The Mission

One of those movies that I had heard about when it was first released but was too young to see in the theater was The Mission. Eventually, it showed up on TCM last year, and so I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a review on it.

The movie starts off in 1758, as a Cardinal Altamirano is writing from Asunción to Rome informing the Vatican of the status of the Guaraní, which had been the subject of some controversy over the preceding several years. The Guaraní are the native people who lived in the region of what is now roughly where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet. The Jesuits, by the time the movie is set becoming a political problem themselves in Europe, had been sent to try to convert the native peoples of South America to Christianity, and set up several rural missions.

Flash back some years, to about 1750. Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is sent from the metropolitan diocese of Asunción out to the jungle after the martyrdom of the previous priest. Irons plays the oboe on his way to the jungle, and that appears to be his saving grace, as the locals seem to be interested in the music. That's what makes Gabriel able to start a bit of a frienship with the locals, as well as set up those missions.

Meanwhile, in the city, Capt. Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) has some problems of his own. He's been hunting for slaves, something the Portuguese don't have a problem with, in the area where Fr. Gabriel is planning on building the mission. That mission would be a haven for the Guaraní, especially since the Spanish don't have slaves the way the Portuguese do. (Indeed, Brazil didn't abolish slavery until 1888.) But more pressing is Mendoza's personal life. He's got a wife, but she doesn't love him. Instead, she loves his brother Felipe (Aidan Quinn in a small role), and that causes Rodgrio to challenge Felipe to a duel in which Rodrigo kills Felipe. Rather than have Rodrigo face the death penalty, Fr. Gabriel is able to get the colonial governor to release Rodrigo to Gabriel's custody as part of Rodrigo's penance; he'll spend his life out at the missions working with the Guaraní, even though they'll be certain to recognize him from his attempts to capture them and sell them into slavery.

Fr. Gabriel and Mendoza work together to try to convert the Guaraní as well as to build for them about as prosperous a life as you could hope for in that part of the world at that time. And indeed, when Altamirano comes to visit, he finds that the missions are doing an exceptionally good job. But there's a catch. Back in Europe, Spain and Portugal have signed a treaty which will result in awarding the section of land on which the missions have been built to Portugal's colony of Brazil. They would be perfectly happy destroying the missions and enslaving the Guaraní. The Spanish don't want this, but they also know that if they try to prevent Portugal from doing this, it's going to set off some serious problems with the Jesuit order, which is already being perceived in Europe as having too much power.

It's clearly going to come to war, although not between Spain and Portugal, but with them ganging up on the Guaraní. Fr. Gabriel and Mendoza don't want to lose the missions, but disagree on how to deal with the colonial powers' plans for the missions.

I have to admit to not knowing all that much about the period of history covered in The Mission before seeing the movie, and apparently there is some fair degree of liberty taken with the history, both conflating events and more starkly delineating between good guys and bad guys. Some of that is always going to be a requirement for a movie, and what results in The Mission is a pretty darn good movie. I'm glad that I finally got the chance to watch it.