The Mission

The period piece The Mission (1986) is set in the 18th century of what is now southern Brazil, when the struggle for territory surged between the Portuguese and Spanish colonists and an even greater war was waged between Jesuit missionaries and slave traders over the lives of the indigenous people populating the area.

The death of a priest at the hands of the Guarani, an indigenous tribe, is the first event to set in motion the main plot of the film. Due to the guilt of sending the previous priest there to encounter his death, Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) treks to the Guarani village above the majestic, but treacherous, waterfalls, deep in the heart of the jungle. There Father Gabriel meets the Gaurani and at first is accepted as an oddity as he quietly plays his flute by a stream and the tribe’s hunters silently surround him to listen. The Guarani then accept him as one of their own as he teaches them about Christianity and begins to build a mission. Alas, this realm of harmony does not last. While out in the jungle, several Guarani hunters are captured by the slave hunter Captain Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) and brought to the settlement of Asunción to be traded to the Portuguese. This troubles Father Gabriel because these slave hunters have never before ventured above the falls. Back in Asunción, Rodrigo’s life slowly spirals out of control as finds out that his girlfriend, Carlotta, has fallen in love with Rodrigo’s brother, Felipe, during Rodrigo’s absence. Rodrigo’s jealous rage leads him to slay his brother in a duel. Seeing as the law can not touch him because the death occurred in a consensual duel, Rodrigo retreats to a cell-like room of the church to seek the penance of being his brother’s killer, a penance which he can not achieve through civil law. It is here that Gabriel comes across him and agrees to bring him back to the Guarani village to help him overcome his grief. Rodrigo physically carries the burden of his brother’s death in the form of a sack of metal armour which he laboriously lugs up the mountain. He has now taken upon himself the role of that which he once hunted: a slave. Upon reaching the village, the Guarani hold a knife to the throat of this known slave-trader, but when Gabriel motions for them to let him live, they instead cut the rope to the sack of armour which attached Rodrigo physically and metaphorically to his shame. This act of compassion brings Rodrigo to tears as the tribesman, the priests, and Rodrigo all embrace and join in a bout of joyous laughter.

The power of the indigenous people’s kindness soon permeates Rodrigo and he commits his life to being a Jesuit priest. The priests work side-by-side with the Guarani as they construct the San Carlos Mission, learn the indigenous language, and convert many to Christianity. But again this harmony does not last as His Eminency, Altamirano (Ray McNally) of the European Papacy, arrives in Asunción to try to decide through the power of the Church what is to be done with these indigenous people, causing all the priests in the Guarani village to return to the colony. There they lobby against the transfer of Guarani territory to Portugal as this would invite the Portuguese to enlist all the Guarani people as slaves. The Spanish support this land transfer as, unbeknownst to the Church, they secretly take part in the slave trade. The decision rests with Altamirano and so he decides to visit several of the surrounding Jesuit missions to see how the conversion to Christianity is progressing. His findings are impressive: indigenous people living on the morals of the church and discovering their own unique talents via the arts and music. Yet, the tremendous pressure from greedy Spanish and Portuguese colonists, who desire the Guarani territory and its inhabitants, still weighs heavy on Altamirano, and so Gabriel invites him to journey to the San Carlos Mission to help him clear his head. Here, Altamirano is overwhelmed with the spiritual and cultural ‘advancement’ of the Guarani but, much to Gabriel’s dismay, he still decides to give the territory to Portugal though the historic Treaty of Madrid (1750), which would cast the Guarani out of the protection of the Church. His Eminency asks the Guarani to retreat from the mission back into the jungle, but the Guarani accept the mission as their home now and choose to fight instead.

