It opens with the end credits – titled “On Earth as it is in Heaven” – and instantly we’re into classic territory, a piece which has grown a life of its own. There might not be the astonishing creativity here of his scores for Sergio Leone – at least not in the sense of simply dazzling the listener with extraordinary techniques that nobody had dreamt up before – but in terms of writing such technically-proficient music which is so gut-wrenchingly beautiful, surely this is Morricone at his peak. And it’s not just the melodies – it’s what Morricone does with them, how he arranges them, moves them along, uses them so inventively. The composer’s ability to craft melodies which are enough to melt the hardest heart has never been in doubt, but The Mission goes beyond what even he usually conjured up – there are half a dozen melodies in this score which are just sublime. And honestly it doesn’t just do that – while in practice I’m sure Morricone took great inspiration from the film (being a religious man) and yet it seems entirely as if it’s the film which is taking its inspiration from the music. Music plays such a key part in the film that many people who saw it will have gone out and bought the album but this is the best type of film music, because it doesn’t just “work in the film”, indeed it doesn’t just enhance the film, it absolutely makes the film – and then some. It’s no surprise that the soundtrack album is one of the best-selling of all time. The music soars with beauty and passion, and the film is perhaps cinema’s most extraordinary marriage of image and music this side of Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s not a great film, but it looks beautiful, is well-acted (Jeremy Irons is excellent as the passive senior missionary, Robert de Niro as a reformed mercenary and Ray McAnally as a papal representative with smaller roles for Aidan Quinn, Ronald Pickup and Liam Neeson) and then of course comes the pièce de résistance, one of the greatest contributions to cinema of one of cinema’s greatest contributors, the incomparable Ennio Morricone.
Roland Joffé’s follow-up to his exceptional debut, The Killing Fields, was about a piece of history considerably more distant, as Spanish Jesuit missionaries see their work undone as a tribe of Paraguayan natives fall within a territorial dispute between the Spanish and Portuguese.
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