The Sword and the Oboe

The Mission, a new film from Fernando Ghia and David Puttnam (producer of the Academy Award-winning Chariots of Fire), uses a bloody slice of South American history to pose questions about the church’s role in dealing with oppression: Are we called to fight the world with the world’s weapons? to respond to earthly pressures by trying to live at peace with the powers that be? to offer potentially suicidal nonviolent resistance and ignore questions of effectiveness in favor of faithfulness to an ideal of love and justice?

In 1750 the Spanish and the Portuguese redrew the boundaries of their South American empires. Seven Jesuit missions to the Indians had been under Spanish rule; now they found themselves in Portuguese territory where there were no legal restraints on the lucrative slave trade. Ordered to abandon their missions, and with the threat of all Jesuits’ being expelled from Portugal and all her colonies as well, the missionaries stood their ground—and lost their lives.

Moral Options

The option of nonviolent resistance is represented by Father Gabriel, a Jesuit missionary who is committed to love, sacrifice, music, and the Guarani, an endangered Indian tribe. Played by Jeremy Irons (“Brideshead Revisited” and The French Lieutenant’s Woman), Father Gabriel, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, attracts the Indians with his oboe. Says the film’s narrator, “With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the whole country.” When the papal legate (under political pressure from the Portuguese) orders the mission shut down, Father Gabriel disobeys and resorts, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., to nonviolent resistance.

The option to fight the oppressors with their own weapons is embodied in the hot-headed Rodrigo Mendoza, a former mercenary and slave trader. In remorse for killing his brother in a jealous fit, Mendoza, played by Robert De Niro (Raging Bull), joins the Jesuit mission to the Indians he had formerly enslaved. But when his loyalty to the Guarani is tested by the papal legate’s demand, Mendoza picks up his discarded sword, renounces his Jesuit vows, and leads the Indians in armed revolt.

The papal legate embodies the possibility of the tense but peaceful coexistence of the church with social evil. But the film does not seriously consider this option.

Ultimately, no option (violent, pacifist, or diplomatic) can save the Indians from colonial lust. Life is ambiguous, and The Mission maintains this ambiguity, offering a rationale for following each of the available options, but demonstrating the drawbacks of each.

Robert Bolt’s screenplay does not offer detailed discussion of the moral options to the extent that his stage play and movie script for A Man for All Seasons explored the issues facing Thomas More. Instead, it relies on situation and action to outline the options. Thus The Mission offers an excellent opportunity for church high-school classes and other discussion-oriented groups to examine the available moral options.

Authenticity

The makers of The Mission were committed to authenticity. The film was shot entirely on location in South America at Argentina’s monumental Iguazu Falls, in the Colombian jungle near Santa Marta, and in the sixteenth-century walled city of Cartagena. As a result, the film is as much a photographic as a dramatic achievement.

Carefully preserved Cartagena required little attention: a layer of red earth over the precast concrete streets, some paint to duplicate the authentic discoloration of old buildings, a new “medieval” city gate. True to history, the Indians wear little clothing, but the camera does not idealize their nakedness. Lumpy and grimy, they look as if they live in the jungle—not in a suburban health club.

British director Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields) even tried for a spiritual authenticity. He hired Vietnam War-protester and poet Daniel Berrigan to help the actors catch the Jesuit spirit. (The Jesuit Berrigan also plays one of Father Gabriel’s assistants.)

In his new book about the making of the film (The Mission: A Film Journal), Berrigan tells how he and Irons repaired to the church of San Pedro Claver in Cartagena, Colombia, for 36 hours of silence and reflection before location shooting began. Says Berrigan: “I think something happened to Jeremy while he was making this film. His performance was so deeply authentic that it became an experience that was both luminous and irreplaceable for both of us.”

The Mission abounds in memorable cinematic moments: the terrifying sight of a martyred missionary, tied to a cross, being swept over a thundering waterfall; the delighted cackle of a toothless Guarani child; the moments of fear, then tears and laughter as the ex-slaver Rodrigo is first menaced, then forgiven by a Guaraní leader.

The film is not unambiguously Christian—although it is substantially so. The papal legate’s admission, “Thus have we made the world,” could have been an echo of Augustinian pessimism about human nature. But in the context of this film, it seems instead to assert the Enlightenment doctrine of the noble savage and the corrupting influence of civilization. The Guaraní are pictured as playful, sharing, noncompetitive, and musically gifted, while the agents of the colonial powers are all depraved.

Nevertheless, The Mission is worth Christian discussion and analysis. Ecclesiastical complicity was a factor in reducing the 3 million Guarani to three thousand. The church today continues to face similar issues: Latin American Indian tribes are still exploited economically, and occasionally targeted for racial extermination. And it does not take much imagination to apply the issues so poignantly raised by The Mission to other parts of the globe.

By David Neff.

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