Top Movies #16

The Mission (1986)

“A surgeon to save the body must often hack off a limb. But in truth nothing could prepare me for the beauty and the power of the limb that I had come here to sever.” – Altamirano

A real sense of authenticity is granted to the film by the use of real South American tribes as performers onscreen. Roland Joffé’s The Mission is a deliberately slow-paced look into a modern civilization’s cultural domination over a civilization that has maintained its traditions, religion, and way of life for centuries.

The film is told from the perspective of an 18th century Spanish Jesuit and his compatriots who descend upon a remote South American tribal village and begin converting them to Christianity. The ultimate tragedy of the film is that the natives, for the most part, do in fact become absorbed by the teachings of the Christian God and build churches and sanctuaries in His honour. Conflict erupts when the Spanish church, under immense pressure, cedes control of the region to Portugal who wants to enslave the natives. There is justifiable confusion among the natives who cannot understand why, after putting their faith and trust in the hands of the Christian God, would God then turn his back on them and ask them to leave their home.

The film manipulates this tragedy by balancing the grand-scale conflict with the more personal tragedy of Mendoza, one of the Jesuits who pledged himself to a life of peace and faith after killing his brother in a fit of jealous rage. For Mendoza, the internal dispute escalates between trusting in the peaceful and benevolent nature of his God, or relinquishing his vows of passivity in favour of violence and retaliation against the encroaching Portuguese oppressors. The eventual message remains inevitably bleak, but the journey toward this end is ever thought-provoking, complex, and ripe with beautiful depictions of humanity that never feel anything less than authentic.