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: "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975)

"Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a movie about a vexing mystery that cares not a whit about solving it. It's a dreamy contemplation of the power of the puzzle itself, rather than the humdrum mechanics of sorting out what piece fits where to assemble the picture on the box.

Instead, we stare at the scattered bits until we go cross-eyed, and form what image we will.

Peter Weir has always been among the first names I recall when someone asks me to list my favorite filmmakers. Along with a few others, he more or less launched the Australian New Wave. He's had a long career, though not a particularly busy one, at least in terms of number of films made, with only three in the last two decades.

But in qualitative terms he's over the moon, with at least a half-dozen works that will be -- or already are -- remembered as classics: "Witness," "The Truman Show," "Dead Poets Society," "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Gallipoli" and this one.

"Picnic," Weir's first movie to garner wide international attention, proudly eschewed the conventions of narrative storytelling and character development. The film relies on arresting visual imagery and an atypical soundscape to evoke themes and emotions, and lets the audience make their own sense of them.

I don't mind saying I usually tend not to favor this type of filmmaking. In a sense, Weir seemed to be working to out-Terrence Malick before Malick himself got too deep inside his own fever dream. But I found this movie highly engaging, and soon my persnickety critic's heart, always restless for a good yarn, settled into the film's rhythmic perambulations.

It concerns the disappearance in 1900 of several students and a teacher at a remote Australian girls' college. On a field trip to Hanging Rock, a famous volcanic formation once used by Aborigines for secret initiation rites, three young women climb up to its uppermost reaches and disappear. A teacher who goes in search of them also vanishes.

At first I thought the movie was based on an actual case. Weir presents it with such stark authenticity that, despite its dream-like quality, the story feels like something that really could have happened. But no, screenwriter Cliff Green based it on the novel by Joan Lindsay.

The notion of a field trip is intoxicating to the girls of Appleyard College because it represents such a departure from their daily lives, which consist of things like dancing, sewing and mathematics suitable for well-bred women to use when they becomes wives and mothers. They wear long dresses and tight corsets, stockings, boots and bonnets -- even white gloves, which the stern headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), advises they may remove owing to the sultry weather, but only after their carriage has cleared the neighboring town.

Three of the more outgoing, popular girls announce they would like to climb the rock's lower reaches to take some measurements. They are Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), blonde and stunning; Irma (Karen Robson), tall and dark; and Marion (Jane Vallis), bespectacled and serious. Tagging along is Edith (Christine Schuler), the black sheep of the class, owing to her dumpy physique and scratchy personality.

The rest of the group falls asleep in the hot sun, but the adventuresses enter a sort of mystical trance, removing their shoes and stockings so they can better commune with nature. Weir shoots this scene with almost fetishistic obsession, as young women who have spent their lives so cloistered and fettered that even this marginal unclothing somehow becomes shocking.

The trio wander off into a fissure, while a discombobulated Edith runs screaming down the mountain to report their actions. Math teacher Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray) goes in search of them, though she seems to be in as much as a daze as they, and also is lost.

Weir wisely never attempts to explain the reason for their strange behavior, leaving it as part of the film's enduring enigma. There's some hint of supernatural and/or magnetic influences -- the watches of two adults stop abruptly at exactly noon.

But Weir is less concerned with explaining than seeing how people react to that which is unexplainable.

Searches are conducted, without success. After a week has gone by and even the police have given up, a young wealthy Englishman (Dominic Guard), who had observed the girls on their way up the hill and became smitten with Miranda, resolves to go in search of them with his manservant (John Jarratt) in tow. He spends the night alone on the mountain, and is rescued himself in a near state of catatonia, but clutches a scrap of cloth that leads to Irma.

Dehydrated but otherwise unharmed, Irma remembers nothing of the encounter. Throughout the process of her recovery there is a particular emphasis placed on whether Irma has been sexually violated -- though the doctor reassures the police and school officials that she is "quite intact." As if the status of her provable virginity is more important than the lives of the three people still missing (who are soon declared presumed dead).

