Peter Weir (1982)
Christopher (C J) Koch’s 1978 novel, on which Peter Weir’s film is based, takes its striking title from the prophetic words of the real political figure at the centre of Koch’s fiction. In a speech of August 1964, Indonesia’s President Sukarno envisaged the year ahead as a time of ‘living dangerously’. Sukarno had led his country since 1945. As the Cold War intensified in the early 1960s, his balancing act – keeping in check the opposing ambitions of the national Communist Party (PKI) and Indonesian army leaders – became increasingly precarious. Before 1965 was out, Sukarno was reduced to a puppet head of state. Images from a Javanese puppet show are the first things to appear on the screen in The Year of Living Dangerously.
These shadow puppets will briefly return at several important points of Weir’s narrative. The photojournalist Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt) will urge Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson), an Australian foreign correspondent just posted to Jakarta and the film’s protagonist, to watch not the actual puppets but the shadows that they cast. The puppet show and Billy’s advice to Guy are expressions of the political instability of contemporary Indonesia. They will come to suggest, too, that the fate of the main characters in Weir’s story is dictated by forces outside their control. The Year of Living Dangerously was the first Australian film to be financed entirely by a Hollywood studio (MGM) so the characters’ fate is also influenced, more than it might otherwise have been, by commercial expectations and demands. Peter Weir does a fine job of managing these with integrity – and with very entertaining results.
Living Dangerously harnesses different movie genres – political history, action adventure, romantic drama – and successfully tethers various film types to three convincingly realised individuals: Guy, Billy and Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), an assistant attaché at the British Embassy in Jakarta, who is Billy’s friend and will become Guy’s lover. The types they represent include the rookie professional, the stranger in a strange land, and the insider-outsider, an individual well acquainted with a place and how things operate there, but obliged, through personal circumstances, to stand at one remove from it. Guy Hamilton, who works for an Australian radio news station, is on his first foreign correspondent posting. Billy Kwan is well versed in Indonesian culture and politics. He’s also half-Australian, half-Chinese and a dwarf, marginalised by other members of the foreign press in Jakarta. The first thing Guy learns on arrival at the city’s airport is that his predecessor, who’d been expected to introduce Guy to useful local contacts, has already left the country. Billy, who knows people that matter, latches on to Guy immediately. In exchange for his contacts, Guy offers Billy ‘all the film work you can handle’. Billy’s delighted by the idea of ‘a real partnership …we’ll make a good team, old man. You for the words, me for the pictures. I can be your eyes.’
Jill Bryant is defined chiefly in terms of what she means to the film’s two main men. Guy’s astonished when Billy says he once proposed to her (she turned him down) but Jill, for a while, is inaccessible to Guy also. Self-possessed and, from his point of view, stuck-up English, she’ll complete her posting in Jakarta and return to London in a few weeks’ time. Jill’s a sketchy conception; it’s fortunate that she’s incarnated so memorably by Sigourney Weaver (in only her third sizeable cinema role, after Alien (1979) and Eyewitness (1981)). What Jill lacks as a character on the page, Weaver more than makes up for on the screen. She’s physically impressive to an almost comical degree. Her beauty, her height (she’s taller than Mel Gibson, let alone tiny Linda Hunt) and her strong jaw give new meaning to the word statuesque. Weaver isn’t always fully in control of her upper-crust English accent but she’s more sensual and emotionally fluid here than in any subsequent film performance I’ve seen from her.
Jill and Guy first meet, introduced to each other by Billy, beside a swimming pool. She’s in the company of her British Embassy boss, ramrod Colonel Henderson (Bill Kerr), who instructs Guy to take him on in a swimming race. It’s seeing the journalist let the Colonel win (because doing so matters to Henderson) that first sparks Jill’s interest in Guy. She resists him as long as she can but he’s soon openly eager for her, juggling work commitments so they can spend time together. Weir builds the romance expertly. There’s a short bedroom scene in due course, but the love affair consists mostly of eye contact, snatched embraces and the chemistry between Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson. Just before Jill and Guy sleep together, though, there’s a sequence where that chemistry generates flamboyant combustion. After swift separate exits from a British Embassy party one night, they drive off together in Guy’s car at high speed – destination: bedroom. Nothing’s going to get in Guy’s way, neither the army roadblock that he ploughs through nor the soldiers’ scintillating rifle fire that lights up the darkness as the car speeds on.
