«La Mission»: a clean western

Saturday movie platforms - Alice Bruxelle

The Mission, released on Netflix on February 10, is Paul Greengrass' first attempt at the Western genre. The result is very mixed. While the film is falsely humanistic, it is characterized more by simplistic Manichaeism. Tom Hanks struggles to save it.

1870, Texas. Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks), a newsreader, meets by chance a little girl (Helena Zengel) who has survived a massacre and has just been orphaned. Deciding to take her back to her native village, they must travel 600 kilometers on horseback. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles, The Mission leaves an emptiness that even the long tracking shots over the Texas plains fail to fill.

Tom Hanks, biblical figure

How can we not draw an analogy with the verses of The Gospel according to Matthew if you look at the title for a moment, The Mission. When Jesus sent the eleven apostles on the Great Commission, he instructed them to «make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit» (Mt 28:19). The problem is that Jesus succeeded in converting millions of followers; Paul Greengrass, on the other hand, converts viewers to boredom. And with good reason: The Mission has transformed the Forrest Gump (1994) as a washed-up apostle spreading newspaper news to an illiterate Southern population (note that this is almost a pleonasm) five years after the end of the Civil War. Against a backdrop of social and racial tensions, he sees himself as the unifier of differences, the disciple of his nation.

Stripped of his charisma, Tom Hanks plays the savior of the little savage girl, unable to save the film. Seemingly unable to believe it either, he delivers a conventional performance that fails miserably to elicit any semblance of emotion. But his character is imbued with biblical references that give him that seraphic air. Captain Kidd, wounded in the war, carries with him a past that we can only guess is tortured, but about which we'll never know anything. Reconverted into a public newspaper reader for reasons unknown - except perhaps after being struck by Revelation - he criss-crosses the muddy villages of Texas to bring the Good News to the little people who still give him a penny as alms. And thanks to a clever play on lighting, the captain is never in the shadows, his face always lit up. What's more, taking under his wing the wild child he's trying to educate only contributes to his messianic side. Whether the British director intended it or not, the film comes off as stereotypical, not least because of the morality it implies.

A message that misses its target

If the figure of the world news reporter could have been an interesting prism to explore in a western, The Mission fails to exploit it properly because of the moral nature of the mission with which Captain Kidd is entrusted. Never named, the mission is ambiguous as to its purpose: should he bring the girl back safe and sound, or enlighten the few Southern rednecks still attached to backward traditions by drenching them in honeyed platitudes about suffering and freedom? It's precisely when a film is given a «mission» that it throws itself into the lion's den. This film is no exception to the rule: any sense of spontaneity or surprise collapses. What follows is a simplistic scenario whose outcome can be guessed after the film's first nine minutes. Any bloodshed is toned down in case our sensibilities are too raw. The characters are not to be outdone: they act exactly as we expect them to: the good guys are good guys and the bad guys, in addition to being bad guys, are bad guys. Some of the plot twists are so baffling as to be almost comical.

A «western» that hurts its predecessors, in short. Among them, Merciless (1992) reveals a Clint Eastwood who displays a more realistic moral ambiguity, and paradoxically, a more reassuring one, knowing that bastards can sometimes be mistaken for good guys. Or more recently, with Django Unchained (2012), in which Jamie Foxx, newly freed from slavery, takes his revenge a little too zealously, even killing the men who freed him. If The Mission had freed itself from its moral straitjacket, we might have been treated to an interesting and nuanced film. And nuanced.

The parallels between this film and the American political situation just emerging from the Trump era are glaring: Captain Kidd, or the fighter for the fakes news educating the Republican public. Without being a Democratic pamphlet, the message shared by Paul Greengrass through his direction is on the whole accurate, but the form with which he stages it remains clumsy. If racial issues continue to be feverish, polarizing current affairs, excommunicating a section of the American population by depicting it in a grotesque caricature only feeds this polarization. Fighting fire with fire has never been a good idea.

Write to the author: alice.bruxelle@leregardlibre.com

Photo credits: © Bruce W. Talamon Universal Pictures