Column: A movie for our cultural winter: ‘Black Robe’

For months I’d been searching for a movie that I’d first watched years ago, a movie that was released long before the wokeists took control of popular culture.

And happily, finally, the other day I found it again, this time on Amazon Prime Video. It might not be a movie for you. But it is a movie for me: “Black Robe.”

Released in 1991, it is the story of a young Jesuit priest in the early 1600s, sent out from Quebec with Algonquin guides on a dangerous journey of 1,500 miles across the unforgiving Canadian wilderness to find the Huron people. The film is directed by Australia native Bruce Beresford (“Driving Miss Daisy,” “Tender Mercies,” “Breaker Morant”), with a screenplay by Brian Moore from his novel.

When I first watched it, what I needed afterward was a quiet place and long silence. And when I watched it the other day, I retreated again and let my mind take me up north.

There is nothing romantic or sentimental about “Black Robe.” Perhaps that is why I loved it. There are no cartoonish superheroes used as avatars in our vulgar modern tribal games. There is no computer-generated imagery, no explosions, no simple quest story easily analogized to fit our modern politics.

But there are the great Canadian forests and silence — the tall pines standing witness like columns of a great French cathedral. And the silence that comes from the inevitable tragic clash of cultures between Europeans and the First Nations people. Some wait for God. Others wait for the She-Manitou.

There is snow, water, faith, cold, profound cruelty and profound love.

I suppose the easy thing to do is put your political blinders on and see “Black Robe” as a story of Europeans bringing God to the forest people as a precursor to colonialism and conquest. Many who genuflected before Kevin Costner’s far more popular and romantic “Dances with Wolves” just hated “Black Robe.”

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Columns are opinion content that reflect the views of the writers.

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Not all critics. The phenomenal yet often deliciously cruel John Simon called it “masterly.”

But David Kehr, a former Chicago-based critic and now curator, dismissed it as a boring slog: “... the pleasures of ‘Black Robe’ are purely masochistic, and slight at that.”

I do not consider it boring or I wouldn’t be telling you about it. The cinematography is astounding, yes, but so is the humanity revealed, the human spirit transcending a world that has always been brutal, tribal and blind, no matter what the continent, period or culture.

On their journey, the Algonquin guides come to believe the Jesuit Father Laforgue is a demon and discuss killing him. No, says Chomina, the Algonquin leader played by August Schellenberg. Chomina agrees that Father Laforgue, whom the guides call “Black Robe,” is stupid, and that his heaven is barbaric, but thinks they should not kill him because the French “are like us.”

Chomina looks beyond tribal blinders to see the humanity in Laforgue.

And later, after they escape the unspeakable tortures of the Iroquois, Laforgue reaches the Huron, who are suffering from fever. The Hurons consider killing him, too, reasoning that if they convert to Christianity, they’ll become weak and such weakness will invite the Iroquois to destroy them.

One Huron, even while thinking of killing the black robe, asks him: Do you love us?

Laforgue’s mind races across every face he has seen on his voyage, some cruel, some stupid, some noble like Chomina, and tells them the absolute truth. Baptism will not cure them of fever. But he does love them.

And he begins to weep.

Why am I writing about this now?

Because the other day I wrote a column about the left seeking to diminish classic literature in American schools. The trend is to support new, didactic works that flow from critical race theory and other ideologies to provide for politically correct instruction for children.

You might think this evil or good. I see it simply as another set of blinders, designed to direct humans (or horses) along a defined path. The tears of the black robe are like the tears of the shattered Trojan King Priam in Homer’s “The Iliad,” who weeps for his lost son Hector and kisses the hands of his killer, Achilles.

They are alike in this way: They are human tears. They are not the tears of two-dimensional cartoons. What draws those tears isn’t politics or culture but humanity — its shocking brutality, indifference and ability to inflict suffering, yet also its limitless capacity for beauty and love.

And isn’t that what true art is supposed to be about?

Homer’s “The Iliad” serves as the foundation of literature now under siege. It is neither sentimental nor simplistic. What’s often ignored or passed over in this great Greek epic, remarkably, is the treatment of the Greeks themselves. The best, most virtuous, most noble, most civilized, even the most human, are the Trojans. That’s what makes it all so complicated and why it and “The Odyssey” are so revealing about human nature.

But now we have a cultural unwillingness to deal with the complexities of Western traditions and human nature itself. As we put blinders on our children, what worries me is that the day is fast approaching when we’ll no longer be able to appreciate there is more to human life than how it fits, categorized, broken down by race and gender, into our power politics.

I hope you see “Black Robe.”

And I hope you’ll read “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” as well, if you haven’t already.

It’s winter. Snow is falling. Cold wind. A good time for reading or watching a film like this.

Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass