The Mission: Morricone’s Musical Masterpiece, Buried in a Broken Film

You know a film has problems when its most memorable moment happens in the first ten minutes and involves no dialogue whatsoever. In Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986), that moment arrives when Jeremy Irons’s Father Gabriel scales the cliff beside Iguazu Falls, pulls out his oboe, and begins to play. The Guaraní emerge from the jungle, captivated not by Christian doctrine or European promises, but by pure sound. It’s a scene that crystallizes everything this movie gets right and wrong: the transcendent power of art versus the crushing weight of good intentions poorly executed.

The Mission staggers under the burden of its own moral seriousness like Robert De Niro’s Mendoza dragging his armor up that waterfall. Here’s a film that desperately wants to grapple with colonialism, faith, and cultural destruction, yet treats these subjects with all the subtlety of a missionary tract. Joffé, flush with the success of The Killing Fields (1984), seems to believe that spectacular South American locations and a handful of meaningful glances can substitute for dramatic complexity. What we get instead is two hours of beautiful people doing beautiful things beautifully, while Ennio Morricone’s score does all the emotional heavy lifting.

The central problem isn’t that The Mission lacks ambition. God knows it has plenty of that. The problem is that Robert Bolt’s script treats its characters like ideological chess pieces rather than breathing human beings. De Niro’s Mendoza undergoes what the film insists is a profound spiritual transformation, but De Niro himself looks like he’s sleepwalking through someone else’s dream. This is the same actor who could make us feel every ounce of Travis Bickle’s alienation or Jake LaMotta’s self-hatred. Here, playing a man supposedly wrestling with the deepest questions of redemption and violence, he’s oddly detached, as if his famous intensity got lost somewhere in the Colombian jungle.

That famous penance sequence should devastate us. Instead, it plays like an elaborate religious exercise, all external struggle with no internal torment visible on De Niro’s face. When the Guaraní finally cut away his burden, the moment feels dramatically unearned because we’ve never seen the man inside the hair shirt. Joffé directs the scene for maximum visual impact, and Chris Menges’s cinematography is undeniably gorgeous, but there’s no psychological reality to anchor all that symbolic weight.

Jeremy Irons fares better, partly because his natural intelligence serves the character well, partly because Father Gabriel’s essential decency never wavers. Irons understands that Gabriel’s strength lies in his certainty, not his doubts, so he plays the role with quiet conviction rather than tortured soul searching. When Gabriel chooses to die with his mission rather than flee to safety, Irons makes us believe this man could find peace in martyrdom. It’s the film’s most genuinely moving performance, though that’s partly because Gabriel never has to change or grow. He simply has to remain himself under pressure.

But let’s talk about what really matters here: Morricone’s score. If The Mission has any claim to lasting significance, it rests entirely on this music. From the opening strains of “On Earth As It Is in Heaven,” Morricone creates something genuinely remarkable, a musical language that synthesizes European classical tradition, indigenous South American elements, and pure spiritual yearning into something that feels both ancient and immediate.

The oboe theme that introduces Father Gabriel isn’t just pretty; it’s dramatically essential. When Irons plays that simple melody for the Guaraní, Morricone makes us understand that music can indeed transcend cultural barriers in ways that words cannot. The theme itself, plaintive, searching, ultimately hopeful, captures everything the character represents. This isn’t background music; it’s the film’s emotional core made audible.

“Gabriel’s Oboe” has since become one of Morricone’s most recognizable themes, spawning countless recordings and even a Sarah Brightman song called “Nella Fantasia.” That popular afterlife speaks to something essential about this music. It can stand alone, divorced from the film’s narrative problems, and still move listeners. That’s both a testament to Morricone’s genius and an indictment of everything else.

The score’s true achievement lies in pieces like “Ave Maria Guaraní,” where indigenous voices perform one of Christianity’s most familiar prayers. Morricone doesn’t simply overlay European harmony onto South American voices; he creates something genuinely hybrid, music that honors both traditions without erasing either. It’s the kind of cultural synthesis the film itself strives for but never achieves dramatically. Where the screenplay reduces complex colonial relationships to simple moral choices, Morricone’s music finds genuine complexity.

