Filmmakers Living Dangerously

Three years before he came to the U.S. to shoot Witness, Australian director Peter Weir took cast and crew to Asia on behalf of a highly ambitious project, The Year of Living Dangerously. Based on a novel of intrigue and romance by Australian author Christopher Koch, it brought together an international band of players to present a story full of real-world tensions. Weir had previously directed a fascinating tale of mysterious disappearance (1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock) and a tragic World War I epic (1981’s Gallipoli). Both stories, deriving from actual historical incidents, saw the world from an Australian perspective. By the time he shot The Year of Living Dangerously, Weir had widened his focus to include citizens of many nations. Building on a turbulent era in the modern history of Indonesia, he used the overthrow of despotic President Sukarno by local Communist forces as the backdrop for a story about love, loyalty, and journalism as a profession. (To be entirely accurate, though the film’s vivid street scenes were filmed in Manila, standing in for Jakarta, social unrest in the Philippines caused cast and crew to head back to Australia to complete the shoot.)

 At the center of the drama is Australia’s Mel Gibson, known at the time for his Mad Max films and for his starring role in Weir’s Gallipoli. No surprise—in his role as an Aussie radio journalist on his first overseas assignment, Gibson’s Guy Hamilton proves to be handsome, cocky, and more than a bit naïve. He wants to become an overnight ;journalistic superstar, but is taken down a peg or two by fellow foreign correspondents, including a particularly crass American (Michael Murphy) and some stuffy Brits. And the environment he’s in is not at all pleasant: poverty is rampant; political dissidents are everywhere; daily life is mostly chaos.

 One major compensation arrives when he is taken to an unexpectedly ritzy country club where British expats congregate. There he meets a woman who works at the British embassy. She’s played by Sigourney Weaver who—three years after Alien—has paused her fight against  extraterrestrials in order to take on a romantic role. Her Jill Bryant is smart, convincingly British, and sexy as all get-out. She’s leaving Jakarta soon to return to her homeland, and part of Guy would enjoy going with her.

 Still, there’s his broadcasting career to consider. And there’s also an off-beat relationship he quickly comes to value. Billy Kwan is a pint-sized photographer, apparently half Australian and half Chinese, who frequently works with Australian journalist to cover the local news. Puckish, but with a strong moral code, he claims no loyalty to any particular national ideology. Instead, he cares deeply for his friends and for the underprivileged: out of sheer generosity of spirit he’s quietly supporting a local woman and her seriously ailing child. Billy, who also serves at times as the film’s voiceover narrator, is the emotional heartbeat of the story. And the casting of this role took observers by surprise.  From what I’ve read, Weir considered tiny American actors like Bob Balaban (5’5”) and Wallace Shawn (5’2”), but neither seemed right. Then through happenstance he saw a photo of an American actress named Linda Hunt. Afflicted with hypopituitary dwarfism, Hunt stood a mere 4’9” tall, and had an androgynous look. There’s nothing kitschy about her portrayal of an adult male, though her character is endowed with an otherworldliness that lingers in the memory. That’s doubtless why she beat out some of Hollywood’s finest (Glenn Close, for one) to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1982.

 

 

Home is Where the Heart Is: Places in the Heart

Sadly, actor and activist Danny Glover, perhaps best known for his cop role opposite Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, has acknowledged he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Always a straightforward guy, he’d previously been frank about his youthful struggles with epilepsy. Now, close to 80, he’s looking back at a career that has given him a wide range of character roles in both wacky comedies and somber dramas. His favorite? He acknowledges that he’s most proud of a 1984 slice of Americana called Places in the Heart.

  As a tribute to Glover, and as a salute to the growing-pains of the USA in its semiquincentennial year, I recently caught up with Places in the Heart. It’s definitely a small film worth knowing, and not just because her leading role in it won Sally Field her second Oscar, and the opportunity to gush to the Academy that "I can't deny the fact that you like me—right now, you like me!" (Personally, I can’t deny the fact that most people misquote her words as “You like me—you really like me!”)

  Places in the Heart was written and directed by the late Robert Benton, who in 1967 came out of New York to co-write (along with fellow Esquire journalist David Newman) an historically -based screenplay they called Bonnie and Clyde. Their script—about a pair of attractive young bank robbers gallivanting through the Southwest during the Great Depression—eventually led to a production deal. After some serious interest from François Truffaut, Arthur Penn ultimately shot Bonnie and Clyde, with  Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the leading roles. It became a national sensation and scored 10 Oscar noms in a highly competitive year.   

