The Year of Living Dangerously

#8 in my ranking of Peter Weir’s filmography.

Peter Weir and the new Australian cinema were getting bigger and bigger with every passing year, and Weir directed all of that increasing energy, value, and creative endeavor into the adaptation of C.J. Koch’s novel about an Australian journalist covering the political upheaval in Indonesia in the early years of President Sukarno’s reign. Also, there’s a romance. Reminding me heavily of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, but perhaps less anti-American and more Romantic in effect, The Year of Living Dangerously is Peter Weir taking his success of Gallipoli and pushing his cinematic ambitions further. That he handles it with the same kind of tact and craft that we’ve seen him develop over the previous few years is an incredible thing. He’s never more ambitious than he knows he can handle, and he can handle a lot very well.

Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) works for an Australian television news service, and he’s all ambition about cracking the great story of the place, a place of misery on the streets and stodgy corruption on top. No one outside of Jakarta cares about either, just like Guy doesn’t, and they want something juicy (I was reminded of the invented plots of the characters in John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama). Instead of being briefed by the man he’s replacing, who bugs out before Guy gets off the plane, he’s met by his photojournalist counterpart Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), the narrator of the film. Kwan is probably the most interesting character in the film. A dwarf, he’s an idealist who dreams both big and small. While taking Guy through the slums of Jakarta, he contrasts himself with Guy saying that even small differences mean something while, at the same time, having such great hopes for the early days of President Sukarno that will get dashed into nothing by the end. Billy’s efforts at small scale help center around the young son of a poor woman who will not learn to not drink the water from the river no matter how much he tells her.

In between them comes Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), a British national working out of the British embassy (probably a spy of some kind) who is about to leave the country for good in a few weeks. Billy had fallen in love with her years ago, going so far as to propose marriage which she declines, and Guy begins a passionate love affair with her pretty much from the moment he lands in the city, much to the chagrin of her escort to most places, Colonel Henderson (Bill Kerr).

What kind of amazes me about the film is how everything feeds into everything else. Each character has a part to play in some subplot that informs an idea that feeds into another idea that gets supported by another character. It’s a demonstration of the Aristotelian ideal of Unity of Action, and it’s a very good example of it. What does Billy’s love for Jill have to do with anything? What does Billy’s early admiration for the promise of Guy have to do with Billy’s early admiration for President Sukarno? What about Guy’s assistant Kumar (Bembol Roco), what does his effort to help Guy’s tracking down of a lead about PKI arms shipments have to do with Guy’s love affair with Jill?

Everything in the film is feeding a central idea of small men in large times. This is a modification of what Weir was doing in something like Picnic at Hanging Rock where a handful of girls could just get swallowed up by Nature, leaving no trace at all, where “events, dear boy, events” have replaced Nature, leaving only the difference in scope between the individual and the forces arrayed against him. How much can Guy affect things? Can he help or hinder the people of Indonesia by reporting on the news that the PKI forces are receiving arms from Vietnam? And all of the little plot threads that are interwoven through this tapestry of the failed communist revolution that leads to tighter military control feed on this idea that Guy will simply not make much of a difference.

Billy’s little child friend just dies not matter how much money he shoves into the boy’s mother’s hands. The people will starve no matter what Guy reports in the paper. Sukarno won’t even notice the protest sign that Billy hangs out his window. What can Guy do in that instance? He has Jill.

Now, the poster makes this look like a romance first and foremost, and it’s not. It’s really a dual portrait of two men in the face of repression and horror and how they deal with it. One, the cynical and bitter older man who wants to still incite positive change because of his base romanticism, reaches his end, and the other, the younger romantic about his job ends up finding what is important to his own life. That’s kind of an awful thing in the face of the mass of people desperate to get out of Indonesia after the failed revolution that Guy is able to almost waltz through because of his status as an Australian citizen, but could he do any more while staying? Or would he end up just like Billy, having accomplished nothing?

The romance angle is supporting Guy’s emotional journey through the limits of an individual’s efforts in the face of history (Napoleon might disagree, but Napoleon wasn’t a journalist) and finding what’s important.

I don’t think this is in the top tier of Weir’s work, but it is very good. I find there’s an uncomfortable balance around Guy’s choice that the film largely glides over without really addressing because it’s actually kind of horrible to think about. I don’t think it would cast Guy as a villain, but it’s about leaving a people in the hands of a dictator and just giving up. That’s harsh, but that is the groundwork that the film had laid out but ignores.

Still, performances are great. Linda Hunt won her Oscar for playing a man, and despite the showiness of the premise of her casting (Weir apparently just didn’t like any of the male little people he met in casting, so he settled on Hunt), it’s a strong performance that deserves recognition. Gibson shows he’s more than just a pretty face with a searching portrayal of a man discovering his limits. Weaver is strong as the largely ornamental female character, though with greater depth around her at the same time.

This is an admirable effort from Weir, taking more money and a grander scope and turning out something surprisingly focused and affecting. Maybe Hollywood will come knocking.

Rating: 3.5/4