Reeling Backward: "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1982)

You could probably summarize the entire plot of "The Year of Living Dangerously" on a postcard, with space left over. Not a lot really happens, yet what does transpire seems so consequential and filled with dramatic heft.

The film, directed by Peter Weir based on the novel by C.J. Koch, is a testament to the observation by screenwriting legend William Goldman that dialogue is often the least important part of a script. The movie has many long wordless or near-wordless scenes that use imagery and music to pull us into an emotional vortex of longing and dread. Weir and Koch co-wrote the screenplay along with David Williamson.

Take the scene where callow young Australian journalist Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) and British embassy worker Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) first hook up in Indonesia circa 1965. They've been introduced -- set up, really -- by a mutual friend (more on that later) and have sort of skipped around each other nonchalantly a couple of times before. Then they show up at a party for Westerners, each accompanied by different people.

Jill is just ravishing, creamy shoulders and lithe limbs bursting out of a strappy dress; Guy is seething and sweaty, filled with primal urges. They're incredibly beautiful people, and everyone in the room can't take their eyes off them. They bump into each other while dancing with others, try to brush it off, but their attraction is combustible, and palpable.

One gets the sense the other party goers are only there to serve as witnesses to their joining.

Later they escape from a stuffy embassy party and drive off in his car for a tryst, despite the strict military curfew and shocking break with the Brits' starched-shirt decorum. They run a blockade, Guy's Chevy Impala gets filled with bullet holes, but they laugh and smile at their little rebellion, as the electronic thrum of Vangelis' "L'Enfant" buoys them into the night.

Most of the talk Jill and Guy do share is logistics: Where are you going? When are you leaving? Why won't you return my calls? The only real substantive conversation they have onscreen is Jill (who's actually a spy in the book though it's only hinted at in the movie) telling Guy about an incoming shipment of arms to support the Indonesia Communists (PKI), a clear indication a coup is imminent. Guy opts to use the intel for a story -- rather than save his own neck as she intended -- vaulting his career but betraying Jill.

"Year" is masterful at evoking a specific time and place -- one that, frankly, isn't high in the consciousness of most Americans. Indonesia in the mid-1960s was a place of burgeoning rebellion, and a backwater for aspiring foreign corespondents like Guy. He and the other journalists, from the Washington Post or whatnot, pine for promotions to Saigon, where the real action is. They're fighting each other for scraps of information from the government of the dictator-like president, Sukarno, and for newsprint inches and airtime back home before an indifferent public.

Weir spent much of his film stock simply representing the street people of Jakarta, underlining the humbling poverty and rising anger of that period. (The film was actually shot in the Philippines, as the Indonesians were hostile to the story; the movie was banned there until 1999.)

Here was a people who had felt the yoke of the West, shrugged it off, and now felt the push-and-pull of various factions vying for power: the establishment, the Muslim leaders, the Communists, etc. Meanwhile, the people suffered and starved.

The film is likely most remembered today for the casting of Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan, the mysterious and oddly affecting photographer/enigma who befriends both Guy and Jill, and nudges them together. It was one of the first major instances of a performer playing a character of the opposite gender. Hunt won the Academy Award for her performance by a Supporting Actress, launching an unlikely career that has remained busy till today.

She's completely believable as a man; Hunt chopped her hair to a severe short style, wore padding under Billy's standard uniform of trousers and a vaguely Hawaiian shirt, with the shirt pocket stuffed to give it a weighted, untidy look. Billy, of course, is not an average-looking person: he's supposed to be half Caucasian and half Chinese, and a dwarf to boot.

Billy also seems to be asexual; everything about him screams Other. Yet he easily slides in and out of the Sukarno corridors of power, or mingles with the street people unnoticed. He is accepted, or at least tolerated, wherever he goes. His exceptionalism somehow grants him a form of invisibility, which he cherishes and utilizes for his purposes.

Billy's motivations are hard to discern, and fickle. He claims to admire Sukarno for his puppet master skill at balancing the forces arrayed against him, but cares deeply about the suffering of the people. He has unofficially adopted a prostitute and her sickly young boy, bringing toys, medicine and cash to their miserable hovel by the polluted river, where they bathe and drink. When the boy dies of starvation and illness, Billy snaps and vents his anger at the regime that fails to feed its people.

Similarly, Billy takes an immediate liking to Guy, seeing him as a white knight, and uses his influence and connections to see that his career is a success, getting Guy interviews with the Muslim leader and other key figures. Billy also sets him up with Jill, whom he adores in a chaste way -- even once asking her to marry him. When Guy betrays Jill for the story, Billy sees it as cheating on his own trust, too.

