Film Pairings — Intrigue In The Tropics, Politics And Strange Bedfellows

As cold weather approaches, this might be the time to entertain a couple of politically challenging films set where perspiration is more likely than goose pimples and a dramatic glimpse into recent history provokes thoughts about how our actions in foreign lands are more serious than we might think.  What does our government do when we’re not paying attention?

The Extraordinary Linda Hunt

The Year of Living Dangerously tells the story of an Australian journalist (Mel Gibson) who arrives in Indonesia during increasing public unrest, which finally results in the overthrow of its corrupt President Sukarno.  The question pits a hungry, get-the-scoop journalist against understanding the deeper issues that affect a population being undermined by its leaders.  Not too incidentally, he must choose between his career and the woman he loves.  Tough choices.  Linda Hunt gives her academy award performance as a young male dwarf concerned about the victims of corrupt leadership and Sigourney Weaver is the woman in the ambitious reporter's life.  The steamy, smart sexy, adventurous film directed by Peter Weir was released in 1982.  It was based on the book by Christopher Koch.

The parallels between this film and the film of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American are worth noticing. Director Phillip Noyce initially wanted to do The Year of Living Dangerously before losing out to Weir.  Here, we have CIA intervention in the affairs of 1950s Vietnam while the French were struggling with colonizing it, all supposedly part of domino theory that would again raise its ugly head in the 1960s with the U.S. trying to get rid of the “red menace.”

In this case, Michael Caine plays a cynical journalist posted to Saigon during the French occupation.    The U.S., which escaped culpability in Weir’s version of the Sukarno affair, doesn’t fair so well in The Quiet American.  In fact, this is a remake.  The first film, (1958) starring American war hero Audie Murphy, was virtually disowned by Greene as an American propaganda film.  This one (2002) was more faithful to Greene’s intent.  When we meet Brendan Fraser’s character, we believe he is an innocent do-gooder, a contrast to the older, wizened character played by Caine.  Things, we learn, aren’t always what they seem and right and wrong, as it is in both movies, aren’t necessarily easy to discern. The idea of “collateral damage” is brought up here and is just as serious and controversial today as are CIA dirty tricks. Both films have, a their heart, both doing right on a deeply personal level with those we love and doing right for a cause greater than ourselves.  And when are abominable acts justified in order to achieve a so-called greater good? Do Thi Hai Yen is the beautiful Vietnamese woman who symbolizes both the personal and the universal.

These are two perfect films for those who love history and politics mixed with a little steamy sex.  And if cold, gray winter has descended on your household, take a trip to places closer to the equator.  Turn up the heat and drink something that requires ice and a lime or a lemon.

Film Pairing — Down Under And Outback, Peter Weir And Nicholas Roeg

David Gulpilil is an actor, dancer and artist who grew up in the Outback, far away from the British influence in Australia.  His performances in director Nicholas Roeg’s stunning film Walkabout and in Peter Weir’s magnificent Last Wave have the ring of authenticity and are breathtaking.

He was only 16 when he portrayed someone much like himself in a movie that powerfully conveys the stark similarity between so-called primitive and advanced cultures.

The story begins with a deranged father trying to shoot his daughter and son after taking them out to a remote, desolate area of Australia. The children manage to escape, but to what? The hot, unfriendly environment of Australia’s Outback. It’s unlikely the two young bourgeois children could survive long enough to find their way back to food, water and shelter. Along comes the young man, who has begun his rite of passage into adulthood by attempting to survive on his own in the wild. It is a tribal ritual called “walkabout.”  Being much more equipped to survive in this environment, he takes responsibility for the lost children.  Jenny Agutter is the coming of age girl.  She is an extraordinary actress playing an extraordinary character. (Roeg apparently suffered some criticism — that he exploited her beauty by including extensive nude scenes.)  It is incredible to me that the human mind would go there. This is what the film is about — humans stripped to their nakedness — in a dangerous Eden.  And Lucien John is the young boy, young enough fortunately, to find the walkabout an adventure. And we believe him too. The film is about the three of them and all three are very much up to the task.

