Morricone Makes a Good Film into a Seemingly Great One

Rating: 9/10 (17 February 2007)

Producer David Puttnam evidently has a gift for selecting composers that can lift good films to the status of seemingly great ones. In 1981, Puttnam hired the Greek composer Vangelis to write the score for a low budget film about two obscure athletes who competed in the 1924 Olympic Games. The resulting score, which was the most memorable attribute of the film, catapulted "Chariots of Fire" to a Best Picture Academy Award. A half-dozen years later, Puttnam selected the great Italian composer Ennio Morricone to pen the score for a high-minded film about the Church-sanctioned abuses of indigenous people in 18th-century South America. The result was a magnificent musical work that not only enhanced "The Mission," but remains as one of the finest scores ever written for a motion picture. However, like "Chariots of Fire," Roland Joffe's "The Mission" without its music would be less impressive.
While Chris Menges's beautiful cinematography of Iguazu Falls and the South American jungles makes every frame suitable for a National Geographic centerfold, the tale of two men with conflicting moral centers often plods under the weight of its importance, which is written with a capital "I." Although Robert Bolt wrote the script with obvious conviction and feeling for the injustices doled out by the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, good intentions do not always hold the audience's attention. The man of flesh, who is intensely played by Robert De Niro, struggles with his conversion from bloody soldier to submissive Jesuit. Meanwhile, the man of spirit, equally well delineated by Jeremy Irons, ponders the hypocrisy of his Church, which seems to put politics and greed above spirituality and souls. Unfortunately, when Morricone's soaring music is not swelling through the speakers, inner struggles with guilt, penance, and the meaning of life do not make compelling cinema.
However, patient viewers who can immerse themselves in the music and the painterly images on screen may find "The Mission" a moving experience that will leave them angry with the fate of the indigenous peoples who still struggle to hold onto their culture. One character rhetorically asks if these people would not have preferred that the Europeans had never arrived. Although "The Mission" is less than the sum of its parts, the film is nevertheless worth seeing for its fine performances, stunning photography, and, above all, unrivaled music.