Screen
O'Brien, Tom
In a nation of illiterate citizens, radio is the chief means of doctor, and a true Daughter of Wisdom. public communication. Operating on an annual budget of Sister Marie...
...Two other priests were expelled along with him, and one elderly priest was brutally beaten to death...
...urge, as some reports have suggested, that people boycott the election...
...green background for the film...
...Schrader and Weir try to finesse the the evil spirits lurking inside their spirited critique of social issue by showing her happily abandoning unwashed dishes on evil...
...dissent...
...see is just the face...
...The inevitable disasters in the film's second half are less The treatment of Ford's family, however, involves one interesting than Ford's language and family conflicts...
...Using Theroux, they made a movie that combines adventhem they'd better "act like men...
...And to us she makes a pun in English, "His name is being presented before the voters: the referendum declared L'homme, that means man...
...Ford's achievement, When Father Trieste was asked what the U.S...
...Her healing spirit was palpable in broadcast during the course of the discussion which made it every room she entered...
...O'BRIEN: The color red appears only a CAVALIER: To concentrate the view, the few times in the film...
...tion and daily service...
...Weir and over natives and family alike...
...energy sources, Ford is sickened by our country's waste and "I ask: Is this money really used to profit the poor...
...This also involves a style which is a little bit pauvre - poor CAVALIER: We realized that the only important red in the film was blood, and TOM O'BRIEN is Commonweal's film critic...
...He's not a girl, he's a man...
...in Hollywood, producers wanted a happy Ford's abusive derision of his sons when they doubt his wis- ending...
...With the sets, we constructed a - won a special jury prize at the 1986 limits - was the Carmelites receiving a "free space" with no walls, no winCannes film festival...
...Mosquito Coast is thus a ture and intelligence...
...This fits women who write the answer on the same envelope so close themselves up only to be able to O'BRIEN: Why did you choose a neutral that they don't waste it...
...The screenplay, writ- less a statement of equality than an alias for "little woman...
...On one grueling trek, he asks them sarcastically if beyond the conventional heroic mode that brought him starthey want popsicles or rooms at the Holiday Inn, then tells dom...
...It stand English - break into peals of laughter at her English also called for the legal existence of various political parties, joke...
...Rather than let themselves be disillusioned Harvard, he said, 'to get an education.' " Many such modern by the deteriorating conditions - even in the wake of the Thoreaus (the original even punned, "You learn all the Duvalier ouster - in a country where most had worked for at branches of learning at Harvard, and none of the roots") least a decade and where some had spent their entire lives, each existed and exist, having abandoned careerism to settle in seemed enthusiastic, vivacious, sustained by her or his voca- Vermont, make cabinets, and read the Whole Earth Catalog...
...He refused, then found Saul Zaentz, who financed dom...
...My film tries to record the inexpensive, to remain "poor" on that rector whose recently released importance of every single object in the level: But we also realized that this sysfilm, Therese - a study of the Carmelite convents...
...The son reveres his suffering I witnessed...
...they unglue the envelopes, and dows, no ceilings...
...This is what teaching human dignity plain that the referendum was a hoax, but the station did not means...
...Its transmitters reach nearly work...
...It ten by Paul Schrader, is filled with perfect illustrations of those is hard to believe that she would be so passive and dependent, worst of evils-evils rationalized with the aid of ideology...
...To him, they are namby-pamby to question "upstream" Amadeus...
...At its best, The Mosquito Coast has the Dostoyevskian leaving America, but the scene is inadequate to explain how power to remind us how many emotional dictators feast on much she tolerates in the jungle...
...Bonjour, mon cher," she says to July 1985 Radio Soleil aired discussions of the referendum him...
...Helen Mirren, one of the finest actresses in suave, ideological master of slogans and half-truths: even after England, never challenges her husband...
...and programs on literacy, health, cooperatives, and nificent, an irritating, provocative adventure satire conscientization...
...The Jean-Claude Duvalier President-for-Life, with powers to ap- dozen, silent, seemingly-dazed men - who cannot underpoint the prime minister and to appoint his own successor...
...On the surface, they are enemies, with Ford astonishment of family and natives, transforms it into a hating Gregory's use of the Gospel as an opiate for the masses...
...to 11 P.M...
...once I became conscious of that, each Commonweal: 690...
...TOM O'BRIEN AN INTERVIEW WITH FILM DIRECTOR ALAIN CAVALIER Success in small things - like the Carmelites are poor...
...Trieste said the station's objective is "evangelization, edu- 'THE MOSQUITO COAST' cation, and information...
...We insist on having direct or indirect par- based on Paul Theroux's novel on the hippie as a modern ticipation from the grassroots," Trieste said...
...I found it in the ebullient person- The satire is subtle and suspenseful, at least for the first half ality of Sister Marie Emmanuel, a native of Port-au-Prince, a of the film...
...The film is better than its defects...
...letter...
...Once there, the coast isn't good enough...