 After that triumph, Benton pursued his interest in directing as well as writing, winning Oscars in both categories for the 1979 divorce drama, Kramer vs. Kramer. But he was a native Texan, and perhaps that dry, dusty landscape continued to call to him. In 1984, he returned to his roots, crafting a Depression-era story set in Waxahachie, Texas, with nary a bank robber in sight. Life is not easy in Waxahachie: Edna Spalding (Sally Field) has been left a widow after the accidental killing of her husband, the local sheriff. Desperate to support herself and her young children, she takes in a boarder, a bitter ex-soldier (John Malkovich) who lost his sight during the Great War. She also takes pity on the African-American drifter (Glover) who shows up to do chores, even though he’s been caught trying to steal her silverware. Edna’s basic good-heartedness proves contagious, and a viable new household forms. But there are also many external challenges: the bank is eager to foreclose on Edna’s acreage; her sister’s marriage is threatened by a philandering spouse; a powerful tornado (dramatically filmed) flattens the town’s center; the Ku Klux Klan violently turns on Glover’s character. Somehow Edna holds on, leading to a remarkable final scene in which love and redemption surface in a way that can only be called mystical. 

 1985 was a year of BIG movies, led by Amadeus, A Passage to India, and a powerful drama about journalists covering the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Killing Fields. Folksy Americana hardly seemed like one of the film-year’s major areas of interest.  But Places in the Heart, a loving, inspiring, and yet down-to-earth portrait of small-town life, holds its own among the costume epics.

 I wish Danny Glover well, and hope he’ll be able to cling onto his memories of being a central figure in this tender film.  

 

Anne Heche: Looking Back in Sorrow . . . And Frustration

 Yes, I feel bad about Anne Heche’s final days. Clearly there is something terribly wrong when a talented woman gets into a senseless accident that destroys her life. The fact that she had experienced other bizarre encounters, both on the day of her final crash and years before, suggests that she was suffering from mental issues that no one could permanently solve. It’s tragic, but it happens. 

 What nags at me, though, is the fact that we’re all lamenting Heche’s lost promise, with little thought for the woman whose life she so permanently upended. On August 5, a Mini Cooper driven by Heche crashed into the garage of a West L.A. apartment building, narrowly missed hitting a pedestrian, and struck a Jaguar. Shortly thereafter, it smashed through a small rental house on Walgrove Avenue, destroying the front wall and lodging in the rear, where it burst into flames. Thankfully, the occupant managed—with the help of neighbors—to save herself and her pets, but after some fifty-nine firefighters converged to put out the blaze, most of her belongings (as well as her home itself) were toast. Remarkably, this newly bereft L.A. woman has had the grace to express on Instagram her condolences to Heche’s family. But will the public outpouring of grief for Heche and her bereaved kin extend to the person whose life she has irretrievably altered?

 Maybe it’s the fact that the destroyed house is perhaps ten minutes from the peaceful street on which I live that makes me so sensitive to the losses suffered by innocent bystanders. But I’ve got to say that living in Movieland is not always easy for us civilians. True, I’ve had the thrill of seeing  (and sometimes interacting with) celebrities in their native habitat Many are gracious to members of the public, and I’ve certainly read about hugely good deeds done out of the spotlight. But it’s also true that successful creative types seem prone to lapsed judgment, often involving alcohol, drugs, and very fast cars. I’ve just been reading back over the details of Charlie Sheen’s checkered career. Sheen mostly seemed to do harm to those he married, but other Tinseltown figures have come closer to injuring complete strangers in their vicinity. There was, for instance, Mel Gibson, who was stopped by a Malibu cop for driving under the influence, then responded with anti-Semitic threats to the arresting officer  A special case, I suppose, is that of Margot Kidder, who—having rejected a medical diagnosis of bipolar disorder—was found in a distressed state of mind wandering in a homeowner’s Glendale backyard.

 Of course it’s not just entertainment figures who wind up creating havoc for those around them. A tragic story covered by the Los Angeles Times occurred just one day before Heche’s Mar Vista misadventure. In a section of L.A. known as Windsor Hills, a Mercedes traveling at 90 miles an hour sped through a red light and crashed. The result: five people died, including a pregnant woman and a very young child. The horror of the situation was compounded when news surfaced that the driver of the Mercedes was a longtime nurse, much respected in the community for her compassion and her medical skills. (Somehow her 13 previous crashes had never affected her license to drive a motor vehicle.)

 What’s my point in all this? People—both famous and not—are complicated. And mental illness can bubble up anywhere. But I can’t help wishing that we spent less time mourning troubled celebrities who cause harm, and more time focusing on the plight of their unfortunate victims.