The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There are a few movies that make more sense when measured against an entire corpus, and while I’m not calling The Year of Living Dangerously an incomplete movie by itself, it does get much of its power when you oppose it to a corpus of adventure films in which a westerner performs heroics in a foreign country, either saving others or having an impact on the events. Here, we get a very young Mel Gibson as an Australian journalist assigned to Indonesia in the months leading to the 1965 attempted coup, learning about the dangerous country, befriending an eccentric character, falling for an English embassy worker, and trying to do his job during a volatile situation. Gibson is fine, Sigourney Weaver is quite good as the British woman but it’s Linda Hunt who steals the movie (and won an Academy Award) as an Asian male—an impressive transformation that adds much to the character. The Year of Living Dangerously may sound like a dull foreign drama, but it works wonders in immediately capturing viewers in its opening moments, thanks to an enigmatic character narrating and taking harsh notes on the protagonist. The atmosphere carries much of the film’s midsection despite a few lulls, with director Peter Weir doing well at showing how much our protagonist is still a neophyte at his job, how far out of his element he is and how he ends up paying for his mistakes. That starkly comes into play during the film’s last act, as the white saviour stereotype is completely defeated in the Graham Greene tradition. Our lead spends much of the film’s climactic events completely unable to do anything, unable to report on the biggest story of his career and having to abandon everything in order to make it out alive. It’s a measure of the film’s success that the film isn’t all that depressing despite the downbeat material, but your mileage may vary—you may have to be exasperated with an entirely different kind of film in order to get the most out of The Year of Living Dangerously.