn that the man was a priest and apparently he did not fit in very well with the locals.  The Jesuit fathers send another priest to take his place, played by Jeremy Irons. The priest takes the opposite route, climbing the sheer mountains until he reaches his objective high above. Along with Irons is a junior priest played by Liam Neeson in one of his early film appearances.  They get on all right with the local Indians and begin to teach them about religion.

We see slave trader DeNiro trapping his prey, then back at the settlement he catches his brother and his girl, well, you know; doing it.  He promptly kills his brother in a public duel, and then he broods for a good long time. He gets in with Jeremy Irons and asks for forgiveness to which Irons says he has to do penance and forgive himself, then more brooding, etc. He drags a bag full of armor around as penance leaving us to wonder if he has all his marbles. DeNiro becomes a priest, like Irons, yet his violent past still finds him out when the Portuguese and Spanish appeal to the Pope to decide who owns the property the Indians are on??!!?  Of course, you know the Pope's representative decides the people who want to enslave the Indians are in the right and DeNiro and Irons both meet their fates in their several ways, making the viewer believe they have both lost their marbles. None of the acting made much of an impression and DeNiro even did a rip off of his Travis Bickle dialog "You talking to me" that really makes you roll your eyes.  You'll know it when you see it.

The movie is very slow moving and the nature footage does not relieve the director from telling an interesting or enlightening story, which he pretty much fails to do.

When I ask myself what I learned after watching The Mission I have to honestly say I saw a travelogue much like Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line with very good nature footage but hardly being worthy of being accepted as a movie about an historical event. 

The Warner Bros DVD is a Special Edition 2 Disk set including the 125 minute color movie in 2.35:1 theatrical format.  The movie has a full length commentary by director Roland Joffe and an hour long documentary about the making of the movie that focuses on the local Indians who played the Indians in the movie.  The Ennio Morricone score is highly spoken of by many reviewers but I found it bombastic and tedious along with the slow moving narrative structure of the movie.

Movies set in similar times to The Mission are Mel Gibson's recent Apocalypto and Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise.  I thought both of those were better movies than The Mission. To see Catholic priests going native, a much better film is Black Robe.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day