Steve Saint’s father, Nate, died at the “End of the Spear,” a missionary pilot murdered with four others in a bungled encounter with Amazon jungle natives in 1956.
“End of the Spear” is about that massacre, the people who committed it, and Saint’s emotional confrontation with the man who killed his father.
It’s an independently produced religious film made with imagination and skill. Co-writer/director Jim Hanon takes us into a “Stone Age world” of violence and revenge, and shows us the animist Waodani people and the trap of violence that was their existence.
The conventional way of telling this story would be to set up the massacre, show its effects on young Steve (who lived with his parents in the Ecuadorean Amazon) and then pick up the tale when the boy becomes a man and comes back to meet his father’s killer.
Hanon found the native stuff more interesting and keeps his movie in subtitles and in the jungle and with the Waodani, creating an informative – not to mention beautifully shot and scored – National Geographic drama.
That structure, though, robs this tale of the emotional impact. We never know Steve, despite his banal narration of the tale throughout.
We meet the tribe in the 1940s amid a cycle of revenge killings among different family groups. Men kidnap women, and with machetes and spears, hack and stab those who would stop them, children included.
Mincayani, compellingly played as an adult by Louie Leonardo, grows up in an isolated world of slaughter and fear. The stage is set for the misunderstandings that led to the massacre in 1956.
One girl escaped another massacre, in 1943; Dayumae (Christina Souza) has grown up among missionaries, told them of her people and taught them bits of her language. Nate Saint (Chad Allen) is a pilot determined to make contact with the Waodani. When he and four of his colleagues finally do, it’s a short, bloody meeting.
And as he told Steve, “Son, we can’t shoot the Waodani. They aren’t ready for heaven. We are.” Steve grows up without his father. But as a child (Chase Ellison), he witnesses the contacts that lead to full missionary involvement with the Waodani. He lives through a tribal polio epidemic.
The movie’s best-written scenes retell how the missionaries explain Christianity and Jesus to the Waodani. “He was speared. And he didn’t spear back.”
But the movie’s native focus and its moral absolutes – it is a religious film, after all – don’t leave room for discussing the merits of this culture clash. The Huaorani, as most anthropologists name them, were trapped in a deadly cycle of violence in the 1940s and ’50s. There’s debate over why the violence receded, and the impact of efforts to “convert” these people.
The end of “End of the Spear” feels abrupt, lacking the heartfelt payoff the filmmakers wanted and the audience needs.
** 1/2 | “End of the Spear”
PG-13 for intense sequences of violence | 1 hour, 52 minutes | DOCUDRAMA | Directed
by Jim Hanon; written by Hanon, Bill Ewing, Bart Gavigan; starring Chad
Allen, Louie Leonardo, Christina Souza | Opens today at area theaters.
