Adapted from the widely heralded but unread Peter Mathiessen novel, Hector
Babenco's "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" has the feel of being several
chapters lifted from a Joseph Conrad-inspired genealogical expedition by James
A. Michener titled "Amazonia." Some of us would argue that he already wrote
something close -- "Hawaii." And the 1966 movie of it comes to mind as "At
Play" proceeds to lay its episodic groundwork: Tom Berenger as a Rafer Hoxworth
with an ethnic consciousness; John Lithgow as the black and Aidan Quinn as the
white version of Abner Hale; and Kathy Bates as the fattened-up ancestor of
Abner and his wife Jerusha. While nothing in Mathiessen's or Babenco's versions
of the perils of White God Redemption is all that new -- it's still the same
old White Man rape of supposedly unGodly cultures for religious power and
commercial gain -- there's a twist here that keeps you interested: an American
Indian (in the movie, Berenger) literally dropping down from the skies to
become the Amazon Indians' Kisu Mu -- the Thunder Spirit. It's Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's "Old Man With Enormous Wing" darkened and without the magic.
What keeps the movie from becoming better than it turns out is its
obviousness: just about everything -- from corrupt police to machetes as
bribes, from bells subtly tolling in the background to epidemics -- is
ham-radioed in, even before the principals turn theirs on. And though we know
that the heat, insects and various illnesses while filming hampered production,
some of the actors just aren't delivering. They appear to have given in to the
climate -- they're sluggish, dehydrated, missing beats in their line readings;
the general tone, except for Berenger and sometimes Quinn, is, "Let's get this
over with asap." Hindering Babenco may have been his lack of knowledge about
Bates and Lithgow -- that they need directors who stay on top of them, keeping
them from going flaccid, preventing them from reciting their lines on a par
with sloppy e-mail; when you hear Lithgow reading from a letter, you'll know
what I mean. As a converter for the Lord, Quinn is miscast -- Bates calls him
"a regular little four-eyed Jesus" -- and he doesn't have anything resembling a
believable married relationship with Bates; you wonder what's the matter with
him that he got stuck with her. Come climax, however, he's the turmoil of
religious confusion, the bearer of delayed honor and the eventual tragic
sacrifice that the fields of this Lord demand.
It's Berenger's performance the movie has to rest on; if you can accept the
convenient mechanism that on one ordinary day he lands his plane down in the
Amazon and finds his need to re-establish his roots suddenly mushrooming and
therefore has to parachute backyard into his linkable origins to save "his
people" from white man's exploitation, then you'll be fairly engrossed. If you
don't, then nothing he does will matter. (You'll find yourself hoping that
Bates does one of her "goes bananas" numbers, and you won't be too
disappointed.) What he has to do many other actors wouldn't, but that he keeps
holding his backpack (?) over his privates can drive you crazy -- not because
you don't get to see his measure but because it gets so damned distracting. But
not paralyzing; Berenger is soon given an Indian brief and from that moment on,
he becomes so assimilated into the tribe that he's like camouflage. (The makeup
and hair design by Jaque Monteiro.) His native look has one comic bit -- when
he's peeking at a nude Daryl Hannah. Babenco's direction of the Indians is a
wonder and rarely have I seen actors in group sequences avoid the camera with
this much diligence; these actors have a no nonsense approach to their duties
and in some moments -- when, for example, the flu strikes -- what they achieve
in unison appears so real that you keep having to remind yourself that these
people coughing and trying to rub away the chills are performers.
Photographed by Lauro Escorel, this Amazon is safer than what we've seen in
other movies: no snakes (except a dead one), no infestations of ants or other
creepy crawlers; it's a habitable environment. Concentrated doses of the jungle
aren't beautiful after a while -- the greenery and earth floor blunt the senses
through prolonged exposure -- but there are aerial shots by Stan McClain that
showcase the region and the best come when Berenger flies toward a waterfall.
The lulling mist from the falls is breathtaking in its panoramic delicacy and
enhanced by the almost classical music by Zbigniew Preisner. If you can get
past the first forty minutes, you should be able to go all the way. You'll wish
it had a stronger narrative push, and that the action was speedier, but, given
Waco and other martyrs, it's a useful refresher course: all of us need to be
reminded about the charlatans who pass themselves off as messengers of God.