The decision of the Church ignites a fire of hostility in all the priests as they revoke their vows of obedience; all except Gabriel, who chooses, after much deliberation, to fight this decision with love instead of with brute force. The other priests are led by ex-mercenary Rodrigo in a plan that would attack the advancing Portuguese forces from the river and the jungle. Scenes of the brutal and heartless round-up of indigenous slaves in the colonies prophesize the same cruelty about to befall the Guarani. Although the priests lay several clever traps and catch the Portuguese troops by surprise, they still fail to defeat the advancing threat. Several of the priests are killed among the multitude of Guarani during the preliminary fight scenes. At a crucial moment in the battle when Rodrigo is about to blow up a bridge, he instead turns to help two small Guarani children get to safety. This demonstrates his complete transformation of compassion from mercenary to Jesuit priest, but also allows the Portuguese to invade the village. The Guarani women and children, led by Gabriel holding a gold crucifix, walk slowly through the burning village as arrows fly through the air, piercing bodies randomly. Rodrigo is shot and shortly after an arrow kills Gabriel. Rodrigo’s last vision is of Gabriel collapsing to the ground and the Guarani crowd picking up the crucifix to continue their slow march to certain death; an image which shows the moral accomplishment achieved by the priests, but also their epic failure as both versions of the priests’ resistance prove unsuccessful. The film ends with Altamirano questioning the colony leaders about the slaughter of the Guarani, but still knowing that he had ultimately sanctioned the purpose for their deaths. The few Guarani children left alive are then shown rowing a canoe up-river, away from the lives they had known and the carnage that now remains.

The film portrays two feuding sides: first, the mercenaries against the Jesuit priests, followed by the Jesuit priests disputing the colonists and the Church in the name of protecting indigenous rights; and with the Guarani people constantly wedged in the middle of it all. Rodrigo personifies the transition of these two battles as his character finds its vitality and purpose through his connection to the indigenous tribe. But as was seen in the film, this harmony can not be maintained. Even in real life, South America and its indigenous cultures are seen only as a massive chunk of territory ready for the taking by foreigners and South American governments alike. This is displayed most boldly by the fact that the film-makers had attempted to use the actual Guarani people to perform in the movie, but instead decided on the Waunana, a Colombian tribe, when the Guarani proved to be too assimilated and desolate for any use. How ironic that the cultural propagation presented in the film is sent spiraling by the present situation of the Guarani people. The reality that the culture of the Waunana tribe is also nearing the point of extinction presents the question of when this vicious cycle of assimilation will end.

Amazon

Amazon (1990), which begins with an aerial camera shot of an indigenous hut nestled among the trees and then flashes to a pitiful landscape of deforestation stretching as far as the horizon, should be commended for its sense of authenticity as such scenes were accurately filmed in the paradox that is the Brazilian rainforest.

The movie opens by introducing Kari (Kari Väänänen) and his two pre-adolescent daughters traveling the dusty road of the Trans-Amazonic highway through Brazil. Flashbacks show that Kari used to be a successful and happy businessman living Finland, until his beloved American wife was put in a coma due to a car crash. The accident devastates Kari who disconnects his wife’s breathing machine in an act of love; thus prompting him to escape to Brazil with his daughters in order to evade the authorities. The promising new life in Rio de Janeiro is dashed when Kari realizes that he can’t possibly find work without knowing the right people, which leaves him and his family surrounded by theft and shady characters. His friend Fransisco offers him a job as a driver, but they are stopped en route by police. Fransisco makes a break for it, obviously indicating that they are transporting illegal materials, and he is shot dead. After Kari avoids the same fate by claiming to be an American, he ushers his daughter onto a long road trip in search of employment and a better life, which brings us back to the Trans-Amazonic highway: a “skinny, black line through an endless wall of green” on the map, but in reality a “red dusty nightmare headed for nowhere”. The three travelers run out of gas and inadvertently meet Dan (Robert Davi), a selfish and rude American pilot whose plane has also run out of gas. After filling the car’s gas tank with alcohol, the group tows the plane to an abandoned highway construction site housing an old bulldozer which they use to siphon some gas into the plane. Here Dan tells Kari that he plans to mine for gold in the north, and when Kari pleads for him and his daughter to go as well, Dan reluctantly agrees.

They arrive in the mining town of Cerapalata, meaning ‘naked mountain’ but feeling like “Dante’s Hell where condemned miners look for nonexistent retribution”, and Kari immediately sets out to make a buck by doing the strenuous hard labour of carrying bags of wet soil out of huge mining holes. One night after Kari collapses in his hammock from exhaustion, his daughter finds a large diamond in his shoe. Kari thinks that this is his fortune at last, but Dan knows better and after he has the flawed stone appraised, he offers a partnership to Kari in the northern town of Tapacan where they will pan in a river for real diamonds. The plan is to make enough money by doing flying errands to eventually tow the abandoned bulldozer from the Trans-Amazonic highway up to north; but this plan is upset when Kari becomes enchanted with an educated and beautiful woman living in Tapacan named Paola (Rae Dawn Chong). She likes Kari as well, but disagrees with the plan to bring huge machines in order to mine the mythical diamonds because this will cause the greedy banks to sweep in on the free land and use it for their own purposes. Kari is torn on what to do as he examines the reality of selfish foreigners who disturb the balance of the Brazilian environment.

