Movie Review : A Field of Dreams in the Amazon

Producer Saul Zaentz was so captivated when he read Peter Matthiessen’s elusive, poetic novel “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” he yearned and burned for more than 20 years to turn it into a film. Finally, he succeeded, and though the finished product has some impressive virtues, it is not going to have the same effect that the book had not only on Zaentz but on an entire culture.

Because Matthiessen’s story of the varying but ultimately debilitating effect several Americans have on a fierce tribe of Stone Age Indians living deep in Brazil’s Amazon jungles was, when it was published in 1965, one of the first modern novels to have an ecological consciousness. It took the lead in raising the kinds of troubling questions that disturbed a generation that today snacks on Rainforest Crunch and is on chummy terms with the ozone layer.

Though the passage of time has if anything made this cause more urgent, it has also made it more familiar and less dramatically involving. Not to mention that films that systematically ridicule poor Kipling’s concept of “the White Man’s burden,” ranging from “The Mission” to “Black Robe” to this one, have also had considerable time in the sun.

Still, Zaentz has done everything he could to see his dream come true. He assembled a first-rate ensemble cast (Tom Berenger, John Lithgow, Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn, Tom Waits and Kathy Bates), hired master screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrier, a veteran of everything from the films of Bunuel to Peter Brook’s on-stage “Mahabarata,” put him together with Brazilian director Hector Babenco (“Pixote,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Ironweed”) and persuaded Universal to let their collaboration run for a full three hours.

More than that, he and Babenco have gone to considerable lengths to ensure the visual authenticity of the film. “At Play” (selected theaters) went on location in the Amazon for a full six months, occasionally in places so remote the cast and crew lived on a riverboat. To create the Niaruna, the story’s fictional Indian tribe, former Amazonians who had deserted the jungle for the city were recruited and then put into the hands of acting and movement coaches who, or so we are told, “stimulated their cultural memories” and helped them come up with rituals, dances and costumes that connected to the tribal reality they had left behind.

And, on the level of a National Geographic special, “At Play” is quite successful. Covered with body paint and strategically located feathers and utilizing enough implements and weapons to keep six Indian prop makers busy, the Niaruna are absolutely convincing, though one may wonder why every last unclothed woman in the village just happens to be as cute as a button. And the aerial photography of the startling jungle itself, complete with unnerving cliffs and vast waterfalls, is a wonder to behold. But though the landscape invariably soars, the drama has a tendency to find itself awkwardly earthbound.

“At Play” begins with the emergency landing of a small, battered, woebegone airplane at Mae de Deus, a tiny dot close to the end of nowhere. On board are Wolf (Waits), a wild and crazy mercenary type, and his brooding, silent pilot, Lewis Moon (Berenger), a pony-tailed, half-Cheyenne loner.

All these two want is some gas and a chance to leave, but Commandante Guzman (Jose Dumont), a lawman straight out of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” says not so fast. Nominally in charge of protecting the Niaruna, he wouldn’t be averse to having an airplane drop a few bombs and scare the tribe a little, forcing them to flee deeper into the jungle and opening up their homeland to hungry settlers.

Other folks are interested in the Niaruna as well, intent on their souls, not their land. Leslie Huben (Lithgow) and his waif-like wife Andy (Hannah) are veteran fundamentalist missionaries who are joined by a new couple just down from the States, Martin Quarrier (Quinn), his wife Hazel (Bates) and their young son Billy (a very natural performance by Niilo Kivirinta).

While Leslie is a prig’s prig, so intent on his own crusade that he considers Catholics “the opposition” and a massacre of their priests a golden opportunity for his side, Martin is a more questioning, sensitive man, someone who has dreamed of the Amazon since he was a boy and feels an almost instinctual kinship with the Niaruna, as does, of all people, Lewis Moon, the silent half-Cheyenne. Both these men get very different chances to interact with this tribe from the beginning of time, and what that contact does both to the tribe and to them is the heart of what “At Play” is about.

Both Quinn and Berenger are self-contained, quietly charismatic actors, and both (but especially Quinn) do exceptional jobs in making their tortured, conflicted characters believable as well as sympathetic. In fact, without this ability to capably portray men on very different kinds of spiritual quests “At Play” would be in serious trouble.

For Hector Babenco, perhaps because his ear for effective English is not quite there, has set the emotional pitch of this movie way too high. This is especially a problem in the characters of Leslie Huben and Hazel Quarrier, the more committed of the missionaries. Both Lithgow and Bates appear to have been advised to invest these people with an ever-present edge of hysteria which makes them appear rather foolish and makes condescending to their aims inevitable. Enough of Matthiessen’s scenario remains to make much of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (rated R for language and sensuality) an often haunting experience, but Babenco’s occasionally simplistic approach robs the film of the kind of lasting impact it wants so badly to achieve.

‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord’

Tom Berenger Lewis Moon

John Lithgow Leslie Huben

Daryl Hannah Andy Huben

Aidan Quinn Martin Quarrier

Tom Waits Wolf

Kathy Bates Hazel Quarrier

Presented by the Saul Zaentz Co., released by Universal. Director Hector Babenco. Producer Saul Zaentz. Executive producers Francisco Ramalho Jr., David Nichols. Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere and Hector Babenco. Cinematographer Lauro Escorel. Editor William Anderson. Costumes Rita Murtinho. Music Zbigniew Preisner. Production design Clovis Bueno. Running time: 3 hours.

MPAA-rated R (language and sensuality).