At Play in the Fields of the Lord

A film set in the Amazon forest. There are two groups in a town. Missionaries on one side, and on the other a local administration after minerals and land. A tribe lives inside the forest. The Niaruna have no contact with the outside and shoot arrows at anyone who enters. The governor wants a solution. The tribe will either be moved or removed. Two mercenaries arrive in a small aircraft. Moon and Wolf are looking for work to pay for fuel. They are given a task. They will bomb the tribe's village from the air. Moon does not do it. He takes a drug and jumps from the plane. He lands at the village, stands naked, and the tribe takes him for a being from the sky. From there the film runs two lines side by side. The time Moon spends inside the tribe and the missionaries' effort to reach it. Martin and his wife Hazel are a newly arrived missionary couple. She is frightened of the forest, cannot protect her child, and comes apart by degrees. What the narrative is interested in is not faith but contagion: Moon enters the tribe with good intentions and what he brings with him is disease. The film proves no side right. The missionary, the mercenary and the administration all produce the same result. The production is large in scale and was shot entirely in Brazil, in the Amazon; some of those playing the tribe are from local communities. The running time is long. The film is close to three hours and the second part moves heavily. The source is Peter Matthiessen's novel. Tom Berenger, John Lithgow, Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn and Kathy Bates are in the cast. Héctor Babenco directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes large-scale films about colonialism and missionary work. Who it is not for: anyone without patience for length; the narrative is very long and some characters are underwritten.