The Letters

What makes a person great? Great accomplishments? Selflessness? Motivation and determination? Not allowing greatness to get in the way of further accomplishments? In the case of Mother Teresa of Calcutta… check, check, check, check. The docudrama "The Letters" (PG, 1:54) portrays a great woman and shows us what made her great, but, almost as importantly, shows us what made her human.

The film uses Mother Teresa's own words in the letters she wrote to tell her story in the context of the Catholic Church's process of examining her life for beatification and possible canonization. It turns out that the ethnic Albanian woman who was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, chose to become Sister Teresa and became world famous as Mother Teresa experienced intense loneliness and dealt with long-term doubts about the presence of God in her life. Even so, she managed to become the personification of love, compassion and selfless service and started a worldwide movement to help the disadvantaged.

The letters provide the framework for the story when a priest named Benjamin Praggh (Rutger Hauer) travels to India to meet with Mother Teresa's long-time spiritual adviser, the elderly Father Celeste van Exem (Max von Sydow) and discusses her life. Father van Exem quotes from her letters throughout the film and ultimately gives Father Praggh five decades' worth of letters to aid in his investigation. The scenes in which the two priests talk (the weakest moments in an otherwise very strong film) are short, few and far between. This story is mainly told chronologically within extended flashbacks which vividly illustrate why the woman who wrote those letters was such a special and compelling character.

Most of the movie focuses on less than seven years in Mother Teresa's nearly seventy-year-long ministry. In 1946, she was happily teaching privileged young Indian girls at the Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta, but she becomes increasingly burdened by the extreme poverty that she regularly observes down in the streets literally right outside her classroom window. She felt she was honoring God's call to be become a nun at 18, but now she experiences what she describes as "a call within a call" to go into the slums of Calcutta and work to help that city's "poorest of the poor". Gaining permission to work outside the convent walls requires her to make her case to the convent's short-sighted Mother General (Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal), who forwards it to the convent's priest, then the local bishop, who takes it to the Vatican, where it has to be considered by none other than Pope Pius XII.

The granting of Sister Teresa's initial request (for up to one year) was the beginning of the nun's legendary work ministering to, in her words "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for". She started with nothing but her compassion. She wandered the Calcutta slums helping those she came across who would accept her aid. She had to battle the local Hindu population's hesitation to trust an English-speaking woman in the newly independent nation and the animosity from those who were sure that she was there to convert people to Catholicism. She also had to navigate the many rules and restrictions of the Catholic Church and deal with the opposition of some who felt that her apparent calling was contrary to the vows she had taken years earlier. Still, in spite of all this, she persevered and left a lasting legacy.

"The Letters" is a surprisingly powerful movie. Its particular strength is the performance of British actress Juliet Stevenson in the main role which she embodies with remarkable authenticity – physically, emotionally and spiritually. You don't have to be a spiritual person to appreciate her performance or this film. In the movie, just as in Mother Teresa's life, her faith was the background of her story and the foundation of her work, but her innate goodness as a person is what shines most brightly. The film's sets and script are simple, but they seem appropriate for the simplicity of this story. The portrayal of Mother Teresa's personal and spiritual struggles and triumphs are entertaining, touching and compelling. The real Mother Teresa wanted her letters destroyed upon her death for fear that people would "think more of me and less of Jesus." Either way, her letters have survived to further inspire others – and produce one h*** of a movie. In conclusion, to sum up "The Letters": I have a letter for you: "A".

The letters has some really good moments that really showcased the impact of someone like Mother Teresa on this planet. Certain moments that were uplifting and showed the type of woman she was through her 60 years of helping the poor.

I wish the movie was a little bit better, however. I thought the acting could have used a little more emotion. It seem a lot of times more like someone reading their lines off a cue card than actually acting.

The setup of The Letters maybe at fault. The Letters is about a priest who is trying submit Mother Teresa for sainthood. After witnessing one miracle, he gets a call from the arch Bishop who gives him Letters Mother Teresa gave to him that documented her work from her own point of view.

The movie gives a feel of going from letter to letter. I'm not sure if that was what they met to do or that's just how it ended up, but it made the movie hard to get into on an emotional level.

It's worth it to see how Sister Teresa becomes mother Teresa (especially if you don't know), but it does not pull the stings of your heart like it should.

Disclaimer: I was a small investor in this film (I was cold-called about the film 7 years ago when Bill Riead was in the early stages of making the movie, and decided it was a good project). So I have a small financial interest in this movie.

I add that I am not catholic (nor even religious), and knew little about mother teresa before I saw this film, so I have no connection to the church, or mother teresa's particular cause.

