The Mission (1986)

The Mission arrives from 1986, a British historical drama directed by Roland Joffe, and it carries itself with the unhurried gravity of a cathedral tour. Robert De Niro drags his armor through the jungle as a reformed slave hunter. Jeremy Irons plays an oboe at a waterfall and waits to be understood. Between them sits an entire indigenous nation, the Guarani, patient and smiling, waiting to be instructed in the mechanics of European salvation. The film took the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for cinematography, and it holds the top slot on the Church Times list of religious films. None of this makes it nimble.

The casting earns partial credit. A handful of Guarani roles went to indigenous performers, Bercelio Moya and Sigifredo Ismare among them, and they are granted genuine screen time. The moral center, however, stays firmly in European hands, and the historian James Schofield Saeger judged the natives to be mission furniture: smiling, singing, undifferentiated. The film does condemn the colonizers who call indigenous people animals fit only for slavery, and it lingers on the massacre at the climax. That is a religious humanism older than the current vocabulary, and the racial awareness on display is real but delivered from the pulpit. Colonial greed, the slave trade, and the sale of thirty thousand people for fewer than one peso each all come under fire. The target is exploitation, not the economic machinery that produced it.

The script states its moral points instead of dramatizing them, a habit that moved one New York Times critic to complain about fancy locutions. Cardinal Altamirano eventually says the thesis out loud: no, thus have we made the world, thus have I made it. The historical record is softened here and there, conversion arrives suspiciously fast, native resistance is quietly trimmed, though the impulse is old-fashioned epic sympathy, not ideological reframing. There is no romance beyond a stray fiancee, no environmental lament, no discussion of bodies or brains or capital in the contemporary sense. The film leaves us with a handsome, ponderous sermon about complicity, delivered by men in robes to a congregation that already agrees.