At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991)

This is not your typical adventure movie. This is a marvelous drama about culture clash - the clash of civilization and nature. I will not spent time to describe everything here, because words are really not enough. Despite not being popular, this movie is among my favorites and a must-see I could say. Very very good story, amazing views, especially the aerial ones, wonderful music and great acting.Speaking of acting, everybody love Tom Berenger and Daryl Hannah, but I must give credit also to Aidan Quinn and especially Kathy Bates, whose acting in this movie I like the most.I am not aware who are the people playing the native tribes, but they deserve a great credit for good acting too.This movie is greatly underrated, so do not consider IMDb or another score and just go and see it.

Savagery accelerates. It took European immigrants several centuries to "pacify" - convert, slaughter and segregate - the native populations of North America, but Brazilians have accomplished the same feat in less than 50 years. It is estimated that by the end of the century not a single native in the state of Amazonia will be living under traditional conditions. The issue is almost academic: Thanks to European-introduced diseases, forced relocations and outright genocide, relatively few natives will be around to live under any conditions.That's the subject of At Play in the Fields of the Lord, adapted from Peter Matthiessen's prescient 1965 novel, and it's an extraordinary one, but Brazilian director Hector Babenco's three-hour, $36-million morality play trivializes it with caricatured performances and crowd-pleasing comedy. Babenco, best known for Pixote and The Kiss of the Spider Woman, has said that Matthiessen's novel was "critical and intense" when dealing with two white missionary couples, the Hubens and the Quarriers, but that the Indians, a fictitious composite tribe called the Niaruna, were "cartoonish." Hence, Babenco has evened the score: in his film, the natives are presented with intensity and the missionaries are cartoons.Although put into production before Dances With Wolves and Black Robe were released, At Play combines their story lines. The Dances With Wolves scenario is played out by the half-Cheyenne mercenary Lewis Moon (Tom Berenger); hired to bomb the Niaruna, he instead parachutes into their compound and becomes one of their near-naked, idyllically happy number.Meanwhile, the missionary couples enact a Protestant version of Black Robe. Leslie Huben (John Lithgow) is a ridiculously rigid martinet who dismisses the Catholic Church as "the opposition" and even tries to wrest a statue of the Virgin Mary from the arms of a native convert. His wife Andy (Darryl Hannah) has no personality - she appears to be present to give voyeurs in the audience something nice to look at. But toward the end of the epic, she goes skinny-dipping and then - still starkers as the day she was born - sticks her tongue into the mouth of the now thoroughly native Lewis Moon, who has conveniently popped up to ogle her long-limbed nudity. (In the concupiescent camp sweepstakes, the scene rivals The Blue Lagoon.) The embrace has dire consequences. It gives Moon a minor case of the flu, which he in turn passes along to the Niaruna, who have no immunity to the disease. Talk about kiss of the Spider Woman.The other couple, Martin (Aidan Quinn) and Hazel Quarrier (Kathy Bates) , have other problems. She is a puritanical hysteric - "Everything here is dirty," she screeches of a town on the border of the wilderness, as if a would-be missionary would expect anything else - who is anxious that her child, Billy (Niilo Kivirinta), retain his Midwestern mores. Her husband, however, is a somewhat sensitive true believer (like the priest in Black Robe) who is anxious to help the natives without harming them. This is the single complex character in the film, so it's no surprise that Quinn gives the single multidimensional performance.Babenco's attitudes toward Hazel Quarrier, as a character, and toward Kathy Bates, as an actress, are inexcusable - Bates' weight and Hazel's hysteria are callously used for comic relief, even after Hazel undergoes a nervous breakdown brought on by grief. Compared to what Babenco does with her, director Rob Reiner treated Bates as a sacred object in Misery.At Play in the Fields of the Lord is not without rewards. The aerial Amazon vistas, shrouded in mist, are startlingly beautiful; the daily life of the Niaruna is depicted with a glossy, picturesque clarity that brings to mind National Geographic; and the sequences in which the boy Billy goes native are sweetly humorous. But the tribe remains an enigma - we understand far more about the 17th-century native cultures in Black Robe than we do about these contemporary people. With the exception of the inappropriately Christological conclusion (I am being deliberately vague), we are never encouraged to understand the missionaries, only to laugh at, detest and feel superior to them. Surely it's not that simple. Endeavouring to bring salvation, they brought only suffering; there should be a tragic human drama there. Endeavouring to bring insight, At Play in the Fields of the Lord brings only obfuscation; there should have been a great movie there. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Does anyone know where I can buy this movie? I believe it is still only available in VHS.Please feel free to contact me if you know where I can purchase this movie, or if you have one for sale yourself. Does anyone know where I can buy this movie? I believe it is still only available in VHS.Please feel free to contact me if you know where I can purchase this movie, or if you have one for sale yourself. Does anyone know where I can buy this movie? I believe it is still only available in VHS.Please feel free to contact me if you know where I can purchase this movie, or if you have one for sale yourself. Does anyone know where I can buy this movie? I believe it is still only available in VHS.Please feel free to contact me if you know where I can purchase this movie, or if you have one for sale yourself.

This film is a drama about a missionary who takes his wife and son into the jungles of South America. Big mistake. He meets his boss, a materialistic user of people, and his high maintenance young wife, who looks like she somehow found a health club in the jungle. The Christian missionary has his hands full, and tries hard to spread the word of Jesus to the natives. He makes another mistake when he puts a seed into the mind of a mercenary Native American pilot, who decides to join the natives, where his knowledge of the world makes him one of their most respected leaders. The dramas that unfold turn the missionary into a modern day Job, to say the least, while no one else seems to be affected. While it is true, that such people suffer, the director bends over backwards to make his points, and by the end, you just start shrugging and wondering if he's going to beat you over the head with his ideal world of horror. With a little more subtlety, he might have done so. His overkill is lost when weighed against efforts towards realism. "End of the Spear," a true story, gives a superior and realistic look at such a life style. This movie is certainly biased, and looks to be made out of complete ignorance.