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.

 

 

The Making (and Mocking) of a President: "Dave"

 In this country, we’re fast approaching the every-four-years Silly Season, when candidates go to insane extremes to convince voters not to support their opponents. (Given the nature of the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates and their proxies, insanity is truly the name of the game.) Last evening, I decided to turn away from political realities by watching a 1993 film that finds great humor and heart in a  presidential what-if.

 In Dave, which came out in the year of Schindler’s List, Kevin Kline plays U.S. President Bill Mitchell,  a cold-hearted man with an eye for pretty young bed-warmers. It bothers him not one whit that his behavior has permanently estranged the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver), who only pretends to be part of a happy presidential couple. But his misbehavior catches up with him when, in bed with a cute member of his staff, he suffers a severe stroke. His cagey chief of staff (the always-slightly-reptilian Frank Langella) has no wish to undermine his own power by handing the reins of government over to the squeaky-clean vice-president (Ben Kingsley, of all people).l His solution is to elevate a convenient look-alike (also, of course, played by Kevin Kline) into the presidency. Kline’s Dave, who runs a Georgetown temp agency, is naturally at first awed by the honor of pretending to be President Mitchell. He’s naïve about the personalities of the powers that be, and overwhelmed by the thrill of actually occupying the presidential suite in the White House. (When he lifts up a phone receiver to make a call from the Oval Office, he feels the need to ask if he needs to dial 9 first.)

 But Dave, for all his aw-shucks manner, is not exactly a fool. He believes in his country’s mission, sees true honor in helping the genuinely needy, and quickly discovers that as President Mitchell he’s positioned to do an end-run around his malevolent chief of staff. There comes a time, though, when the situation of a missing, ailing  president has to be permanently resolved. And Dave’s inventive solution, which I’m sure takes most viewers completely by surprise, allows for a happy ending that’s at least semi-credible, given all that’s gone before.

 It's well known that comedies, even excellent ones, are generally overlooked when Oscars are handed out. The year of Schindler’s List also produced a number of other seriously great films, like The Remains of the Day, The Age of Innocence, and Philadelphia, the AIDS-related drama for which Tom Hanks won his first Oscar.  Dave was nominated for exactly one Academy Award, a well-deserved nod to Gary Ross for his original screenplay, which beautifully sets up all the craziness to come. (As a longtime teacher of screenwriting. I salute him.) The screenwriting Oscar, though, went to Jane Campion, for her extraordinarily inventive work on The Piano. (Other losers in that category were Ron Nyswaner for writing Philadelphia and Nora Ephron—among others—for scripting a romcom classic, Sleepless in Seattle.)

 Politics American-style is a funny business. The year of Dave’s release into theatres was also the year that William Jefferson Clinton entered the White House. When the threat of a presidential impeachment arose in Dave, audiences of the time were well aware that a U.S. president had never been impeached since Andrew Johson in 1868. That was to change in 1998 following the notorious Monica Lewinsky affair, and of course we all know which president was impeached twice during his single term in office.

 What’s going on our country today is no laughing matter. But I’m grateful that Dave finds some humor in unthinkable news from Washington.

 

 

Broadway Bound: Bob & Carol & Masha & Spike

Well, the A to Z Challenge is over, and I’ve stepped away from Cormanville to make a quick business trip to New York. You know, that high-rise place where they talk not about movies but about the theatah. But so many of today’s big Broadway productions are Hollywood-dependent. They’re either based on movies (Newsies, Kinky Boots, The Lion King) or rely for their box office appeal on movie stars in the flesh. This week’s announcement of the 2013 Tony Award nominees was accompanied by much head-scratching about why most Hollywood types got snubbed. Yes, Tom Hanks (making his Broadway debut) did nab a nom for his role in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Man. But journalists noted the non-nomination of such celebrity heavyweights as Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, and Scarlett Johansson, all of whom have starred on the Great White Way in 2012-13.

Another oversight: the divine Bette Midler was overlooked for her portrayal of a real-life Hollywood superagent in I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. So a show biz legend (whose Parental Guidance I watched on the plane flight home) failed to get Tony love for depicting another show biz legend. No matter. Fans are turning this one-woman show into a big fat hit.

I didn’t see I’ll Eat You Last. Instead  I got  half-price tickets to a play I knew only from its unlikely title (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) and from the fact that its two top stars were familiar Hollywood folk: Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce. The author, Christopher Durang, has an antic sensibility that often takes on the Catholic Church, as in his wickedly funny SisterMary Ignatius Explains It All for You. But he also happens to be fascinated by the motion picture industry: he’s written several unproduced screenplays, and one of his first big stage successes was called History of the American Film.  

Durang’s new play sounds like a nod to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But in fact it’s an homage to the late nineteenth-century family dramedies of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Aside from the characters’ names, there are Chekhovian elements galore: a beautiful country estate that may need to be sold (see Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard); the return home of a once-glamorous actress (The Seagull); siblings too caught up in their own ennui to do much of anything (The Three Sisters). Sounds somber, but Durang’s play is extremely funny, partly thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s Masha, who sweeps in and parodies her own Hollywood aura. Masha is the grande dame type, the show-biz superbitch who feels entitled to run everyone’s life because she’s a certified movie star. She arrives with her own pretty boy, Spike, in tow, and his knuckleheaded enactment of the audition that almost won him a role in Entourage 2 is worth the price of admission. (And if you want to see what Ripley looks like in Disney princess drag, now’s your chance.)

Meanwhile Masha’s stay-at-home siblings meekly put up with the indignities she heaps upon them. That is, until the wonderful David Hyde Pierce (as Vanya) explodes into a diatribe about what pop culture has lost since the Fifties. He misses Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller and Annette Funicello on the Mickey Mouse Club. Sure, Señor Wences – who made puppets out of his hands on the old Ed Sullivan Show – was boring, but everyone was bored TOGETHER: a whole lovely community of bored people. This in contrast to young Spike, caught up in his personal playlist. Community’s what theatre is all about, and part of why I love it.  

News flash: The $2.99 sale of the Kindle ebook version of my updated insider bio, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers,  absolutely must end on Sunday, Cinco de Mayo. Get yours while supplies last! (Huh?)