In one of the film's most shocking scenes, a reconstituted Irma is presented to her classmates and is set upon them like a pack of dogs, demanding to know the whereabouts of Miranda and the others. Edith is the chief interrogator, perhaps in an effort to throw suspicion off herself.

The disappearances have a tragic effect on the entire college. Mrs. Appleyard learns that a number of girls are being pulled from the school after the current semester, making the financial viability of the enterprise quite perilous. Her frazzled state is reflected in her prim appearance becoming increasingly frayed, particularly an impressive vertical hairdo that starts to wilt like summer corn left too long unharvested.

Appleyard takes much of her frustration out on Sara (Margaret Nelson), an orphaned girl whose tuition is in arrears due to lack of payment by her guardian. She even threatens to have Sara returned to the institution where she suffered much.

Sara is the closest thing to a fully realized character in the movie, a waifish thing who seems to have no personality of her own but lives vicariously through others. She was especially entranced by Miranda -- possibly a sexual attraction, calling her "a Botticelli angel" -- and begins to come apart at the seams without her touchstone.

Jacki Weaver, best known on these shores for "Animal Kingdom," has a small role as a maid with an insider's view of the school's dissolution. Helen Morse also has a strong presence as an enlightened teacher who quietly resists the college's more dire curriculum, such as having Sara tied to a wall to correct her stooped posture.

The ending of "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is just as purposefully obtuse as the beginning. Mrs. Appleyard lies and claims that Sara has been taken away by her guardian, but the girl's body is found in the greenhouse the next morning, having fallen through from above.

Whether Sara was pushed or jumped to her death remains open to debate, though it should be noted the headmistress was already wearing a black mourning dress when a teacher burst into her office to deliver the awful news. A title card informs us Appleyard was later found dead at the base of Hanging Rock, in what was presumed to be an accidental fall.

The experience of watching "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is an unnerving one, and it's meant to be. This sort of movie doesn't really go places, but sits and spins, humming its own peculiar chant.

It's up to us to decide whether to be annoyed by that siren call, or close our eyes and become ensorceled.

Reeling Backward: "The Truman Show"

There are literally college courses taught about "The Truman Show," which is not something most pop-culture movies can say. People have made allusions to its alleged deeper meanings via Christian, urban planning, political and psychological interpretations. I generally find that sort of analysis a waste of time, though the film's insights on the insidious power of media are hard to deny.

Consider that, coming out in 1998, "The Truman Show" predated most of the reality TV crazy, with the exception of MTV's "Real World" and a few other shows. Ron Howard would, a year later, try a similar theme with "Edtv" starring Matthew McConaughey. I don't think it's an insult to note that movie is barely remembered at all.

Though it's important to emphasize that while "Edtv" and all reality shows are about people who proactively decide to have their activities taped -- an arrangement that attracts a certain type of personality -- "Truman" is the only creative production I can think of in which the main character -- and only he -- is unaware of the fact that his doings are being viewed.

In addition, Truman Burbank also believes that his tiny hometown island of Seahaven is real, when in fact it is all an elaborate facsimile -- a TV set the same size and economic impact of a small nation. This basic premise, of our hero living in a constructed world inside of the real one, in which he becomes the main focus of audiences both helpful and antagonistic, would be repeated in a science fiction version in the following year's "The Matrix."

"Truman" even presages the only recently realized phenomenon of the "reality talk show," in which programmers create an additional (and revenue-generating) venue for people to chat about the main show. The movie's "TruTalk," hosted by Harry Shearer, is the forbear to today's "The Talking Dead."

"Truman" also marked the delineation of Jim Carrey's career shift from straight-out funnyman to more dour, ambitious projects, especially "Man on the Moon" a year later. His career has bobbled and wobbled since then, though the recent "Dumb and Dumber To" announced his full retreat back into the comedy safe zone.

