Defiant purity is both subject and style of de Oliveira's film about a freethinking 17th-century Jesuit priest, Antonio Vieira. Championing the cause of Brazil's blacks and Indians and Portugal's converted Jews, Vieira realizes the power of truth spoken. Brought before the Portuguese Inquisition, his iconoclastic thinking about God, prophecy, and the nature of laughter makes him the darling of Europe while reviled at home. Three actors play Father Vieira in the callow compassion of youth, the electric rhetoric of maturity, and the savvy anger of old age. De Oliveira's striking compositions are juxtaposed (often ironically) with a veritable barrage of words. His biopic is a cinema of ideas, the true meaning of a person's life.