I just have this bias against biopics, and I can't deny it. Taking entire lives of complex men and squeezing that into two hours is just a hard thing to do. The process simplifies instead of illuminates complexities, and when complexities are revealed, they're quickly forgotten because we have a movie about a martyr to make here. The story of the life of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist fighting to preserve the rubber farmers in the rainforest, is brought to earnest life by John Frankenheimer and his trio of writers, based on Andrew Revkin's book, but the film can never really get past the fact that it's more hagiography than any kind of exploration of politics or the human condition.
We start with Chico as a child, watching his father get cheated out of the full price of his rubber harvest from the local merchant (Luis Guzman) and learning to read from a city dweller come to the forest to make a living. He grows up, joins the rubber workers union under its president Wilson Pinheiro (Edward James Olmos), and its efforts to protect the trees and their livelihoods from the encroaching ranchers, exemplified by Darli (Tomas Milian), who has cleared a large section of forest for his ranch. The central conflict is over a proposed road through the forest, championed by Alfredo Sezero (Carmen Argenziano), a government official.
Where the film loses me is in the portrayal of Chico's ideals. They're incoherent, at best. He's a rubber farmer who wants the people of his area to continue rubber farming. Clear enough. Cutting down vast swaths of the forest will stop them from farming. Clear enough. And then, as his profile grows and after he loses a local election, the documentary filmmaker Steven Kaye (Nigel Havers) brings him to Miami to meet with bankers talking about South American development. Frustrated at the bankers' lack of care for his position and feeling like a tool for someone else's agenda, Chico faces down Steven in a bathroom where he says he doesn't oppose progress or roads or development. He just wants find jobs for his people that won't leave them in poverty (this combines with his first effort at confrontation when he learns that those being paid to cut down the trees aren't paid much themselves). But, this hits up with dialogue from others who say that the rubber trade is dying (it apparently was because synthetic rubbers are generally superior to natural ones), so we have this portrait of a man trying to preserve a dying industry by denying other people's use of the land all while insisting he's not against progress, he just wants a good wage for his people.
And the film never comes close to thinking about his ideology again after that. He's never anything less than an angel of a man dedicated to helping those around him, but the contradictions in his belief system are things that I'm not even sure anyone in the movie's production realized.
And that was the one thing about Chico's character that interested me, trying to cling to the past in a changing world, and the movie just...treats him as fully right. It's what I was afraid Frankenheimer was going to do in Against the Wall. And it's just hagiography, and Chico ends up not a terribly interesting character in the middle of a situation that's presented with some level of interesting nuance which ultimately doesn't matter because Chico is an angel of a man.
So, everything bred from that thin portrait of the central character just becomes less interesting. The picture of the fight between homesteaders and ranchers (to put it in American western terms, a comparison the film actually makes explicit early) becomes a fight between good and evil. So, when the film gives us an ending where the government literally steals thousands of acres from our villain, what is the film trying to make us feel? It's justified and he reacts badly because he's bad? The whole approach to Chico muddies the ending so much that it's more confusing tonally than anything else.
And, I never feel much for the tragic ends of unrealistic characters. It's sad, but sad in a reading an encyclopedia entry kind of way, not feeling a tragic loss of a character I care about sort of way. Everything ends up muted, stemming from the film's incoherent and flat portrait of its main character.
Frankenheimer seems to have had the passion for this project like he had for Against the Wall, but the script is just not there. I seem to be in the minority on this one (out of a very small number of those who've actually seen this HBO film), but I found it thin and unpersuasive and unengaging emotionally. Frankenheimer films handsomely and Julia gives a dedicated, somewhat effective performance, but he's limited by the writing.