As to the movie, let me start by saying the movie is not a great piece of filmmaking, and has obvious flaws. For example, the narration is stiff and tiresome in places, and the script feels unsophisticated compared to what we're used to these days.

ON THE OTHER HAND, despite its flaws, I found the movie to be quite powerful. I think the professional critics have really missed something here. I find it hard to believe that anyone could watch this movie and not be inspired by what this woman did, under the conditions that she did it. If you don't feel like crying at times, then you must have a hard heart. :-) The suffering of those people was off-scale, as was the personal sacrifice of mother teresa, who had to fight to be released from her cush job as a nun/teacher at a fancy girls school, to give her life to the poorest, sickest rejects of society. We should all be more like her.

I also want to plug some of the acting: I thought Stevenson was strong (within the limitations of the script), but it was many of the Indian actors (previously unknown to me) who stood out as charismatic and excellent.

Bottom line: lower your expectations as to the entertainment value of the film, and go see it for the way it will make you feel. And take your kids -- it's a very good message.

Don't go looking for excuses not to. You will not find any reason here. I personally enjoyed the film. I found it informative, inspiring and enlightening. I too was a skeptic and had serious questions regarding her sanity and her mission. From the point of view of an outsider it seemed to be such a foolish and futile mission. A simple explanation on how something nonsensical actually makes sense. India has a caste system wherein the lowest of the caste or "untouchable" are helplessly poor with no chance of changing their circumstance. Adding to that the country is overpopulated. So do the math. Her mission was to help the poor and India had in abundance the people she was seeking to help. It was exactly the place she needed to be! By the end of the film all my doubts erased and every question answered. I hope this encourages you to see it yourself and disregard any poor reviews of this film. Deepen your knowledge of Blessed Mother Teresa, her life and her mission.

I would never have known about this movie had I not come across it on Netflix. I haven't watched any of the other films about Mother Teresa, so I can't compare, but none of these biography movies are big names, I think. Maybe because Mother Teresa herself isn't that big a name?

I'm not really sure how she's perceived in the rest of the world, but I grew up in Bangladesh, where she greatly revered. Indeed she's revered throughout South Asia, probably the most in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) where she was based. But I know Bangladeshis specifically revere her because she helped the refugees who fled from present-day Bangladesh to Kolkata during the Independence War, and after the war, she came over and built orphanages and shelters for women.

This biography shows how she got started with her work - how she left the life of a cloistered nun in a convent and went to work in the slums. The movie didn't directly reference the Bengal famine of '43, but that had to be a huge motivator, because people were dying en mass on the street due to starvation.

The biography then follows her through a few milestones of her work and how she came to form and lead the Missionaries of Charity convent, all the while highlighting her growing sense of loneliness and despair and feeling of abandonment as she expressed in her letters to her spiritual adviser. I thought the movie had a strong emotional core. And I also thought Juliet Stevenson gave a fantastic performance as Mother Teresa (although I wondered if she overdid the accent a tad?). And I really connected with her performance and the story of this woman who really was as selfless as they come.

She always insisted that she was doing God's work, that it was His will that she do this work, not hers. I take this to mean that the calling she felt to help the poor was a force much greater than herself.

There are a few minor gripes I have with the film though. First, I was looking forward to seeing Kolkata/Calcutta in film. Bengal and Bengalis don't get much attention in International films. While there were a very few spoken lines in Bengali, most of the characters (even the slum dwellers) spoke in English with each other. I understand this was done for the ease of the audience, but they spoke perfect posh English and they came off as somewhat genteel and polished, which was at odds with the fact that they lived in slums.

I was also disappointed that their names were pronounced the Hindi way rather than the Bengali way. And there were lots of scenes when people are shouting in the background and the subtitles say "speaking in Bengali", but the words were unintelligible and in some instances they sounded Hindi. Maybe they just didn't get enough Bengalis on board while making this movie, and that was disappointing. But I suppose this is how most people from third world countries feel when they see their countries not depicted quite right on the screen.

Finally, there was a glaring anachronism that I noted. Characters referred to Bangladesh during scenes taking place in 1949 - right after the partition. Bangladesh ought to have been referred to as East Pakistan. Unless I am deeply misinformed about the history of my country, the name Bangladesh didn't come into usage until many years later when East Pakistan started thinking about Independence. (And it was only after independence that it became officially known as Bangladesh.)

However, I suppose these gripes are rather minor in the larger context of the film. I'm glad to have watched at least one movie where I learned about how she got started and formed her congregation.