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At Play in the Fields of the Lord | 
| Director: Hector Babenco
Actors: Tom Berenger, John Lithgow, Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn, Tom Waits
Category: DVD
This item is no longer available
Rating:  55 reviews
Format: Ntsc
Rating: R (Restricted)
ASIN: B00005JMHJ
Theatrical Release Date: December 6, 1991
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Amazon.com essential video
Missionaries travel to the Brazilian rain forest and make a mess of everything. What else is new? Actually, plenty in this dark but beautifully realized adaptation of Peter Matthiessen's well-regarded novel, directed by Hector Babenco. Aidan Quinn, Daryl Hannah, Kathy Bates, and John Lithgow play the Americans who travel to the Brazilian interior in an effort to do some good. But their definitions of good vary wildly; Bates and Lithgow are old-fashioned puritans who want to convert the heathens to Christianity and remove all traces of their own culture. Quinn and Hannah are more spiritually minded, hoping to make a connection and a cultural exchange with the Indians they encounter. In the end, they're all delusional, trapped in their own preconceptions. Downbeat but magical in its way, with sterling performances all around and amazing scenery, to say the least. --Marshall Fine
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| Customer Reviews: Read 50 more reviews...
 Western Civilization??? February 26, 2009
Leonidas (Kentucky)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
And what do you think of Western Civilization, Mr. Gandhi??
"I think it would be a good idea"
A truly great movie, true to the book it is based on. Please release it on DVD soon, I've been waiting a long time!
VHS Movie February 3, 2009
Ray F. Longaker Jr.
3 hour and 6 minute story of why man shouldn't fool with nature and why man shouldn't try to impose his will on others.
Where Is It? July 17, 2008
Tidewater
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Where is it? I echo previous reviewers asking why this classic has not been released on DVD. A burnt-out reviewer like Terrence Rafferty (The New Yorker) pans it, but real people who do not live on Manhattan's Upper West Side see virtue in the film. I'm among them and so, happily, is Roger Ebert. Among the many things I like about the film is its portrayal of the wise, patient Catholic priest, who has seen it all yet seems to have retained his faith in a very trying setting and has put his hope where it belongs--in the impenetrable workings of the Holy Spirit.
I also respect and admire the passionate relationship (there's no other word for it) between Moon and Wolfie. Both Berenger and Waits are terrific, but I'd argue Waits steals the show.
The movie aparently cost a bundle and lost money, so the director is ostracized by the moguls. Thank goodness for producers like Saul Zaentz.
 Savagery accelerates, four stars overall July 7, 2008
Peter Beyer (Dortmund)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 storylines. 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. (If Kevin Costner and Berenger are any indication, firm buttocks are mandatory for those who would go native.)
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 humourous. 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.
I have been waiting along time for the DVD March 3, 2008
K. Wells (everywhere)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I absolutely love this movie and requested it on DVD along time ago. Why isn't it on DVD yet. There are many movies that aren't even close to being this good on DVD, so whats the deal? If your out there reading this Universal, please put this on DVD.
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