Capable of great affection and monumental anger, Billy blows like a zephyr in whatever direction his passions take him. He keeps meticulous files on everyone he knows, including Jill and Guy, whose meetings he secretly photographs.

After Guy discovers this, Billy denies being a spy, and this is probably true. He's observing life rather than living it, gathering information and using it to move people around like pawns in a game of chess he's not trying to win or lose, but simply play with a sense of purity he knows is unattainable.

I marvel at how politically incorrect this film would be if it were released today. Hunt playing a man would probably still be celebrated as brave, if for different reasons, but a white actress portraying an Asian character would be unacceptable.

Similarly, Billy calling out another Australian correspondent (Noel Ferrier) for dallying with his boytoy servant -- a virtual death sentence in the Indonesia of six decades ago -- is an act that today would be viewed as irredeemably homophobic. Add in the way the American reporter (Michael Murphy) enjoys using the cheap local female flesh as fodder for his vile self-aggrandizing.

But "The Year of Living Dangerously" is not a film that tries to comfort us. Rather, it shows us the dark underbelly of what humanity is capable. The Americans and British and Aussies do not have a direct hand in perpetuating the misery of the Indonesian people, but they're more than happy to employ it as a lever for their own personal devices. I think of the many scenes in which the Westerners drink and carouse as the natives look on with envy and growing hatred.

Gibson's Guy Hamilton is neither hero, as Billy would have him, or villain, but somewhere in the grey. He wants the scoop and he wants the girl, and he's willing to do questionable things to get them, even if it means parlaying one for the other. But he's genuinely sickened by the poverty and human waste; the other reporters and even Jill criticize him for the "melodramatic" tone of his copy.

"The Year of Living Dangerously" is a grand and grim reminder of our capacities for hope and despair, and that you don't need a lot of words to convey big ideas.

Reeling Backward: "Silverado" (1985)

Emmett: "Blind Pete always said you'd hang. I guess tomorrow at dawn, he'll be proved right."
Sheriff Langston: "10 a.m."
Emmett: "Oh, right. I always thought they did it at dawn."

"Silverado" is a film that I've never quite been able to peg. All I know is that I've always adored it.

Made in the dark days of the Western between "The Wild Bunch" and "Unforgiven," it would appear at first glance to be an homage to the genre. Made by and starring Baby Boomers, it reads like a bunch of kids playing dress-up and mimicking the shootin' and ridin' of John Wayne and other cowboys they themselves watched on film and TV.

The plot is essentially a pastiche of every great Western trope -- revenge duel, cattlemen vs. farmers, a corrupt lawman, a hero in a black hat, a pretty woman who tempts a wandering soul into settling down, a young boy who idolizes the gunman who's known only a life of tragedy. There's even a modernist angle with a proud African-American standing up to a bunch of racist cowpokes threatening his family.

(About the only thing it's missing is a subplot involving Indians, of which there's not a one.)

And yet, director Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote the script with his brother Mark, often lets the proceedings wander into the territory of parody. The part I've never figured out is whether it's intentional or not.

Consider the quote above. That's just this side of pure comedy. When the cowpoke Emmett delivers the last line, that's not the stern pronouncement of a well-worn cowhand who's ridden everywhere and seen it all. It's the postmodernist quip of a guy in 1985 making a pun out of every movie he's seen that included a hanging.

(For that matter, who the hell is Blind Pete? He's referenced twice in the movie without any other information being provided. Presumably he's another familiar Western type, the crazy/smart old codger. This way Kasdan gets to summon his image without having to bother with actually creating and casting a character.)

Emmett is played by Scott Glenn, one of my all-time favorite "That Guy" movie actors. With his lean, creased face, rangy physique, squinty eyes and gruff voice, he was born looking like he wandered out of a Hollywood Western poster. Emmett has just finished doing five years in prison for manslaughter after killing the patriarch of the McKendrick clain, the local cattle barons. Taciturn and tough, Emmett comes closest of the film's four cowboys to the classic Western hero archetype.

Technically Emmett is the main character, though Glenn receives second billing to Kevin Kline. He plays Paden, a funny/sad gambler/gunman with a wise disposition and fatalistic bent. When we first meet him he's been robbed of everything he owns and left in his longjohns to die in the desert. After being rescued by Emmett, he proceeds to recover his beloved horse, hat and gun in subsequent shoot-outs with his robbers. Paden is a cynic who often takes on lost causes, and a romantic whose passions drift like a tumbleweed, until they stop in the most unexpected places.

