MEN WITH GUNS

John Sayles remains one of the great independent moviemakers whose profound movies are now distributed by boutique divisions of the majors. What makes his movies great is an incredible amount of intelligence in storytelling, a passionate reserve, a moral hunger, an in-depth familiarity with Christian values, and an idealistic hope tempered by a very realistic view of mankind. Sayles makes movies because he wants to tell important stories. Ever broadening his own horizon, he decided recently to learn Spanish and then decided to write a script in Spanish a few months later which became MEN WITH GUNS. The incredibly challenging undertaking of producing a movie in another language which he recently studied has produced one of the best movies of his illustrious career, equaling such great movies as MATEWAN.

Dr. Humberto Fuentes (Federico Luppi) has just lost his wife. He treats the rich and famous in Mexico City. An Army general whom he is examining explains that the media does not always report the truth about the Indian rebellions. Instead, the general notes, the news media exaggerates the truth because people want drama.

Since his wife has just died and he has never had a religious faith, Dr. Fuentes decides to find out if life really matters. He believes that his only legacy are the young doctors whom he taught so they could go into the mountains to care for the Indians under the provisions of a U.S. aid program. When he sees one of these former pupils stealing a TV, he tails him and finds out that his legacy may be no legacy at all. So, he drives into the jungle to track down each one of his students.

Travel by explorer and foot from tiny village to remote village, he finds out one by one that each of his students has been killed, some by the army who think that the doctors have been helping the guerrillas, and some by the guerrillas who think that the doctors have been helping the army. In each remote village where one of his students was stationed, the Indians are very scared of him, but there is always an outcast who is willing to tell him a piece of the puzzle: a blind woman with no family, a little orphan boy, a soldier who deserted, or a priest who has run away from the horror. These outcasts even take Dr. Fuentes to the killing fields. In each case, it doesn’t matter whether it was the army or the guerrillas who killed people because it was always men with guns, who were trying to exercise power over ordinary, poverty-stricken people by killing the doctors trying to help keep them alive. As Dr. Fuentes climbs the trail into the mountains, he hears that there may be one more village where one of his students may actually be alive. Along his journey, there are scenes of tremendous self-sacrifice, set in a world of extreme cruelty.

MEN WITH GUNS is storytelling at its best. Although John Sayles understands the sinfulness of man, he cuts away from the actual acts of violence to allow the viewer’s imagination to do justice to the story. Although he is overtly anti-European, he does not portray the Indians as being much better. Although he leans toward agnosticism, the movie is laced with Christian references. Since the movie is produced in part by the Anarchists’ Convention, it is self-evident that the movie is anti-government. However, this is not an anything-goes-licentiousness. This is a power corrupts and so we must limit government and search for that something good in man that is very hard to find. Ultimately, Sayles is a romantic, but whatever his worldview, he is asking extremely moral questions and presenting facts and perspectives that are trying to get at the truth. Of course, he does not realize that that Truth is the very faith in that God who died and rose again from the dead to offer a free gift of salvation to all who call upon His Name, including the poorest of the poor.