Consider the contrast between the “Spanish” and “Guaraní” themes. The European musical elements, formal chorales, structured harmonies, speak to the ordered world of Christian doctrine and colonial administration. The indigenous elements, polyrhythmic percussion, modal melodies, evoke the natural world and traditional spiritual practices. Rather than positioning these elements in opposition, Morricone weaves them together, creating musical conversations that feel like genuine dialogue rather than cultural appropriation.

The piece “Falls,” inspired by the Iguazu waterfalls that dominate the film’s geography, demonstrates Morricone’s ability to make landscape itself emotionally expressive. The cascading melodic lines don’t simply accompany Menges’s spectacular cinematography; they transform natural beauty into spiritual metaphor. You can almost feel the water’s power, its indifference to human schemes and sufferings. This is film music at its most essential, not just supporting the story but creating its own parallel emotional narrative.

Which makes Morricone’s Academy Award loss all the more galling. The composer lost to Herbie Hancock’s ‘Round Midnight, and Morricone wasn’t shy about his feelings: “I definitely felt that I should have won for The Mission, especially when you consider that the Oscar winner that year was ‘Round Midnight, which was not an original score. It had a very good arrangement by Herbie Hancock, but it used existing pieces. So there could be no comparison with The Mission. There was a theft!”

Morricone’s bitterness is understandable. Hancock’s work, however skillful, consisted largely of arrangements of jazz standards. Morricone created an entirely new musical language from scratch, one that served the specific dramatic needs of this particular story while honoring multiple cultural traditions. The Academy’s decision prompted rule changes to ensure that “scores diluted by the use of tracked or pre existing music” would no longer be eligible. Small consolation for a genuine masterpiece.

The irony is that The Mission survives primarily because of the music Morricone created for it. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, though it won only for Chris Menges’s cinematography. Contemporary critics recognized the film’s visual splendor while questioning its dramatic substance. Roger Ebert, never one to mince words, noted the film’s “confusing series of scenes” and complained that “chaos takes over the screen.”

Nearly four decades later, that assessment feels generous. The Mission belongs to that peculiar category of films that seem important while you’re watching them but dissolve under any serious examination. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a beautiful cathedral with no foundation, impressive to look at, impossible to inhabit comfortably.

Yet Morricone’s music endures because it addresses the spiritual questions the film raises with an honesty and directness the screenplay never achieves. When you hear that oboe melody floating over the jungle, or the indigenous voices lifting in prayer, you understand what The Mission could have been: a genuine meditation on faith, culture, and human connection rather than a gorgeous but hollow pageant.

The film’s real tragedy isn’t the destruction of the missions or the fate of the Guaraní, though both are genuinely tragic. The real tragedy is that all this talent, all this ambition, all this spectacular natural beauty, couldn’t add up to a movie that trusted its audience to grapple with moral complexity. Instead, we get Robert Bolt’s Sunday school lesson dressed up in David Lean production values, with two fine actors looking slightly embarrassed by the whole enterprise.

Except for Morricone. His music never apologizes for its emotional directness, never hedges its spiritual bets. It’s romantic without being sentimental, complex without being pretentious. In the concert hall, stripped of the film’s narrative baggage, these themes reveal themselves as pure expression, music that understands something essential about human longing for transcendence.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe great art can emerge from flawed vessels, maybe masterpieces can survive the movies that contain them. The Mission will never be the profound statement about faith and colonialism it wants to be. But as long as Morricone’s music continues to move audiences, and it will, long after the film’s reputation has settled into historical footnote status, something essential will survive. When Gabriel plays his oboe for the Guaraní, when those voices lift in prayer, when the waterfall theme cascades through the orchestra, we hear what the film has been trying to say all along: that beauty and meaning can survive even our most earnest attempts to destroy them.