Though I usually have difficult naming my all-time favorite films, I have no such reservation about citing directors I most admire. And Peter Weir would certainly be on that list (plus the likes of Ridley Scott, John Boorman, George Miller and David Lean ... apparently I only go for Brits and Aussies.)

Along with "The Truman Show," Weir has "Gallipoli," "Witness," "Green Card," "Picnic at Hanging Rock," "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Fearless," "Dead Poets Society" and "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" to his name.

Not a bad cinematic epitaph, that.

(Though personally I hope Weir, who recently turned 70, stays with us a very long time and, Sidney Lumet-like, continues cranking out amazing films right up until the grave beckons.)

Of course, the premise of "The Truman Show" is absurd. It's preposterous to think that you could raise a man to the age of 30 without him ever realizing that everyone around him is actors pretending to be his neighbors, friends -- even his mother and father. And that the perfectly tidy town, with its cotton candy coloring and eternal sunshine (actually Seaside, Fla.), is not real. Plus the treacherous legal and moral implications -- Truman is essentially an imprisoned slave, owned by a corporation.

But Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol (an accomplished director himself of films like "Gattaca") cleverly delay the big reveal of what's really going on until about one-third of the way into the movie, so the audience never really questions the conceit. By then Truman has become so known and endearing to them, they don't even have to suspend their disbelief.

As the tale opens Truman is starting to grow antsy, shucking off the "script" of a perfect life that producer/eye in the sky Christof (Ed Harris) has constructed for him. Though married to incessantly upbeat Meryl (Laura Linney), he still pines for Sylvia (Natascha McElhone), a background character who caught his eye and found herself ditching the rules to be with him.

Of course, whenever something happens to break through this "fourth wall," the show has a small army of burly men to rush in to block Truman's view and clean things up. Over the years various saboteurs have attempted to breach the show's sanctum by parachuting into Main Street or holding up signs saying "It's a show!" But Truman has remained blessedly indifferent.

(Though, now that I think about it, I'm not sure if this really constitutes breaking the fourth wall, which is supposed to exist between an ongoing work of art and its audience. In this case, it is not the creative act that is disrupted by acknowledging itself, but internal sabotage by unwilling participants. Someone needs to come up with a name for that.)

I was surprised watching the movie again (for I think the first time in 16 years) how weak Truman's relationships are with the actors playing his mother and father. They only really get one substantial scene apiece, and dad's is when he is reintegrated into the show after his supposed death when Truman was a boy. (This was a calculated psychological manipulation by Christof to render him afraid of water and thus unlikely to want to leave his water-bound hometown.)

Even his relationship with Meryl goes relatively unexplored, or the morality of how the actors who have spent their life participating in the charade feel about it. Only Marlon (Noah Emmerich), who plays his best friend, appears to hold any genuine affection for Truman. Though he carries out Christof's orders, he often seems on the verge of blurting out the truth.

The character of Truman remains something of a goofy cypher, a mix of Carrey's manic early stand-up comic persona and the script's plot demands. In "Ace Ventura" and a lot of Carrey's other early movies, there was an overt aspect of "performance" to the characters, of them playing a part in order to carry out the intended comedic effect, and I think we see a lot of that in Truman. Even he thinks he's putting on a front.

His interactions with other Seahaven residents, often repetitive from day to day, are boring even to Truman. So he's more apt to notice little screw-ups like accidentally receiving the radio signals of the crew tracking his movements via his car radio, or a set light falling from the sky. Indeed, one of the subtlest of subsidiary themes is the notion that, after three decades on the air, the puppeteers pulling the strings have gotten distracted and careless.

Thought-provoking and eerily prescient, "The Truman Show" will likely be one of those films that withstands the tests of the ages -- at least, until we've all got cameras sewn into our bodies, and everything everyone does is recorded and transmitted, everywhere. Say, 2030?