How ‘The Convert’ Replaces One Tired Trope With Another That’s Just As Bad
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) “The Convert” has enjoyable pacing and individual performances, but its shallow treatment of its well-worn “white savior” cliches will make few quality believers.
Hollywood has a long and complicated history with what’s become known as the white savior trope. Defined as a White protagonist who swoops in to rescue a Black — or other non-White — character from circumstances like poverty or overt racism. Many of Hollywood’s most celebrated and popular movies have followed the this trope, including films like “Dances with Wolves,” “Pocahontas” and “The Blind Side.” On the flip side, this trope has been criticized for perpetuating ideas of white superiority and minority victimhood.
This was something that director Lee Tamahori (most famous for helming the James Bond film “Die Another Day”) knew he didn’t want to do with his movie “The Convert,” a film about a chapter in the history of his native New Zealand.
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“I was well aware of the white savior trope and all that.” Tamahori told Yahoo. “We went into it knowing full well what we were up against, the Pocahontas routine, et cetera. But I decided to turn it on its head and have everyone think that it’s gonna be the white savior routine when it’s really not.”
The film follows Thomas Munro (played by Guy Pearce), a lay preacher who travels to New Zealand to pastor a British settlement there. He gets caught between two warring Maori tribes and the British locals after saving the chief’s daughter Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne). As the story goes on, Munro becomes more and more disillusioned with his own culture and begins to embrace the Maori culture as his own.
“The Convert” deserves credit for creating a tone and pace for its film that is slower and more contemplative than others in its genre. While we’ve seen the “bad White man” story before many times, this film takes its time with its events. It pauses in moments like when Munro’s under a tree, Rangimai discovering an English dance and the marriage between the two tribes at the end of the war.
These moments, when they work, allow us to take in moments that have become like cliches at this point. This sometimes grants more reverence and solemnity to these moments. Moments like the ending marriage between the warring tribes particularly work.
The brutality of the violence and the performances of the actors are also a treat. The war scenes are shot and scored in a deeply understated way, emphasizing their simple brutality. Pearce always brings equal parts charm and vulnerability to his characters, and does so here as well, while Ngatai-Melbourne brings a fierceness to her character.
But this slow pace is a weakness as well as strength. The movie adds almost nothing to the cliches that it walks through, meaning that its slow stroll through this familiar territory feels more like a slog. It doesn’t dig deeply into Munro’s beliefs or how they differ from the people he’s ministering to. We don’t dig deeply into the beliefs of the Native peoples and how they differ from Christianity. Even Munro’s backstory is just another cliche.
Tamahori made a point in interviews that what makes his film different is how it subverts the white savior tropes.
“Munro’s an observer of events around him, which he can really do very little to influence. He tries in his own way throughout the film to influence,” he added. “But what I wanted to show more than anything else with Tioreore’s female character (is) that she was not a love interest, but there was a respect between the two of them.”
Yet Tamahori doesn’t replace these white savior archetypes with anything else more interesting. Munro being thrown about uselessly makes him feel pointless, not subversive. The film never replaces Munro’s absent romantic relationship with Rangimai with anything else to fill that void, like a developed father-daughter or peer-to-peer relationship. The result is that the movie feels more empty than the original.
Tamahori is also open about how uninterested he is in the religious elements of the story. He told Screen Rant that he didn’t like the character of Munro when he first saw the script.
“He was a religious zealot and I don't like characters about religious zealots. It doesn't hold much sway with me,” Tamahori said. “They don't have anywhere to go with them. You know what they are there. They just believe in a higher power and that dominates the story. I didn’t want to tell that. I wanted a story more about a humanist who’s hiding out in clerical clothes, so to speak, trying to get away from a nightmare in his head.”
The problem is the progressive disillusioned humanist White dude who ends up siding with the Native peoples is just as flat an archetype as the religious zealot. Munro isn’t ever really challenged in his humanist beliefs. He doesn't wrestle with the decision to abandon his culture for another one. Neither he nor the film bother to struggle with the internal tensions in their belief systems because the right and wrong is written on the sky in black and white from the beginning.
And, not to be glib, but the progressive humanist and the religious zealot are not your only two choices. Deeply committed religious believers battle with doubts and come to new conclusions about their faith all the time. A true believer who has had to wrestle with his beliefs and loyalties would have had a far more compelling internal conflict. But that would require an actual knowledge and interest in what religious people believe. It’s something Tamahori appears to lack.
This is tragic because there’s real potential for stories that address the complexity of missionary work and colonial imperialism. Last year’s “The Mission” documentary tried, imperfectly, to address some of these things. On the one hand, missionary work often brings with it contact with the Western world.
On the other hand, studies show places where missionaries were most prominent became less poor and more humane — and remain so to this day. Capitalism has often been tied to imperialism. But historians agree that the spread of capitalism is the biggest cause of the steady reduction of poverty around the world — including in these very exploited places — we see today.
Much has been said about the white savior trope. I’ve always found the “white guilt” genre of Hollywood films equally tiresome. Movies like “The Lost City of Z” and “The Revenant,” for example, tell us how awful White Western Christians are and yet spend almost all their time focusing on the awful Christian White people. If these people are so awful, that’s fine. Instead, focus on the marginalized communities.
Happily, Hollywood has done just that. With movies like “Black Panther,” “Get Out,” “Woman King” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” Hollywood has stopped making movies about how bad White people are and has started focusing more on the underrepresented groups they supposedly care about. This is a welcome change. Yet what has yet to happen is an ability to tell stories about Western Christian history that portray it as complicated, not just black and white.
What white savior and white guilt movies both do is create a fantasy about Christian history that makes us comfortable. In reality, Western Christian history is far more complicated. Filmmakers like Tamahori simply replace one fantasy with another — and, ironically, miss out on a much better movie.
“The Convert” is in theaters now.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.