Black Robe
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Movie Reviews of Black Robe
Movie Review: Wonderful movie
Summary: 5 Stars
I watched this movie yesterday and it is still on my mind and will be for a long time. I think we all know the story, but the cast and crew in this particular film made it into a work of art. The photography was particularly breathtaking. Some shots of the river made me gasp in wonder. I will watch it again for that. Please see this and give yourself some pleasure.
Movie Review: Excellent in Every Way
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is so unHollywood that it is refreshing and moving. It is superbly acted and directed. The sets and costumes are so authentic that the viewer is drawn into the characters' lives immediately. This film is a winner. If you want authentic Indians and real struggles at the time, this is the film. Its documentary-like quality adds even more realism. I loved this film.Movie Review: Great movie!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best movies I've ever seen that depicts the way things truly were. It doesn't involve any of the hollywood stereotypes of American Indians OR the Priests that tried to "save the savages". Beautifully filmed, the scenery is breathtaking. It may have been tanked by the critics - don't listen to them. They don't know what the hell they're talking about!Movie Review: Black Robe
Summary: 5 Stars
Definitely rated R but very interesting and disturbing in the white man's treatment of Indians.Movie Review: New France, now seemingly forgotten
Summary: 4 Stars
This movie seems to aim at being a serious historical comment and an action-adventure movie. It is hard to achieve both aims in the same movie. Life has never been cram-packed with action and adventure even for Jesuit missionaries. Nevertheless, the movie may have the value of interesting some viewers in the historical subject of New France, which had a long life of about a century and a half but can be seen as one of history's big might-have-beens nevertheless.
The music is beautiful, and so is the scenery. Captions are provided for the natives as they speak their own languages. Everything said in English, however, we are supposed to imagine spoken in French, I assume. Why the French should not speak French, I do not know. The DVD provides French and Spanish captions, but not voice-overs.
The movie is rated R, probably for sex and violence. I counted three brief sex scenes. Whether the first two are dramatically justifiable depends mostly on the audience. We take in both scenes through the eyes of the missionary, and both communicate something offensive, and this seems to be their point. In the first, standards of privacy are at stake. In the second, standards of commitment, as it turns out. (Much gets said about the sacrament of baptism in this movie; notably little, in view of the plot, about the sacrament of matrimony.) The third is Hollywoodesque and unlikely to say the least. The movie is fiction, nowhere more than in that scene. But as for the violence, the movie is loosely based on a past reality; and the violence is, if anything, toned down from the historically documented violence and cruelty of that time, place, and people. This does not mean that it is easy to view or that everybody wants to see it. For first-hand historical accounts, see the Jesuit Relations, available on Amazon.
One theme of the movie is that we are all religious creatures in the sense that awareness of our mortality calls forth a response of some kind. The Catholic faith was the response of French Catholics and the response taught by the missionaries. The natives had their own accustomed response. But are all responses equally good and truthful? The movie could seem to say so, but the Catholic answer, both then and now, is a firm no. The movie does not have to be interpretted as affirming religious neutrality or agnosticism, but such an interpretation is easily possible.
One scene shows a penitential gesture on the part of the missionary. It is possible to view this sympathetically, but I fear that it makes him look like a nut, since it hard to see how he can blame himself at that point. Penitential practices were not uncommon and could go rather far, but I know of no good reason to think that Catholic missionaries were neurotic.
In another scene, the young Frenchman Daniel tells the missionary about the Algonquin concept of afterlife. The missionary calls it "childish." Daniel asks rhetorically whether it is harder to believe than that of sitting on clouds enjoying a beatific vision. End of conversation, in the movie. Daniel gets the last word on the subject, and it seems anti-Christian. But in fact, it is merely anti-Dante; and, even at that, Dante's poem and similar works of the European Christian imagination -- the best of them -- would have been poorly summarized or understood. Obviously, the Catholic Church did not prohibit such works, but also teaches, "Heaven is the end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, article 1024). If sitting on clouds would just bore Daniel, then it would not be heaven for him.
Another theme has to do with dreams, whether happy dreams or nightmares. See article 67 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church for a statement on private revelations, which says of them, in part, "It is not their role to improve or complete Christ's definitive Revelation." Chomina's dream does reveal a piece of the future, as it turns out, and such dreams do not occur only in fiction, but generally they are, properly, little more than curiosities. By themselves dreams usually do not reliably guide the dreamer, after waking. The obstacle of interpreting a dream is usually insurmountable, and bad interpretation makes for bad guidance. The missionary's remark about people who think that dreams are real and this world is an illusion has everything to do with the Christian faith, for it is terribly important that Jesus lived in this world for real, not in dreams or in movies -- those dreams enabled through Thomas Edison -- and that he rose from the dead for real. See 1 Corinthians 15: 12-19 for St. Paul's statement on the importance of Jesus's resurrection as real. The missionary would have realized that he was awake in the same real world as Jesus, just sixteeen hundred years later. The year was 1634.
The movie shows three Huron elders debating whether their tribe should accept Christianity from the Jesuit missionaries. They think that doing so might weaken their ability to defend themselves militarily. Then a note at the end of the movie says that the Huron were later "routed and killed by their Iroquois enemies." Without knowing more, the audience would thus be led to believe that the misgivings of the Huron elders were well founded, as though the missionaries had been too pacifistic; but this belief can be doubted. Historically, the missionaries opposed the common practice of torturing defenseless captives, but did not oppose effective defence. In fact, they would have reason to defend their own work with arms if necessary.
Some details in this movie dramatize historical conditions of some note. For example, the very brief scene of Daniel fumbling with his firearm, such as it is, is surely a comment on those extremely awkward and unreliable weapons; the bow was still far superior. The missionary's comment about brandy in the first scene is a comment on the practice of plying the natives with an addictive substance that their culture had no long experience with. The costumes and sets are, I assume, facsimiles of the real thing.
Viewers who do not already know might like to be told that one line in the movie, "For the greater glory of God," is, or used to be, the motto of the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus: "Ad majorem Dei gloriam."
Another line, a sweeping comment on European history, made by an older priest in France, says that the English and the Germans were uncivilized until "we" took our faith to them. If "we" means the Church, then the comment is right as a summary. If it means the French, then it is not quite right. The Chrisitanization of the English was undertaken by missionaries from Ireland and from the continent, not all of whom came from Gaul. The most renowned mission to the Germans was that of St. Boniface, an Englishman. But all of that pertains to late antiquity or the early middle ages, and the priest's line in the movie could actually have reflected views of Frenchmen by the early 1600s, whose grasp of European history might have been strongly influenced, and distorted, by the more recent part of it.
Joan of Arc is called "St. Joan." Her sainthood would have been, I suppose, accepted in an informal sense in France in the early 1600's. But she was not actually canonized a saint in the Catholic Church until the 1920s. Quite a few canonized Catholic saints were in serious trouble with the Church during their lifetimes, but Joan is the only one that I know of who was actually put to death by the Church, to the especially horrible death of being burned alive. It was the Church under the control of her English enemies, but it was still the official Catholic Church. That was long before Luther.