Up the Creek the Mission

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Here is a movie betrayed by its own central image: South America's Iguazu Falls. Beautiful and powerful, the falls possess both an awesome mystery and an epic grandeur that only a great film could hope to duplicate. The Mission, a collaboration between the director of The Killing Fields and the writer of A Man for All Seasons (among other big machines), is not nearly up to the challenge.

The falls serve the picture as a moral and geographical dividing line. Above them, in 18th century Paraguay, live the Guarani Indians, which the movie asks us to believe were converted to Christianity by Jesuit missionaries without damage to their Rousseauean innocence. Below the falls lies an unpleasant civilization, composed of Spanish and Portuguese colonists bent on enslaving the Indians if they can drive out their priestly protectors.

Most prominent among the Jesuits is Father Gabriel, a sort of premature liberation theologian, portrayed with unpersuasive piety by Jeremy Irons. Most interesting among them is Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro), whose spiritual progress gives the movie such modest narrative force and particularized human interest as it has. Discovered doing a little free-lance slaving, Mendoza soon kills his brother in a quarrel, succumbs to righteous guilt and then struggles to atone. To abase himself while scaling the side of the falls as the good father's newest acolyte, Mendoza insists on toting a heavyweight bag of arms, armor and other accoutrements of civilization. This junk boldly symbolizes the burden of his sins, and watching Mendoza struggle with it, we do not know whether to weep or laugh. But we savor this psychological ambiguity in a movie that is generally much more intent on mining a vague political message from a backwoods imperialist tragedy.

The rest of the time we are left in no doubt about anything. The churchmen are saintly in their lack of guile; the Indians are all joyous children, born to be victimized; the settlers are political schemers and oppressive brutes. You can smell the concluding massacre coming for hours. The film's story may be historically true, and it may provide an apt analogue of current conditions in many parts of the Third World. But one suspects liberal show biz, carried away by its high-mindedness, of bending history to its own sanctimonious purposes. Dramatically too The Mission is a drag, almost as much as those Old Hollywood films like Stanley and Livingstone that mindlessly extolled colonialism's virtues. Indeed, this movie is rather worse than those benighted bio-pics because it confuses the importance of its subject with its own smug self-importance.