RETURN TO PARADISE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Wow! Pretty tough to imagine this
not being the best film I see this year. Three
buddies committed a crime in Malaysia, two left the
country, and one was caught. If neither of the
free buddies go back to stand trial the caught man
will hang. Whoever goes back will be volunteering
for prison under horrible conditions. An
intelligent film about very tough moral decisions
and their consequences. Rating: 9 (0 to 10), high
+3 (-4 to +4). A very heavy spoiler after the
review discusses the issues this film raises. This
is a very good film but some of its issues cannot
be discussed without disclosing plot twists.
This is an adult film in the literal meaning. It is a film that does not sugar coat its view of reality. Things do not happen in this film because of wishful thinking the way they might in a Frank Capra film. RETURN TO PARADISE is a film without a safety net. It asks the right questions and does not provide the viewer with pre-digested answers. In A FEW GOOD MEN there are some interesting issues raised, but there are giant neon signs telling the viewer which side to sympathize with on the issues. Independently of the Jack Nicholson character's ideas, the script makes him an insulting male chauvinist. The film entirely sidesteps the issue of whether Nicholson might be correct about defense, he clearly is a villain. RETURN TO PARADISE also raises issues. But it is not a morality tale. It does not tell the viewer what the answers are. There are no neon signs.
Tony (David Conrad), Sheriff (Vince Vaughn), and Lewis (Joaquin Phoenix) are having a good time together in Malaysia. They are drinking beer, seeing the countryside, getting into trouble, and smoking cheap hashish. They throw out the hashish they have not used when Sheriff and Tony have to go home.
Flash forward two years. Sheriff is a limousine driver, and Tony is an architect. Lewis has spent the last two years in a Penang prison. Now the Malaysian government is going to hang Lewis as a drug dealer unless he can prove he was only a user. To do that he has to produce the people who shared the drugs with him. Informally the Malaysian government says that they will give a total of six years prison time to the one or two people who show up and will commute Lewis's term. Lawyer Beth (Anne Heche) is in New York and has the job of convincing Sheriff and Tony to go and take their prison sentences so Lewis will not be executed. But how does one weigh the greater evil when the prison is so bad that six years may be tantamount to a death sentence or perhaps be enough to permanently unhinge the prisoner.
Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix are perhaps better known as the leads of CLAY PIGEONS. Here they have a very different moral relationship but their fates are similarly connected. Anne Heche of SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS is the lawyer stuck with the task of getting two men to give up years of their lives to save the life of someone they hardly know. The script is based on the film FORCE MAJEURE by Pierre Jolivet. The original English language script was written by Bruce Robinson who wrote what I considered the best film I saw in the 1980s, THE KILLING FIELDS. And here he is connected with the best film I have seen thus far in the 1990s. Wesley Strict rewrote the script.
RETURN TO PARADISE is a rare film experience. It is an intelligent and adult look at people making hard choices in the real world. I give it a 9 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +3 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Heavy spoiler.... Heavy spoiler....Heavy spoiler...
If this film were only about the heavy price Sheriff and Tony were being asked to pay to save Lewis's life, this would be a very good film. But it goes much beyond that. Unfortunately one only realizes the other issues of this film toward the end and I cannot discuss them in the main body of may review.
If one were to ask if freedom of the press is a good thing or a bad thing, I think most of us would vote in favor. We give the press a broad range of freedoms in this country in the hopes that it will help to topple dictators, or better yet never letting them get started. We do not want to let the government limit our freedom of expression, our First Amendment rights. If I were asked what is the downside of giving this much power to the press the first example that comes to mind is that we are giving the press the right to publish how to make dangerous devices. There have been issues in the past of magazines wanting to publish instructions for building your own atomic bombs. It is also very timely that this film comes out just as a media barrage is toppling a President. There are certainly good arguments that the press has overstepped its bounds.
Our First Amendment really hamstrings us in controlling dangerous information. There are laws that may let us use restraining orders, but deep down the First Amendment has given all the big guns to people who want to make information available, for better or for worse. In the case in RETURN TO PARADISE it was a lost cause from the beginning. The international press was going tell the world about Lewis's case. That would anger the Malaysian government and they would punish Lewis. Any nobility on the part of Sheriff and Tony would be misplaced. (And that really is something we rarely see in film. The ethical thing to do is rarely shown as being useless and pointless.) As soon as the press got hold of the story, it was out of the main characters' hands. Lewis was going to die, not because of his crime, but because the founding fathers felt the press had to be unrestrained.
Another issue is raised in the film, that that we are much more tolerant of drug use in this country than the rest of the world. The Malaysian judge has a very good point. In his country children are free from the risk of drugs. Malaysia has a much lower risk of crime. Our lax attitude on drug enforcement also has a heavy price. We walk a middle ground between either legalizing drugs or treating drug use as harshly as the Malaysians do. We are afraid to do the former and do not have the stomach to do the latter. And that middle ground of shadow tolerance is also what kills Lewis in this film.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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