...They know what matters: Sister Marie is present for but undermined this goal with a list of exceptions...
...More potent still, however, is the faith father as an inventor and free spirit, claiming proudly in an of the people we met, faith that grounds their deep commit- opening, voice-over narration, "My father dropped out of ment to the poor...
...To be more precise, the central character ruary 7, all the complaints people had, they came here and (played by Harrison Ford) is not exactly a hippie but one of voiced them...
...he never tires of saying it thereafter...
...how long Ford's son will love him, how long this Swiss Family Jesus on earth is dangerous...
...In a small part, Gregory's Ford's achievement is to retain enough plausibility for these daughter (Martha Plimpton) is allowed some rather lewd, but events to delineate the narrow border between genius and realistically idiosyncratic lines to express comically her rebellmadness...
...Jesus in heaven isn't dangerous...
...I found this faith in the gentle Robinson will survive its Faustian Robinson Crusoe...
...genuine visionary...
...daily Mass in Creole and THE MOSQUITO COAST is gravely flawed and gravely magFrench...
...those members of the "sixties generation" who is in America, "I'm afraid of huge organizations," Trieste said, shaking but not of it...
...The country, he says programs really aim at bringing something about at the lowest in the first scene in a dry-goods store, is going to the dogs, and levels...
...Indeed, while Ford is one grisly apocalypse, he has the hubris to declare, "I'm often referred to as "Father," he calls her "Mother," which is happy because,now we're really free...
...better open themselves up to the world...
...And like Of course, use of the simple green TOM O' BRIEN the Carmelites, I attempt to do a lot with background also allowed the film to be A LAIN CAVALIER is the French di- very little...
...warmth of Bishop Constant...
...In hands and strokes him...
...Screen Nevertheless, Trieste was arrested and detained briefly...
...Ford buys a "town" ( in fact a downtrod- Ford's secret sharer is an obnoxious evangelical missionary den set of hovels as far "upstream" as he can get), and to the (Andy Gregory...
...To see a face well, all you should poses...
...Despite planting premonitions of disaster, Weir 26 December 1986: 689 keeps postponing it, granting Ford a measure of success as a American character is the most American of all...
...Before Feb- Dr...
...Do our frightened by the danger of nuclear war...
...paradise of low-tech farming and carpentry...
...Soon one wonders it is politics," Pollefyt said...
...Then start changing their lifestyles provides a strong means of maintaining sympathy: we see Ford accordingly...
...America to be free...
...church can do guided by Peter Weir who also directed him in Witness, is to in face of all the complex problems and enormous needs of the catch...
...our sympathy for the character despite arousing anHaitian people, he paused before answering: "The first thing noyance, and even at times disgust...
...He is a awful defect...
...Weir had a hard time The most brilliant element in The Mosquito Coast involves getting it made...
...In Ford, he found an actor willing to extend himself destiny...
...He even realizes Deep down, Weir and Schrader suggest, they are different his deepest fantasy: to build a gigantic ice machine which expressions of the same conquistadorial temper, tyrannizing needs no energy and only ammonia as raw fuel...
...They say we do politics, but when you talk about the Gospel, they've got to keep going "upstream...
...You could do a lot worse, and recent double-edged satire with a single center: the most anti- films have rarely done better...
...An expert in popular mechanics and alternative his head over the annual budget for the station he administers...
...Not especially considering her character's probable familiarity enough sixties gurus have been so examined, so dissected, for with sixties feminism...
...She waltzes to one bed after another singing and touch65 percent of the Haitian population...
...Did you try to eye of the spectator on something very isolate those few times, for dramatic purprecise...
...I found this faith in the wry one-liners of Ford's figure goes whole hog, so to speak, and uproots his wife Father Bohnen and in the revolutionary quips of Father Yvan (Helen Mirren) and his family to trek to tropical South Pollefeyt (who had been expelled along with Father Trieste...
...Frankenstein...
...Views were them, joking with them...
...It was a personal challenge...
...the church should do, I think, is to become aware of what is Aside from Ford's acting, Weir's narrative method also going on in the world...
...The next day he received notice to leave the country...
...Trieste returned to Haiti in March BEYOND HEROICS 1986...
...Naturally, Radio Soleil broadcasts all the bishops' pastoral messages...
...But there are more complaints now...
...Operating on an annual budget of Sister Marie dances through the tidy but bare wards of the $222,000, the Catholic station, Radio Soleil, broadcasts seven home for the elderly where she and two other sisters live and days a week from 5 A.M...
...One thing I wanted tem of shooting took on a symbolic Carmelite nun, Saint Therese of Lisieux to film - but couldn't because of time meaning...
...through the eyes of his oldest teenage son (played by the When I think of Haiti, I recall the powerful images of human astonishingly named actor River Phoenix...
...Father Hugo Trieste, a ing the people...
...She takes a feeble blind man's face in both her Belgian Missionhurst priest, is the director of Radio Soleil...
Vol. 113 • December 1986 • No. 22