Like Kasdan himself, Kline was just coming off the huge success of "The Big Chill." Jeff Goldblum was also in both movies, relishing a small part as turncoat card-dealer Slick. Technically, Kevin Costner was too, though as is well known in Hollywood lore, Costner's role as the dead friend being grieved was left on the "Chill"-y cutting room floor.

Perhaps that's why the role of Jake, Emmett's callow hot-head of a brother, is so deliberately showy -- Kasdan, perhaps sad over depriving an actor of his breakout role, decided to provide him another. All Jake really does is kiss girls, shoot bad guys with his fancy two-gun rig, and smile at the camera. Soon Costner was landing leads in big productions like "The Untouchables" and "No Way Out," and he was off to the races.

Danny Glover plays expert rifleman Mal, just returned from working in the slaughterhouses of Chicago, only to find his family plot overrun with McKendrick cattle, his mother dead of illness, his father soon murdered, and his sister run off to Silverado to become a whore. He gets a nice introductory scene where he's refused a drink of whiskey in a saloon because of his skin, and takes down three fat-faced white guys who try to enforce the unwritten rule.

He's run out of town by Sheriff Langston, a stiff Brit played for comic relief by John Cleese, who was also planning to hang Jake on trumped-up charges. When the boys break out of town, Cleese delivers the funniest line in the movie: After chasing them into a trap where they're pinned down by Mal's marksmanship, Langston decides to abruptly give up the chase. "Today my jurisdiction ends here," he announces, turning his horse around.

Cleese also got very high billing in the credits unwarranted by his limited screen time, though even he's beaten out by Rosanna Arquette. Billed third, she has maybe four total minutes in the movie, and only two dialogue scenes totaling 119 words. (Yes, I counted.) The character exists solely as a sweet-faced lure to the dusty rawhides who dream of a better, settled life.

If Arquette provides an unsatisfactory female presence, then Linda Hunt makes up any difference. Playing Stella, the pint-sized manager of The Midnight Star, the high-end saloon that bears her nickname, she has a small but solid role as a symbol of decency and workaday toughness. Accustomed to serving on the fringes of other people's indulgences, she's surprised to find herself the object of unexpected affections.

Hunt, having recently won an Oscar -- for playing a character of the opposite gender, still the only performer ever to do so -- shows what you can do with a tiny, tidy role that's well-written and splendidly played.

The rest of the cast is filled out by Brian Dennehy as Cobb, the smiling, winking bandit-turned-sheriff who's firmly in the McKendrick pocket; Jeff Fahey as the local crazy-eyed killer; Lynn Whitfield as Mal's sister Rae; Thomas Wilson Brown as Augie, Emmett and Jake's wide-eyed nephew; the inimitable James Gammon as a gravel-voiced outlaw leader; and Thomas Wilson Brown, a generic and throwaway villain as McKendrick.

Everything in "Silverado" is filmed in a precious way as if trying to recreate the best moments of classic Westerns. The movie opens with a shot from inside a tiny cabin out the doorway into the grand, valley-filled landscape beyond, a fairly deliberate borrowing from "The Searchers." The booming musical score by Bruce Broughton, replete with trumpets and other brassy brass, earned an Oscar nomination, as did the sound crew.

(It was Broughton's song, "Alone Yet Not Alone," that got an Oscar nomination for Best Song last year but got disqualified under some arcane rules of the Academy. Broughton sent out a few dozen emails to his friends in the movie biz asking them to give it a listen, which the Academy disallowed as "campaigning." Yet the annual suck-up-fest perpetrated for whatever Weinstein movie on tap trundles on.)

So is "Silverado" an homage, a parody or something else entirely? After seeing it again for perhaps the dozenth time, I confess I still haven't decided. My gut tells me it's a serious paean, a recreation of the cowboys-and-Indians games (minus the Indians) Kasdan & Co. grew up playing.

But then I watch again scenes like Emmett practicing his gunplay, and I wonder still. There's one part where he's aiming at a cactus plant with his rifle from maybe 50 yards away. Not only does he hit the plant, he shoots off individual spines, one at a time. This is so absurdly ridiculous that I can't believe the filmmakers taking it seriously, or imagining anyone in the audience doing so, either. It's stuff like this that makes me think the movie has just gone momentarily goofy.

Sometimes I laugh at "Silverado," and sometimes I just sit back and admire its fanboy, fetishistic take on the Western. What I do know is, whenever I watch this film, I'm grinning as wide as the dusty plains.