Catherine Claire, Review of End of the Spear, coming to theaters January 20th

There’s something psychologically enticing about the revenge plot. From The Godfather to Hamlet to Wuthering Heights, the characters may change but the lure is something so seemingly built-in to human nature that we find ourselves inextricably drawn like Narcissus to the reflecting pool. That’s probably why I unintentionally know the opening line to Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had born as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” Revenge feels so natural; it rolls so nicely off the tongue.

Perhaps because revenge feels like a reflex, when a story breaks the cycle of bloodshed, we stop. We sit up. We pay attention. When Jean Valjean in Les Miserables uses the knife to cut the cords and not the throat of his arch-enemy and captive, Javert, we swallow hard. Perhaps we raise an eyebrow. Or when Edmund Dantes in Count of Monte Cristo lets go of his 14-year old hatred of Mondego that he has caressed both day and night in the lonely dungeons of Chateu D’if while Mondego has caressed the woman who would have been Dantes’ wife, we may feel a bit light-headed, like someone just pulled the rug out from under the universe.

If the sight of mercy and grace unsettles us so in fiction, it is no wonder that when a true story like End of the Spear comes along, a disbelieving hush falls over an audience. And perhaps, even angels bow their heads as they recall what they saw unfold in a remote jungle in Ecuador in 1956.

Most who know this tale of the five missionaries--- Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Pete Fleming, and Ed McCulley---brutally killed in the jungle by the tribe with whom they had “dared to make contact,” know this story from the vantage point of Jim Elliot or his widow, Elizabeth. Somewhere along the way a pastor has slipped in their story into a sermon illustration, and we scrawled the words, “He is no fool, who gives what he cannot keep to gain the treasure that he cannot lose” on the back of a program. Or we read Through the Gates of Splendour over a summer break or at the bidding of an older Christian friend.

But strikingly, this re-telling of the story comes from the perspective not of Jim or Elizabeth Elliot but of Steve Saint, who was only a child, when his father Nate found a martyr’s crown at the end of the spear. The choice to tell the story though Steve’s eyes is undoubtedly one of the best that Every Tribe entertainment, a brand new production company, could have made, for it allows the audience not only to internalize the pain of the loss, but also feel the great gravitational pull toward revenge that is thwarted in the return to the tribe, and later on in Steve’s own face-to-face and highly charged encounter with his father’s killer, Mincayani.

As the impulse toward revenge is broken on the micro-level of the individual when the missionary widows and Nate Saint’s sister, Rachel, and a young Steve Saint venture into the tribe and begin to live among them, slowly the drive toward revenge is broken down on the macro-level of the warring tribe itself. The Auca Indians, now called Waodani, because their name meant violent savage, had only known the way of revenge. Now they learn of the One who was speared without spearing back. 

Because the film does a good job of touching on the spiritual themes without hammering the audience with them, it is a film that I’d quickly recommend to friends. Viewers are left to draw their own connections, which in the end is much more powerful than a movie that gets too preachy. 

The film pulls it off, I believe, because we are all so naturally curious when the revenge cycle is broken. Something in us realizes as Plantinga says in his Breviary of Sin that things are not the way they are supposed to be. Five young men at the beginning of their lives are not supposed to die so pointlessly, nor so violently. Revenge is our human way of fixing what seems broken, of restoring the precarious balance of justice, of shalom, to the universe. But the problem is revenge doesn’t work to restore shalom. Revenge moves a victim to a place of perpetrator and begins a whole new chapter of not the way it’s supposed to be. The Waodani, once the most violent society ever documented by anthropologists, know this experientially. Maybe, that’s why when they break their spears and lay them down, we stop to listen.

Catherine Claire © 2006

Comments

[Brian]

Did the PF and Wilberforce staff get a preview?

[jeremy]

Catherine, I was at a L'Abri retreat last week and met a woman who worked on the film and is producing a 10-part documentary series about the film and its "aftermath." She encouraged me to put out word to everyone who wants to see it to try to go on opening weekend, for ratings reasons. And she told me this story: She interviewed, individually, a handful of the Indians who were there after the murder. Each one describes (individually, and with perfect agreement) how upon returning to the beach where the men were murdered, they looked up into the treetops and saw, shining, the figures of each of the five men, ethereal, floating, and singing. Wow.

[jd]

jeremy:

Stories like this (apparitions in the trees) surface all over the place where there have been reports of the Spirit moving in the people. The stories I've heard are exclusively from Third World countries. The particular story I've heard more than twice is of a man (or being) in white. This man communicates something to a native who tells the story of the encounter and eventually it gets to us. My recollection is that sometimes these events have occurred unprovoked: that is, before any Christian missionary presence. I suppose someday we'll know what these things mean, but I admit to a thrill of joy when I hear about things like this. Why wouldn't the Spirit or an angel appear to someone like that? Our Bible certainly relates a few precedents.

[Judy]

I also saw the film with Steve Saint and one of the widows present. Steve told the story of one of the tribesman hearing a trumpet from a CD player years later. He went crazy jumping up and down exclaiming THAT was the sound he heard when the "fireflies" were dancing above the martrys. Gives me chillbumps!

[Catez]

"the film does a good job of touching on the spiritual themes without hammering the audience with them"

I like films like that - the conversations afterward can get real deep when exploring the themes.

[Sarah Hazel]

Never in my life have I gone to a movie where there was complete silence for at least 2 minutes after the film. Nobody moved. Complete silence. It was a powerful movie, well produced. Not once did I think the actors were playing roles, it was real. End of the Spear is the kind of excellence of which God surely says, *well done, thou good and faithful servant.*

[Catherine]

In response to Dignan's Trackback, some resources

Good article on this:
http://www.movieministry.com/articles.php?articles=popular&article_view=68

You're not alone in your rant:
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/it-ought-to-be-a-parable-its-that-good#more-293

And another good review:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/books_entertainment/reviews/MeganBasham/183989.html

And an interesting interview with Chad Allen himself, of note is the impact playing this part had on him:
http://thedqtimes.com/pages/castpages/other/chadendofthespearinterview.htm