Only twenty-six at the time, Mel Gibson is, strictly speaking, too young for a man as desperate as Guy supposedly is to seize the opportunity to make his mark as a foreign correspondent. It doesn’t really make sense when he says he’s been waiting ten years for a chance like this, is dismayed by the prospect of failure and returning to a career going nowhere in Sydney. But Gibson’s youth soon works for him: it helps give Guy’s impulsive, adventurous spirit a callow side that makes him more humanly believable. And Mel Gibson, at this early point in his film career, was a luminous screen actor. Highly charismatic, he expresses his character’s changing feelings fully and completely naturally. The screenplay, credited to David Williamson, Weir and C J Koch, is excellent in conveying key information about the political situation so that this never comes over as clumsy exposition. In other respects, though, the scenes involving Guy’s fellow members of the foreign press are relatively weak. Michael Murphy’s role as a Washington Post correspondent both personally and professionally despicable, is crudely written; Murphy overdoes things, even so. As Wally O’Sullivan, another Aussie, Noel Ferrier is enjoyably witty but let down by the bits revealing Wally’s gay proclivities, first witnessed then publicly denounced by Billy, whose scathing hostility doesn’t ring quite true. (Even in this time and place, wouldn’t Wally’s taste for young local men more likely be an open secret within the closed circle of the foreign press, something disreputable but tacitly accepted?)
Billy Kwan is nevertheless the film’s most remarkable character and Linda Hunt’s performance in the role is what, forty-plus years on, The Year of Living Dangerously is best remembered for – with good reason. (Hunt was the first and remains the only person to win an acting Oscar playing a character of the opposite sex.) Billy is a confounding combination of idealist and control freak. What would now be termed ableist prejudice against his dwarfism disqualifies Billy from full membership of the society in which he lives and works. Instead, he observes and records what’s going on around him. It’s clearly apt that he’s a photographer (although his lack of height – Linda Hunt is 4’ 9” – means he must choose his vantage points carefully: in one scene, Billy sits on Guy’s shoulders to shoot film). He also keeps files on people, including Guy and Jill, that comprise biographical information and Billy’s character appraisals. He not only can explain the meaning of the Javanese puppets: he wants to pull people’s strings himself. He greatly likes both Guy and Jill and does what he can to bring them together. Yet when he succeeds Billy, as Linda Hunt ingeniously shows, is regretfully envious, too.
In the early stages of Living Dangerously, Billy is given plenty to say to show that he’s widely read and morally earnest. Walking with Guy on his first night in Jakarta, Billy shows the new arrival the hordes of beggars and ragged street children, quotes St Luke via Tolstoy – ‘What then must we do?’ – and (like John the Baptist) recommends practical, ethical action to help those in need. Billy practises what he preaches in regularly giving money to an impoverished local woman and her ailing young son. Billy also greatly admires Sukarno, a nationalist who ‘is really trying to do something for his people’ and whom he sees as ‘a great puppet master’. Presenting Billy in the film’s first half-hour or so as the all-seeing central consciousness of the story, Peter Weir lulls the audience into assuming he’ll be a permanent fixture in it. But Billy’s capacity for hero worship proves his undoing. He’s grieved by Guy’s careerist tunnel vision, ignoring his moral responsibilities for the sake of a big news story. The death of the boy whose mother he supports leaves Billy feeling betrayed by Sukarno. As the latter’s tightrope walking falters, Billy also loses control of events, and self-control. He goes to a room on a top floor of the Hotel Indonesia and hangs a banner from the window – ‘Sukarno – feed your people’ – for all the city to see. Moments later, security men remove the banner and throw Billy from the window to his death.