The situation is soon thrown into disarray when Dan and Kari crash the plane into the jungle and Dan dies due to a broken neck. Kari is alone and injured in the plane and dreams of him and Dan bringing the bulldozer to the mine which then causes all the indigenous people to disappear. Suddenly Kari wakes up and is surrounded by a tribe Indians who take him back to their village and tersely nurse him back to health. Kari coexists among them as a silent tribe member, until one night they are distracted and Kari escapes down the Amazon in a canoe. After days of barely surviving in the wilderness, he comes across a town on the river and immediately hitches a ride back to Tapacan, his girls, and Paola. The experience of living alongside the indigenous tribe has changed Kari and he is happy once again for the first time since his wife died. He tells Paola that he realized she was right about the devastation the bulldozer would bring to the land; despite this, however, Kari recognizes that greed and power always win when in the last scene everyone looks up to see a ominous black helicopter carrying a bulldozer to the peaceful panning river.

Amazon is a film which was clearly made to bring awareness to the public about the conflict over land in the Brazilian rainforest. The movie incorporates an almost poetic speech to discuss the situation surrounding the indigenous peoples: “The Indians say the Amazon is as long as life…you’ll never reach the end.” The indigenous culture is an ever-present, yet hidden aspect of this lush forest; more of an afterthought to greedy foreigners and officials than an actual community of people. This is demonstrated when Dan off-handedly mentions to Kari that the panning river in Tapacan was government land until 3 years ago when they decided to give it back to the Indians; however, they didn’t make it official and it has ended up being free land for anyone to use. And so it is that the Indians are living “in the stone age, but sitting on treasures of a modern world.” Dan confides to Kari before the plane crashes that he doesn’t think anyone should have any right to tell them how to live. He states that “they’ve got nothing better to do on their reservations but sit around and wait for the next white man’s disease.” Then Dan’s past is divulged about a time when he had an Indian wife and he had supplied guns to the whole village in hopes of being their saviour, but he instead became their burden when white men came with machine guns and murdered the entire community. This is the modern world of technology encroaching upon the indigenous territory. This is the thousands of hectares of abundant and thriving forests being chopped down into a wasteland in order to make to-go coffee cups in a distant country. Just as Kari declares that Rio de Janeiro looks like a paradise in the brochures but in reality it may as well be Hell, the rainforest also looks verdant and fertile until the ugly side of the conflict is illustrated. The movie ends with a note about cultural and environmental awareness saying that 40 million hectares (or roughly the state of Washington) are being destroyed annually which will lead to the final and complete devastation of the Brazilian rainforest within this generation. The words are simultaneously overwhelming and inspiring, yet as we saw with Kari, realization is only the first step, and even with this awareness the bulldozers continue to arrive. Amazon shows that a true sense of change and fervent determination are needed in order to stop the relentless loss of rainforest and indigenous culture.

The Long, Long Trailer

You know those days when nothing seems to go right? When everything falls apart and it’s all you can do not to break down? Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz feel the brunt of that kind of day stretched into weeks in the 1954 film The Long, Long Trailer, a slapstick comedy similar to recent films such as National Lampoon and Meet the Parents, whose audience can't help but cringe as bad luck rains down on the protagonists.

The film begins with Nicky Collini (Desi Arnaz) driving frantically through the rain to a trailer park in Colorado where he knocks on what is presumably his trailer and yells out for Tacy (Lucille Ball) to open up. The camera pans to a "For Sale" sign tacked to the side of the trailer, which is apparently news to Nicky. He decides to retreat from the rain into the clubhouse where he meets an older gentleman (Moroni Olsen) relaxing in a chair. After a few customary pleasantries and inquiries, the two realize that the older man is here to buy Nicky’s rig and both their wives have gone to measure furniture for it. Nicky exclaims, "I'm telling you, it's a fine thing to come home to your home and your home is gone!" and then proceeds down a different path and asks the man if he and his wife ever fight. When the man answers a bewildered "no," Nicky cries out in exasperation, "No fights? No battles? Then don’t buy a trailer!" And with such an exclamation Nicky begins his upside-down tale of his experiences with the long, long trailer.

