THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
A film review by Ralf Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralf Benner
Scene after dark scene after darker, more humid scene--bring along your wiper-included night vision specs--you admire the fevered touches Peter Weir brings to his vision of Third World hell in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. Based on C. J. Koch's award-winning novel about an Australian journalist's reckless pursuit for that next front page scoop during the attempted 1965 Communist coup of the Sukarno dictatorship in Indonesia, the movie, filmed in the Philippines and budgeted at around 6 mil, summons up the atmosphere almost too well--you can get mighty depressed as you view the expanses of privation, the polluted waters, the westernized whores waiting for the foreign press at a local cemetery, the random brutalities of insurgency and martial law. The only other "geopolitical" movies I can think of (at the moment) that have this kind of horror-as-beauty impact to the eye are Roland Joffe's THE KILLING FIELDS and, closer to home, Roger Spottiswoode's UNDER FIRE, in which Oaxaca and Chiapas (later to cause Federales much trouble) are set-decorated to be Nicaragua during Somoza's reign. These latter two pictures got caught in the cross-fire of current politics and propaganda, with governments and journalists at war with the movie makers for what they believed were distortions, inaccuracies, out and out lies. (I wondered at the time: What pot is calling what kettle more black?)
Weir doesn't have an explicit agenda; in fact, he intentionally avoids the aftermath of the aborted Communist coup: starting on September 30, 1965, the ensuing blood bath took the lives of between 300,000 and 400,000 Indonesians. But what Weir does is brave enough: he injects the failed revolution into his romantic inferno of sex and competitive journalism (for which Saigon is the top drawer assignment). Taking the safe position of being against hunger and abject poverty, the director puts a naive Australian reporter named Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) at the center of a moral and ethical dilemma. Shortly before the Communist take-over, Hamilton is given by dishy bedmate-British attache Jill (Sigourney Weaver) a secret news flash -- that a shipload of arms for the commies is headed to the country. If Hamilton reveals the info, he would not only be endangering Jill's life, and his own, but also the lives of Billy Kwan, the part-Chinese, part-Australian dwarf photographer most responsible for his limited successful filings, and all the remaining foreign nationals. At the same time, his energetic quest to be a high priest of journalism necessitates that he get independent verification of the still-secret news, as well as to continue to file peripheral stories; while the other journalists are content to keep low during the bloody turbulence by boozing, eating and whoring, he carries on his duties with foolhardy abandon. Unlike UNDER FIRE, in which journalists commit the gravest sin by becoming involved and taking sides, and unlike THE KILLING FIELDS wherein N.Y.Times reporter Sydney Schanberg suffers a case of the guilts over leaving his beloved Cambodian buddy behind, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY confirms the dangers of the naive who compromise professionalism and risk lives for newsprint glory.
When THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY was released in 1983, and Linda Hunt, who plays the male Billy, won a handful of awards, including the Oscar, some of us were not unfair, but, well, reserved about the performance. Partially because we were at the point of overdose with one sex playing another--as in TOOTSIE, YENTL, and VICTOR/VICTORIA (and, to a degree, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP). Those reversals deliberate and comic and, generally, quite satisfactory. In Hunt's case, there isn't any intended capriccio; this is serious acting, and Hunt got the part not only because she had unique physical qualifications, but also because there really wasn't any other male actor available who had the voice for the needed authoritative elocution. Fighting Hunt's performance back then, it seemed to be that Guy and Jill and Billy had a three-way relationship that we couldn't get a fix on. The crux of the bond they shared was never really stated; they knew "something" we didn't. Today, I'm still not sure what they knew, or what Guy and Jill really felt beyond disguised bourgeois pity. But now, minus all the publicity that surrounded her then, Hunt's portrayal seems far more than a director's gamble or desperate last choice. Though there's a slight betrayal to her sex when we hear her reading the wording of an invitation to a swanky affair, Hunt's Billy is a complex hero as sexual eunuch; with cauliflower ears and a bad hair cut that accentuate the Asian, Billy has a face that looks like Gale Sondergaard crossed with Leonard Nimoy. Ever the uninvited yet omnipresent photographer (of gloomy, doomed humanity), who befriends Guy, and who provides Guy entree to the political factions of Indonesia, Billy is also a secret writer of dossiers, keeping files on his "finds." Having a penchant for things Russian, Billy drops a tidbit about Tolstoy while attacking Stalin for having "good discipline--he wiped out ten million." (That's an underestimate by half.) And Billy is the real writer amongst the foreign journalists--his eyes "see" the real Djakarta, the famished Indonesia, and is the only one to recognize Sukarno as the "great puppet master of the right and left." Dressed in print shirts with large pockets filled with film stock to downplay the breasts, Hunt is never ludicrous--not even when dancing with Sigourney Weaver to "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." And the soundtrack's classics, which accompany Billy, are incongruous-to-the-setting perfect: "September" from Strauss's "Four Last Songs," performed by Kirite Kanawa, and excerpts of "L'Enfant" from "Opera Sauvage."