By this stage, Weir’s clear, confident storytelling has begun to wobble, too. Although this might seem to chime with what’s happening to the puppet masters in the public and private realms of Living Dangerously, you don’t really believe that’s what Weir intends. Jill tells Guy about a top-secret telex received at the British Embassy: a major arms shipment from communist China is en route to the Indonesian PKI. Jill tips Guy off because she cares for him and his safety: all foreigners, she says, will be in danger in a civil war; he should leave Indonesia while he can. Guy sees only a potential exclusive and, with his driver, Kumar (Bembol Roco), heads out of the capital in a search for further information about the imminent shipment. There’s no problem with these developments per se. Guy’s reaction creates a rift with Jill (and Billy); it’s while they’re out of Jakarta that Guy learns Kumar himself is a PKI member; both things will matter in the story’s climax. But the film’s rhythm goes slack while Guy is staying with Kumar and his partner, Tiger Lily (Kuh Ledesma), at an old Dutch villa (you could certainly do without a dream sequence in which Guy sees himself seduced underwater by Tiger Lily). The film doesn’t get back in the groove even when the action returns to Jakarta. You can’t believe Billy wouldn’t have been killed instantly when he fell from the hotel window. He survives long enough to see and smile at Guy, in whose arms he dies.
Billy Kwan’s death scene feels like a sentimental sop to a bygone (unlamented) era of popular moviemaking. You could say that Living Dangerously’s whole climax is more of the same – one concession to Hollywood after another. For most of the film, Weir holds in tension Guy Hamilton’s professional versus romantic compulsions. When Guy pursues the arms shipment story regardless of its effect on his relationship with Jill, he appears to have made a conclusive choice, but they reconcile following Billy’s death: when Jill flies out of Jakarta, Guy’s going to be on the plane with her. Except that he still wants a scoop. The PKI’s attempted coup (if that is what it was: the historical facts of what happened in Indonesia in late September 1965 are still a matter of dispute) is foiled by army generals, who take over the presidential palace. Determined to gain access to the palace, Guy is struck down by a soldier and sustains a serious injury to his left eye. He takes refuge in Billy’s deserted bungalow, recalling words from the Bhagavad Gita that Billy once quoted to him: ‘All is clouded by desire’. In other words, now that Guy’s vision is impaired, he sees more clearly than before! Medical advice is to lie still for days to prevent a detached retina, but Guy, his left eye heavily bandaged, gets loyal Kumar to drive him to the airport, where officials confiscate his journo’s tape-recorder. Guy can live with losing his pressman’s paraphernalia and even half his eyesight because he has, at last, got his priorities right. While the officials are transfixed by unspooled tape, Guy slips quietly through a door and out to the airfield. A plane to safety is ready for take-off. Guy’s just in time to climb the steps to the open cabin door, where Jill is waiting for him. In the film’s closing shot, they embrace.
The finale is problematic, not because of the choice Guy Hamilton makes but because of the film’s priorities: the resolution of Guy’s love life completely eclipses the political turmoil of the country he leaves behind. Weir entirely ignores the grim future that lay just ahead for Indonesia during the Suharto regime, and it’s hard to think that he does so assuming the audience is already so well informed that he doesn’t need to. Finally neglecting the bigger picture feels worse because Weir has crafted, albeit on the margins of the three-character central story, such a vivid portrait of a place coming apart at the seams. Thanks partly but not solely to what Billy Kwan says about them, Jakarta’s destitute aren’t merely peripheral to Weir’s description of the city. His staging of a crowd demonstration outside the American Embassy, with a car attacked by a bulldozer and by an angry crowd, is frighteningly credible. Yet there’s no denying the finale is also emotionally effective, and not just because Mel Gibson makes a first-rate wounded hero. Kumar’s incredulous euphoric laughter, once he and Guy get past the military checkpoint on the approach to the airport, is startling. When the two men go their separate ways, you realise that Kumar is unlikely to survive much longer. (His quiet departure from the scene reminded me a little of how the Jewish couple in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) are never seen again after their wedding: because they have no future.)
The film’s soundtrack is a beguiling mixture: traditional gamelan music for the puppet show and other sequences; bits of opera that Billy loves; Jill dancing to ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, as Guy pretends not to watch but can’t keep his eyes off her; Vangelis’s ‘L’Enfant‘, which joins the party as the couple’s romance gets properly underway; Maurice Jarre’s original score. Despite the title, the story’s timeframe seems to cover a matter of weeks, or a few months at the most. The film itself runs just under two hours and zips by. I still haven’t seen every movie that Peter Weir made but I doubt I’ll change my mind that The Year of Living Dangerously is the best of them.
4 April 2026
