The One Where Robert DeNiro Dies for the Indians

A Critical Review Essay of The Mission

Little is to be expected from mainstream Western corporate filmmaking; the endless stream of movies – produced primarily in Hollywood but also in London – that deal with non-Western peoples provide only iterations of the trope of Indiana Jones-type White heroes coming to rescue the poor, wretched colored savages from themselves, or from other White villains. The Mission is such a film. At best, it is a mediocre work with little character development and a clear lack of historical or ethnographic research. At worst, it is 126 torturous and revolting minutes of Robert DeNiro playing a thinly disguised Christ figure in a nonsensical production whose only epic characteristic is the astonishing extent of its racism.

Similarly, hardly anything is to be learned from this film: not about Paraguay in the 18th century, not about the nature of Jesuit missionaries in the region, and certainly not about the interactions between Guaraní and Spanish peoples in this critical formative period in the history of South America. Rather, to watch The Mission is, for those capable of watching the film through to the end, a bitter look at history through the eyes of those for whom the racist dehumanization of people of color and a ridiculous White savior complex are fundamental parts of their greater worldview.

The premise of the film is clear enough, as the dominant metaphor is established within the first five minutes: the Spanish Jesuits are Christ figures, sacrificed for the sins of the Guaraní, who need salvation from their own savagery and from Portuguese predation. The initial image of a White Jesuit heroically dying for the sake of the savage but innocent Guaraní remains throughout the film, and is reinforced constantly by scenes highlighting the personal struggles of Jesuit missionaries while ignoring those of the forcibly settled and converted Guaraní.

Regardless of the film’s own claim that “The historical events represented in this story are true,” the historical inaccuracy of the film is apparent almost immediately. Not only is the portrayal of the Spanish as saviors hubristic in the extreme, it also perpetuates racist and historically inaccurate perspectives of Latin America. The Guaraní, like all indigenous people, are presupposed to be infantile, docile people without any form of culture. Indeed, the first depiction of Guaraní people is of children obediently playing the violin, followed by a shot of older Guaraní people, still in the jungle, literally coming out of a cave to crucify a Spaniard. As soon as the Jesuits arrive, the Guaraní seemingly drop whatever savage things they were doing before civilization arrived, and wholeheartedly adopt Spanish dress, religion, and practices. When the time comes to rebel against the Portuguese, what was in reality a spontaneous and wholly indigenous resistance movement on the part of the Guaraní, and which represents a major point in Native American resilience and survival against incredible odds, is co-opted by the film into a scenario of helpless “Indians” in what is presumably supposed to be war paint, being led by courageous, strategically-gifted Jesuits.

This is as far as the filmmakers are willing to depict an entire culture- bothering to show any Guaraní songs, ritual practices, social activity, or even the inside of a traditional home is too much trouble. Throughout the rest of film, Guaraní persons are reduced to bodies as just another part of the picturesque and exotic scenery. They are reduced to, in the words of historian James Schofield Saeger, “mission furniture.” Children especially are abused in this manner, to the extent that in one scene, several naked babies are dropped, crying helplessly, into a puddle of mud as rain falls around them. There are only two instances where a Guaraní person is singled out as an individual- the child taken as a protégé by Robert DeNiro’s character Rodrigo Mendoza, and the Guaraní cacique who refuses to comply with Altamirano, the Catholic cardinal played by Ray McAnally. Ibaye, the Guaraní Jesuit played by Cambodian actor Monirak Sisowath, could have never existed in reality, as indigenous people were universally barred from joining the priesthood. To add further insult to an already disgusting situation, the people shown in the film are not even actual Guaraní, but Onaní people from Colombia, where The Mission was filmed. The fact that the only “indigenous” character the filmmakers deigned to make a human being with a voice is at once a historical impossibility, a Europeanized servile minor character who is ultimately humiliated and forced to go nude, and in reality an East Asian actor surrounded by a cast of indigenous extras of the wrong ethnic group, neatly summarizes the flippant concern of the White British filmmakers, for whose purposes all people of color are clearly irrelevant and even more interchangeable and undistinguishable than any piece of scenery or background vegetation.

Elsewhere, people of color remain conspicuously without personality and part of a naked, huddled mass, either performing stereotypical hunting and chasing, or being led like children by a single White man. While indigenous women and men are seen to be naked hunters in such a “natural state” that they originally accept the Jesuit presence because of their fascination by a simple tune played on an oboe. In reality, the Guaraní were semi-sedentary agriculturalists, and wore clothes.

Following in the proud tradition of accusing American peoples of cannibalism and similar “depravities,” the Guaraní are said to practice infanticide. When asked why, Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) responds that parents kill their third child in order to escape from slavers. This is a massive fabrication, as it was not the Guaraní, but their traditional enemies, the Chaco people, who practiced infanticide. Yet such simple questions as to whether the indigenous population that they supposedly “accurately” represent did or did not cover their breasts or kill their children are, again, beyond the high-minded concern of the filmmakers. They would rather recreate the “white man’s Indian” and leave it at that, dedicating more screen time to panoramic shots of the landscape than to humanizing indigenous peoples.

