The Mission

Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Every now and again, someone gets it into his head that the world needs another religious epic, and for most of the Western world, this means something to inspire the Christian faithful. Thus we have The Mission from 1986, a film that additionally features the not inconsiderable talents of Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, and Robert De Niro. Make no mistake—while this isn’t a “greatest story ever told” sort of epic, this is a film about faith and its place in the human story. It depicts the church as something of an evil but faith as a virtue.

The film opens with a look at the world of the South America of the time. Spanish missionaries work to convert the native people of the Amazon. One such missionary attempts to convert the Guarani people who live high up in the forest above the waterfalls and is martyred for his trouble. His martyrdom comes in one of the opening shots; he is tied to a cross and tossed into the river to go over the falls. The Jesuits try again with Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons), who manages to entrance the Guarani with his oboe. Father Gabriel and his associate Father Fielding (Liam Neeson) build a mission in this high place.

Only the Silent Survive

Film: The Killing Fields
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I know very little about the reign of terror that inspired The Killing Fields except what I saw in that film today. I’m not sure how much of it I could take, and I’ve watched countless films on the Holocaust. Am I suggesting that the depredations of the Khmer Rouge was somehow worse than what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s? I am not. But at what point do we really measure atrocities? At some point, evils on this scale are all equally horrible, equally terrible, and need to be stopped and prevented equally. But as with anything, the first step is knowledge. Knowing what happened, we may be able to stop it from happening again.

The Killing Fields is a story about the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the fall of Cambodia, but it is also the story of two men. American journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) has come to Cambodia to cover the parts of the Vietnam War that has spilled over the border and what would eventually become the growing conflict in Cambodia itself. Assisting him is Cambodian journalist Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor). Also in the area is photographer Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) and British journalist John Swain (Julian Sands). Schanberg fights with the military, personified here by Major Reeves (Craig T. Nelson) and the U.S. government, personified by the U.S. Consul in Cambodia (Spalding Gray).