A reverent portrait of a man who conquered hopelessness with the love of Christ

By Patrick Downes

The film “Molokai: the Story of Father Damien” treats the 19th century Belgian missionary priest, and the banished people he gave his life serving, with reverence and affection. And for that, it is a film worth seeing.

The movie does not succumb to the Hollywood temptations inherent in a dramatization of Blessed Damien’s life -- to exploit the lawlessness and licentiousness of the settlement, to portray physical deformity in a prurient way, to exaggerate inner-church politics and hypocrisy, and to avoid Damien’s Catholic spirituality.

The Belgian-made film does none of the above. Because of that, “It’s no Lethal Weapon 4,” as one person commented upon seeing it. But then it has no intention of being Hollywood fare. In fact the film seems consciously to thumb its nose at the modern entertainment industry’s absorption with cynicism, titillation and self-gratification.

That lesson could be summed up in one scene where Father Damien gently but firmly admonishes a woman friend and patient whom he discovers in one of Kalaupapa’s licentious haunts. Despairing at her progressing disease she tells him that she feels entitled to “the good life.” He replies that the good life was “when you helped the sick” and when you comforted frightened children.

It’s Damien’s paraphrasing of the beatitudes -- which guided Damien’s most inner core and which guides the spirit of this film.

The film was produced by Tharsi Vanhuysse and directed by Paul Cox. The film shown in Hawaii was Cox’s “director’s cut,” the version which prevailed after an artistic tousle in Belgium resulted in a court battle over the final edit.

Cox told the viewing audience at the Hawaii Theatre on Sept. 18 that he wanted his film “to resurrect Damien, to bring him back to life” in a world filled with “so much greed hatred ignorance.”

The movie begins with Father Damien, played by little know Australian actor David Wenham, on an early missionary assignment on the Big Island, unsuccessfully trying to hide from the police a woman suspected of having Hansen’s disease.

The next scene shows Damien and several other priests volunteering, at Bishop Louis Maigret’s (Leo MeKern) request to go to Kalawao on the Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai to serve the diseased citizens whom the law has banished there for life.

Damien goes, and despite the bishop’s fraternal admonition not to touch anyone, he feels compelled to literally embrace his new flock, and to stay.

Wenham’s Damien has a strength and intensity grounded in deep faith. He is compassionate without compromising his beliefs. His sanctity is rough-hewed and simple, but not pious or rigid.

The film shows many scenes which will be recognizable to those familiar with Damien’s story -- his touching the patients and eating with them, his raids of “houses of disrepute,” his great physical labor, the discovery of his disease, his confrontations with authority, the questioning of his chastity, and his dark night of the soul.

It offers a somewhat generous portrayal of Damien’s priesthood and spirituality. He is shown celebrating Mass on five different occasions, he hears confessions, prays the breviary and prays “extemporaneously,” and administers the sacrament of the sick.

Father Damien’s frequent frustrated requests to go to confession nearly becomes a running joke through the movie, but it clearly symbolizes how Kalaupapa’s banishment was as much spiritual as it was physical. When forced to go say his confession in public at sea, from a small boat to Bishop Louis Maigret in a larger ship, his only confessional “screen” was the French language, which the curious onlookers presumably did not understand. The bishop was more embarrassed than Damien, who by this time had learned to live with some humiliation.

But in another scene, humiliation gets the best of him as he seethes in anger at having to undergo a physical examination for syphilis (Hansen’s disease was thought by some to be the fourth stage of syphilis). He is furious, less from the examination itself, than from the implication that his priestly vows are a fraud and that he caught the disease through his own immoral recklessness.

Besides, disease, death and despair, Damien must battle the authority and bureaucracy of religion and government. They are represented in the historical characters of Father Leonor Fouesnel played slyly by Derek Jacobi and prime minister Walter Gibson played by Sam Neil.

Among the people he meets is the dying Protestant British medic Williamson, eloquently played by Peter O’Toole, and the German Molokai rancher Rudolph Meyer (Kris Kristofferson).

There is no Hollywood climax to this story. Rather it is a careful portrait of courage and love painted through the priest’s relationships with those he encounters -- patients and authority figures, doctors and scoundrels, people who admire him and people who don’t. He is a humble servant to them all, a calling which ultimately elevates him in the eyes of the world.

When Damien finally comes down with the disease, he is concerned but accepting. On his deathbed during Holy Week, his thoughts are still for others. “I’m looking forward to Easter in Heaven,” he says, “I will pray for all of you.”

The film uses present Kalaupapa patients, some with obvious disfigurement, in a straightforward non-exploitative manner. Small common scenes, like a fingerless hand casually petting a dog, help remove some of the disease’s dread.

In a nice personal gesture to the patients, their own names are used, for if this film is anyone‘s story, it is theirs.

The character of Mother Marianne is played a bit too devoutly and demurely than one might think for those independent pioneering women who traveled here from half a world away to care for leprosy patients in an isolated island kingdom. Though a robust candidate for sainthood herself, the film treats her as a somewhat minor character. Her actual relationship with Damien was more substantial than the deathbed nurse portrayed. (For this view, see page 22.)

Nevertheless, it is Damien’s movie and some fiction and some minor dramatic liberties were taken at the expense of historical fact in order to develop the character’s story.

Most authentic was the film’s location at Kalawao on the very land Damien worked. With Hawaiian chants and songs woven into the soundtrack and the powerful backdrops of the Pacific Ocean and the Molokai pali, this film has a very Hawaiian feel to it.

The film ends with Brother Joseph Dutton announcing Blessed Damien’s death to a crowd of patients. The camera then pans back and slowly turns 360 across the blue Pacific, up the foreboding cliffs, back to Damien house and finally to St. Philomena Church as hundreds of patients stream toward it. The transformation of Kalaupapa is complete. From despair there is hope; in death, life.