In depicting the Spanish colonials, The Mission fares no better. It seems as if absolutely no thought or research beyond a rudimentary knowledge of the Guaraní War went into making the film. The term “Spanish” cannot even be used to describe those characters supposedly representing Spanish colonists. Beyond the superficial care given to the styling of period-appropriate attire and a basic familiarity with reducción (mission) architecture, there is nothing to identify the English-speaking characters as Spaniards. Instead, they broadly resemble British and U.S. ideas of European colonizers in the Americas- civilized White people bringing enlightenment and reason to a wild, Eden-like realm. Nowhere can be seen the cultural developments, such as intermarriage, that were so vital to the emergence of a new Latin American identity. Since mestizaje did not occur in the British colonies, it apparently has no place in the fictionalized and literally Whitewashed Spanish America of The Mission. Looking to the portrayal of social standards of the period, one is presented only with wildly inaccurate scenes. In one scene Carlotta, a well-to do woman, is seen running out in the street half-nude after having been discovered having sex. Such behavior would have been rare even for lower-class women, and for someone of Carlotta’s stature, would have been unthinkable and tantamount to social suicide. But since Carlotta quickly disappears from the plot, gender issues are discarded with the same ease as any analysis of race more complex than the standard Anglo-American view of “Black, White, and other.” The Mission is seemingly a film by White men, about White men, and for White men

Thus the film, which begins with a single White man’s face dominating the screen, by the end leaves the audience wondering whether the camera ever moved at all. Altamirano’s extended flashback and accompanying narration constitute the bulk of the film; his voice can be heard at all critical junctures in the movie, and at each vital new development. This is important, as the values expounded by The Mission are apparent in the hierarchy of voices- only White males are allowed to speak throughout the film. All the main characters and virtually all the dialogue come from White men speaking British English; beyond this, the privilege of producing understandable speech (assuming an English-speaking audience) is granted to only one White woman and to the historical impossibility Ibaye. All others, either black servants speaking Spanish or the many Guaraní-speaking people, either go untranslated, interpreted by a White man, or have their speech given the same attention as the sounds made by the pet monkey in the film.

In fact, there is no agency on the part of Guaraní people, or any non-White people at all. There are no named characters that are not white, and never does a non-White person perform any action central to the plot. This is another rotund failure on the part The Mission to reflect the actual conditions in Paraguay at the time. Instead of showing any indication of the extensive cultural and linguistic hybridization that occurred in the region, the filmmakers were content with simply restating the widespread racist view of superior Spanish culture rightfully and totally obliterating indigenous lifeways in America

The present reality in the region supposedly chronicled by the film is one of such extensive cultural survival of indigenous culture that the Guaraní language is in fact preferred over Spanish in almost all aspects of Paraguayan daily life. Were the filmmakers’ ludicrously inaccurate vision of history true, no such society could have grown out of the time of The Mission. Thankfully for Paraguayans and all Latin Americans, the warped fantasies of the filmmakers remain firmly entrenched only in the minds of those narrow-minded enough to continue to believe them.

The film is nicely directed and the photography is quite good. But as a work of historical accuracy or human value, The Mission is absolute dross. It is another example of the overabundant racism extant in contemporary cinematography and mass media. Unabashedly Eurocentric and White supremacist, this work is only enjoyable insofar as crude, bigoted caricatures of indigenous Americans and chauvinist eulogizing of imperialism are to be found amusing. To expect any sort of cultural sensitivity, historical rigor, or indeed, even the most feeble-handed attempt at intellectual honesty from such a work as The Mission would be naive to the extreme. To even praise the film for its cinematography or the dramatic value of its story misses the greater tragedy- that centuries after the Guaraní and countless other American peoples first struggled against Spanish and Portuguese invasion, to glorify in European atrocities and denigrate indigenous resilience is still enough to win the Palme d’Or.

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Bibliography

Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Random House, 1979.

Fogelquist, Donald F. “The Bilingualism of Paraguay.” Hispania 33 no. 1 (1950): 23-27.

Gómez, Gérard. Entre las bellas palabras y las palabras sagradas: el sincretismo lingüístico-religioso en las reducciones jesuíticas del Paraguay. Asunción, Paraguay: ServiLibro, 2006.

Melià, Bartolomeu. La lengua guaraní en el Paraguay colonial: que contiene la creación de un lenguaje cristiano en las reducciones de los guaraníes en el Paraguay. Translated, revised, and corrected by Luis Antonio Alarcón Pibernat, Antonio Caballos, and Demetrio Núñez. Asunción, Paraguay: CEPAG, 2003.

Saeger, James Schofield. “The Mission and Historical Missions: Film and the Writing of
History.” The Americas 51 no. 3 (1995) 393-415.

Filmography

The Mission. DVD. Directed by Roland Joffé. London, UK: Goldcrest Films, 1986.