The movie is filmed as a flashback from the point of view of Nicky, a successful engineer who travels a lot for his work. The flashbacks begin with the sound of laughter as Nicky ridicules his fiancé Tacy's idea of living in a mobile home, but Tacy soon wins him over with clever pouts and hypnotizing dreams of a mobile honeymoon. The next scene brings the pair to the mobile home show where Tacy falls in love at first sight with the Blue Moon rig, complete with charming doorbell, sunken living room (where Nicky always manages to trip on the stair), and a $5345 price tag; three times the price they had originally had in mind. Lucy convinces her fidgety fiancé that in the end they would actually save money because they would otherwise be living in hotels (words she may need to eat by the end of the film), and Nicky signs the cheque. The trailer is magic to Tacy and misfortune to Nicky as mishaps happen again and again, including the task of learning to drive with a 40 foot trailer creeping up behind him. However, these calamities are put on hold for the lovebirds to be wed and Nicky even puts the trailer in his new wife’s name as a wedding gift. And so the honeymoon, and the bad luck, begin.

After the first leg of their trip, filled with wrong turns, driving embarrassingly slow, and stopping in the middle of a busy traffic light, they arrive at their first trailer park, only to realize that being a neighbour in a trailer park means that they can’t have any privacy, not even to consummate their marriage (a curious consummation seeing as they sleep in separate beds, a rule and regulation of 1950s film and television). After a frustrating night, they pack up and attempt to camp in the wilderness only to get the trailer stuck in a rut on a back-country road. A downpour commences as they undertake the comedic task of cooking and eating dinner while on a slant, culminating in Tacy getting thrown out of the trailer door into an enormous mud puddle, in true Lucille Ball form. Tacy now begins to see the disadvantages to her big, beautiful trailer.

The adventure continues with a much-anticipated week-long stop at Tacy’s Aunt Anastasia’s house, only to have Nicky back the trailer over the the garden, the roses, and then into the garage, all in front of an on-looking crowd of extended relatives. Needless to say, the trip promptly continues the next day. Throughout the catastrophes, the couple is committed to staying together, with Nicky saying that he’d be happy with Tacy even if they had to live in a cave. This leads the movie into a few scenes of rest, relaxation, and beautiful scenery while cruising through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Tacy tries a turn at the wheel and discovers that she’s better at driving the rig than Nicky, which only leads to resentment and another fight. Tacy makes amends by suggesting she cook a pasta dinner while Nicky drives and then they can eat upon arrival at the next destination. Unfortunately, Tacy does not compensate for the turbulent ride and ends up covered in all her ingredients.

The final drama involves the couple driving up the mountain to an elevation of 8,000 feet. Nicky had asked Tacy to get rid of all her heavy possessions, including the large rocks she collected throughout the trip. Tacy can’t bear to part with her memories and so she hides them around the trailer, only to regret her actions when the rocks tumble from their hiding places and nearly topple the trailer off the edge of a cliff. When Nicky opens the trailer door and discovers what Tacy has done, it is the last straw and the pair part unfavorably, with Nicky taking a long drive alone.
This brings us back to the film's opening scene, with Nicky coming back to find his wife gone and his home for sale. The old man who has listened to this tale of woe tells Nicky that he and his wife were unhappy at first as well, but all they had to do was learn to say "I'm sorry." Nicky balks at this idea and then sees Tacy arriving back at the trailer. He grudgingly grabs his things from her and makes his exit in the car, when all of a sudden Tacy races through the rain to the car and the two of them exclaim apologies to one another. They rush inside to make-up, and the audience catches glimpses, through the door banging in the wind, of this eccentric couple embracing in their long, long trailer.

Although this film enjoys kooky mishaps and romantic reconciliations, it denies the viewers any recognition of the Cuban culture of Desi Arnaz. That being said, in one scene Arnaz does rattle off angrily in Spanish as he’s trying to put the trailer on a jack, but these rants are directed only to himself and the prominent use of the English word “trailer” is the only clue to the non-hispanic audience that he is upset with having bought the mobile home. It is also interesting that a character with the Italian last name of "Collini" is spouting Spanish vocabulary. As a result, it can be inferred that the film is more focused on creating an opposition between wife and husband, male and female, rather than one between American and Cuban cultures. The Collinis are portrayed as a typical newly-wed, 1950s American couple trying to find a place to call their own, whether it be on the road or simply a long, long trailer.