What Roeg has wrought here is much more than a story of survival.  It is setting so-called civilization up against the more primitive lives of those who live closer to the earth.  This isn’t romancing the simple life, though there are occasional glances of paradise amidst nature at its most brutal, which includes the graphic killing of prey in order to survive.  If nothing else, it is shows that the life in high-rises and life out in the brush are in many ways very much the same. We are of the same blood.  We have only created a little distance between the killing and the eating.  And in some ways we have desensitized ourselves from the essential, though often unpleasant, truths of existence, including, paradoxically, the impossible gap between the two worlds, as much alike as they are.

The Last Wave is perhaps a little less visually powerful, but no less thought-provoking. An aboriginal man dies in Sydney. The police believe it is murder and a brief investigation leads to four men, one of them David Gulpilil, older now, but still mesmerizing.  Richard Chamblerlain finds himself, through his association with a nonprofit defense association, to be their defense attorney — a difficult job at best.

Weir, who directed Picnic at Hanging Rock and Don’t Look Now, returns to themes that can be described as otherworldly in as much as one must accept a world of not necessarily complete rationality.  In The Last Wave, there is a suggestion that a great natural calamity is about to take place and that, in order prevent it, Chamberlain’s character, must uncover the mystery at the heart of an aboriginal tribe’s “myth.”  He can only do so — and incidentally free the four wrongly charged with homicide — by risking his sanity as well as his life and quite possibly the lives of everyone. Gulpilil plays one of the young men charged with murder and again he is the guide to the outback of the human psyche, a more reluctant guide this time.  Again, Gulpilil is flawless and Chamberlain reminds us just how underrated an actor he has been during his career. 

The question is what is real?  Is rational thought the truth?  What about dreams?  Premonitions? 

What both films have in common besides aborigines, though they are at the heart of them, is a larger question. What do we make of culture and how it shapes “the truth.” Of the two. Roeg’s film makes a statement and Weir’s poses a question.

Not sure what you should be drinking with this double feature.  Walkabout takes place in a dessert.  You could get heatstroke just watching it.  So beer or a chilled wine.  The Last Wave is interminably cold and wet.  Water, water, everywhere.  And caves and wind.  Perhaps an Australian version of an Irish coffee or a House Cappuccino modeled after San Francisco’s Tosca house specialty, coffee, chocolate steamed milk and brandy.

Film Pairing — Keep The Kid In The Picture, And Keep Him Alive

This double feature represents that old saying “keep the kid in the movie…because the kid is the movie.  That’s not altogether true for Witness and The Client, both big box office successes that deal with protecting a child who becomes a target for elimination because he knows too much.

The Client (1994) is based on John Grisham’s bestseller. Brad Renfro plays a mature beyond his years teen caught between an overly ambitious U.S. attorney (Tommy Lee Jones) and some gangsters who killed a high-ranking Louisiana politician.  Susan Sarandon plays Reggie Love, an ex-alcoholic attorney on the comeback trail.  She is the character who must keep young Renfro from being run over by the competing forces, both, it seems, intent on destroying him as well as his moonbeam of a mom in order to win the battle.  All three main characters are strong, as is the plot, but Renfro is the draw here.  He plays a tough, uncannily wise country bumpkin. Sarandon was nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Actress.”  Anthony LaPaglia, Ossie Davis and William H. Macy also appear in the film.  Joel Schumacher directed.

Witness (1985) cleaned up in the awards department. I remember loving the movie. My worry, when I sat down to watch it again these many years later, was that it wouldn’t hold up.  I needn’t have worried.  Director Peter Weir created a nearly timeless film that delivers a sit-on-the-edge-of-your seat plot and sets it against both a rarely used social environment and a strikingly visual landscape.  A young Amish kid witnesses the brutal killing of a cop in the restroom of a train station.  Because of corruption in the police department, neither the young witness (Lucas Haas) nor his police protector Harrison Ford, are safe — anywhere.  They retreat, Ford reluctantly, to an Amish community in Pennsylvania, where we meet an attractive Amish woman played by Kelly McGillis and other members of the boy’s family.  We also see Alexander Godunov, Patti LuPone and the first Hollywood appearance of Viggo Mortensen.  Danny Glover plays a significant role and if you pay attention you’ll get a glimpse of James Earl Jones.

As far as what to have with your double feature, maybe this is an alcohol free night.  The Client takes you back and forth from New Orleans to Memphis, but despite this two-hour plus film, time goes quickly.  Witness moves a little more slowly and lusciously. But when you are in Amish country, you have to be content with sipping lemonade on the porch swing.