Presented in the World Cinema Documentary Competition of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Tania Anderson’s The Mission chronicles the life of American teenage missionaries as they put their faith to the test far from home. Yet, not the young Mormons nor the filmmaker end up successful.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival is in full swing (20-30 January 2022), and as usual, we are excited to attend the festival as press and share with you our impressions and content related to the films showcased at this year’s Sundance. Among the titles we discovered is The Mission, by Tania Anderson, which received its World Premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.
In her official director’s statement, Director Tania Anderson explains how, on a lonely winter’s walk in some rural part of Finland, she stumbled upon two young American missionaries talking to each other in the cold. As she recalls, “in that moment, [she] only saw two regular guys, who were far away from home.” This event was an impetus for The Mission, which sprung from her desire to show “the young people behind the suits”.
Indeed, The Mission focuses on the young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (most commonly referred to as Mormons) who are sent every year across the world to preach their gospel.
The premise of the film stands strong, temptingly inviting and beautifully metaphorical. The camera is traveling forward, in the woods, slowly but steadily. Above a mighty soundscape, a young man’s timid voice can be heard, reading a religious sermon which evokes the importance of the mission he, and other teenagers, are about to accomplish. The whole program of the film lies here: a sacred, superior voice, and young people who, despite their lack in confidence, will preach this message over a new territory, trying to expand it, and keep it moving forward, just as the camera does.
We are then exposed to four young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, preparing their trip to the Missionary Training Center, and eventually to Finland. This build-up sequence reveals a little about them: they are between 18 and 20 years old, and their families have been saving up money so they can be sent to Finland to accomplish what looks like an initiation rite. The director manages to convey a sense of duty, as well as some apprehension of what lies ahead of them.
However, quickly, the film starts lacking pace and substance, and just like in the entire film, more questions than answers arise when observing those young people, about to be sent away from their home for 18 months, to a country whose language they barely know two words.
Once in Finland, we witness those young people being met with rejection when trying to communicate and deliver their religious message to the Finns. Is this really surprising? And this is where director Tania Anderson misses the point. The direct cinema approach of the film misses a lot of the thoughts and intimacy of those young people. As a result, instead of making us empathize with them and consider the young boys and girls behind the suits, we remain at a relative distance and just witness a predictable failure. Even worse, by piling on scenes where the kids feel frustrated or unhappy of being turned down by people they randomly stop on the streets to promote their faith, with the couple of Finnish words they know, one can easily end up judging those characters. Instead of traveling the world, being open-minded, curious and eager to learn about the country they end up in; they remain self-centered, in their bubble, and their only aim is to impose their views to people they do not know, whose country, language and culture they are unfamiliar with.
In this context, by not taking us close enough to the kids and by not being able to glean authentic reactions or insights from them, one can only regret the naivety of those young people. By only capturing brief surface-level interviews of the kids, the director ends up chronicling an expected failure, at a distance from the characters. “People view you as a missionary rather than a regular person”, one of the missionaries complains. But this is what you are, and this is how you behave. And this is exactly what the film depicts. Not the human being behind the suit. Just the missionary.
What frustrates me the most about the film is just how very little it brings to the table, by refusing, or not succeeding at bringing us close to the kids. One scene in particular epitomizes the film’s weakness. As the young missionaries are meeting with Finnish teenagers, and mentioning the sacrifice and principles they follow as Mormons, one local girl asks the American missionaries the following question: “Do you think your life as a teenager is being limited?”. At last, we will get some insights from them… Their faith is being questioned and challenged. Let’s hear what they have to say… But no! The director cuts out their answer, and prefers to replace their voices by a superficial soundscape! We definitely miss a raw access to the characters.
Later in the film, the same scenario happens again when two missionaries manage to get invited by a family of Finns so they can have a conversation and exchange opinions. The Finnish man politely expresses gratitude for the missionary’s message but explains that he does not need this faith to be happy. This is, however, where the encounter scene stops. Because, once again, a superficial soundscape hinders us from delving deeper into the young missionaries’ motivations, faith, and personalities.
It is not until late in the movie that finally, the director offers us a few glimpses of some missionaries’ thoughts and concerns. It is way too late, yet one can end up understanding how the missionaries’ faith grows stronger in the face of rejection during this difficult period. Nonetheless, for a film that spans nearly two years, this is insufficient. Apart from typical, surface-level discoveries, we don’t feel any evolution.
Therefore, when The Mission comes to an end, the missionaries are back in America, and one declares: “It changed me”. This is when we realize we haven’t seen any changes and haven’t gone on this personal trip with him. As a result, I believe one walks away from the movie with a greater skepticism of the bubble in which those children grow up and live.
Overall, my resistance to the film stems from the problematic distance between the camera and the missionaries. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the visual style of the film either, and I believe an opportunity has been missed. I still have the same perspective and understanding of missionaries as before, and I can’t claim to have met any character on screen. It is even hard to differentiate the four characters that the film pretends to follow, given how little we learn about them. All in all, The Mission is rather disappointing.
Grade: 2/5.
