Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) is the new correspondent in Djakarta for an Australian news service. He knows no one and nothing, but that's not going to stop him. He's got ambition.
Which wouldn't count for much, but he's also got the aid of Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), a Chinese-Australian cameraman who does know the area. Knows who to talk to, knows how to get Guy in the door, get him the scoops that earn headlines.
Billy has his own motives, of course. He's growing increasingly dissatisfied with the Indonesian president, with the poverty and starvation that the majority of the population are left to suffer through while the Westerners hang out in air-conditioned bars and hotels, having fancy parties. So in that regard, Guy is potentially useful to him. Someone eager and ambitious enough to pounce on any story or lead or interview Billy can dangle in front of him, with only vague concern for any ripple effects. Billy also seems to have plans for Guy's personal life, and they concern Jill (Sigourney Weaver), part of the British attache office. Billy proposed to her, and was turned down, but still loves her, in a certain way.
Billy tells Guy at one point that to understand the country, he needs to understand the significance of the puppet master in the society. That the stories and culture are not a binary of good/evil, black/white, but a shifting mixture, creating a balance between two sides. Billy also says the puppet master is a priest, but I wasn't clear if that was meant literally or figuratively, though I assume the latter. Especially as Billy clearly sees himself as a puppeteer, trying to move Guy and Jill around towards a happy ending he thinks they both need, watching unseen (or unnoticed) from somewhere nearby.
So Hunt spends most of the film playing Billy as jovial. Everyone's pal. Clever, but not cruel. Always helpful, but also keeping files on anyone he thinks could be useful or significant. It's only every so often he gets tired of the facade and snaps back at people. Asshole American journalist Curtis, mostly. Guy sometimes, for not living up to the version of himself Billy thinks he can be. Hunt has a very good gravely tone for expressing disappointment.
I haven't read the book, but I assume it doesn't end as happily as the film, if only because the arc of the movie doesn't feel like it's moving that way. For one, the attempted Communist uprising, which most of the people Guy knows are in favor of (if not actively assisting), is ultimately crushed. His coworkers, Kumar and Tiger Lily, which have to run for their lives to have any chance of survival.
Beyond that, Billy tried, the first night, to get Guy to give the people in the local market the money in his pockets. Guy declined, arguing it would be not even a drop in the ocean. He wouldn't make the small gesture. Billy can't save the child of the young woman he knows. Either she didn't actually go to a doctor with the money he provided, or it was too late. His big plan to hang a sign from a hotel window calling out the president for letting his people starve is never seen by said president, and Billy is killed by what I think were American security guys there to keep everything nice and friendly for Capitalism, sorry, I mean, Democracy's, allies. Billy tried the small gesture, and the grand gesture, and neither worked out.
Likewise, his efforts to push Jill and Guy together appear doomed because he's misjudged Guy. Guy put the scoop of a shipment of weapons being smuggled to the Communists above Jilly's career and trust. And then, when she somehow still gives him the time of day later, he promises to be on the flight out of the country with her. Until he hears the presidential palace has been seized. Then he had to get the scoop. It really feels like that was supposed to end with the soldier shooting him in the back as he boldly marched past, waving his press credentials. Instead, he gets a rifle butt to the eye and a detached retina, but ultimately escapes the country.
I think the significant scene is the one fairly early where Billy makes a comment about being a dwarf and Guy says he isn't. Billy says, "You really don't care, do you? Or maybe you just don't see." I think Billy hoped it was the former, but it was really the latter. It isn't about idealism, it's about self-interest. If Billy can help Guy, then nothing else matters. He has to find a source, has to get something newsworthy, or he'll be sent back to Sydney, which he describes as a graveyard for his career. Ignoring that staying Djakarta, growing increasingly hostile to Westerners, could easily become his literal graveyard.
Guy just doesn't strike me as a character who learns a lesson until it's too late. He insisted on them driving along with the protest march that ended with people throwing rocks at the U.S. embassy, and nearly got everyone inside the car killed, plus a machete cut to his leg for his trouble. He has a clumsy charm and quick temper that feels like it stems from some inferiority complex, both of which can get him into trouble. Gibson portrays those well, but those are things he usually played well. The young boy trying to be a rogue and not quite pulling it off, but still amusing for the attempt. Or the overly intense teenager that's always on the brink of an explosion. Young, headstrong, easily insulted, easily manipulated.
He always looks sweaty and unkempt, which only makes Weaver look even more out of his league than you'd expect. Weaver plays Jill as cool and composed. I assume Jill's supposed to be several years Guy's senior. Certainly in emotional age. Though in the end, they both try to keep their distance from what's happening in the country. Jill describes Guy's report on the famine on Lombok Island as being overly melodramatic. She doesn't dispute the facts, she just thinks he's overdoing it. Guy's only retort is to ask what it takes to make her cry. The facts don't really matter, not in the sense of the suffering. They're just something to hype, to get people talking about him.
In that sense, I can't decide if the reason Guy pulls back from the worst excesses of his fellow journalist Curtis is because he sees too much of himself in the man, or because Curtis' exploitation of the locals and the power he thinks he has makes Guy conscious of things he'd rather not inspect too closely.
No comments:
Post a Comment