Watching Hunt in a role of a lifetime, you know that she earns the right to steal the picture. But she doesn't, or more precisely, she can't. No one could--not when you're co-starring with two super sexy numbers like Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson, both of whom give great heat. With a youthful, almost petulant handsomeness, in a high school-conservative do, wearing skinny, limply knotted ties and L.A. beach shades and carrying a microphone in one hand and a recorder hanging over a shoulder, Gibson's the spitting image of our worst fears about journalists--a thoughtless Gung Dan. But there's no denying the power of his looks: his beauty at once disarms our defenses and at the same time loads our fantasies which, I have no doubt, manifest into nocturnal emissions. Back in '83, when I first saw the movie, I told friends who hadn't seen THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY yet, or the previous year's ROAD WARRIOR that he'd become the hottest piece on the international movie-beef rack. I even wrote in notes that he'll leave "women with soaked panties." No one believed me--then. When Weaver first meets him at pool side, she lowers her sunglasses to get a better view of him in a swim suit; when Hunt asks her opinion, Weaver says, "Cheeky." Stopping by Gibson's office, she checks him out once again--giving him a below-the-belt glance that doesn't go unnoticed. On what is their initial though informal date, Gibson and Weaver share as a first drink something red-colored, during which he's being boyishly insolent. Suddenly thunder is heard and the rains pour down and the camera moves on their overwhelmingly healthy faces that crack into mile-wide smiles. Jumping into a car to protect themselves from the rain, holding glasses that are filled with a green concoction, immersed in contagious laughter, the heat between them--and for us--begins to rise. We have to wait a bit for their first kiss--a nod to the pent-up, erotic sneakiness of Liz & Monty in A PLACE IN THE SUN. Defying curfews and roadblocks, they speed past a blaze of automatic weapon fire, so gloriously giddy with passion that they can hardly keep their hands off one another. After spending the night together at Hunt's place, all of diplomatic Djakarta knows they've consummated the affair and one envious journalist cracks to Gibson, "You're looking a little pooped, kid." Exactly how we'd all like to be feeling.
Their sexiness notwithstanding, Weaver and Gibson are at least quite adequate. Let's say they get the job done, despite Weaver's poor British accent--sounding as if it's a trial run for a vocal coach to measure its deficiencies--and despite Gibson's runty movement (and gleamy sweats suggesting a trick-as-trophy). Weaver's like-no-tomorrow chin matches her on-screen bulk--in some scenes her face and body have an Amazonian hugeness--and at times she looks as if she could easily squash little Mel. She looks decidedly thinner when she's in a red dress dancing, and only occasionally does it appear she's wearing makeup. (In lobby cards, ads and the front cover of the video, she looks quite cosmeticized--as if she had been done up by that expert wizard, the late Way Bandy.) In some hairdos hinting at Mary Tyler Moore, Weaver's Plane Jane is one of those vagabond career types who has learned to put class in slumminess. And learned to parlay criticism into something constructive: when Gibson's Hamilton smarts at her comment that one of his stories could have been better without the "melodrama," he returns to the tape of it and realizes she's on to something: it does sound like Tennessee Williams on a sap-sucking downer.
Better Australian movies there are--Fred Schepisi's CHANT OF JUMMIE BLACKSMITH, for example (and his DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND ain't too shabby, either)--and more exciting ones, like George Miller's ROAD WARRIOR, a giant, hyper-scored what's-coming-after-the-bomb? "Argosy" vehicle that is an intense, thrilling pleasure to be run over by. And there are more thoughtful, closer-to-our-experience features, like the Australian TV miniseries THE BRIDES OF CHRIST, with Brenda Fricker every 60s Catholic school pupil's recollection of the social and moral turmoil started by Vatican II (and exacerbated by birth control and Vietnam). Weir himself has made movies more popular with audiences than THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY--like the goody-goody WITNESS and the retrograde DEAD POETS SOCIETY. (He's also made two flops that have been wrongfully neglected: THE MOSQUITO COAST and FEARLESS. The latter is a lesson about release dates: dealing with survivors of a commercial jet crash, the movie opened in the fall, just when the nation was gearing up to hop abroad planes for Thanksgiving, Xmas and New Year's. It's not likely to be part of in-flight entertainment.) But THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY gives the audience what it wants--Gibson and Weaver locked in each other's embrace, escaping the approaching genocide. Backed up by the haunting social conscience of Hunt's Billy, and Maurice Jarre's Vangelis-in-the-tropics score, Weir mixes Third World exotic with a tempered Anglo eroticism that remains his most effective movie to date. It's the kind of romanticism you wish Gibson, currently mired in juvenilia, and Weaver, stuck in Purex specials like GORILLAS IN THE MIST and "weep for me" gasbaggers like DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, would find their way back to. They'd be the reunion to bring to the screen the rapture of Anita Baker.
-- RalfBenner@aol.com
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