Stars: Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hunt
Director: Peter Weir
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Linda Hunt*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Guy Hamilton (Gibson), an Australian journalist in 1960's Indonesia hunting for a "big story" (and with it, his big break). He immediately meets Billy Kwan (Hunt), a Chinese-Australian dwarf (I googled, and based on what I found this is a politically correct term here-if this isn't the case, I mean no offense whatsoever and will take this as a learning moment, but just wanted to call that out so that I am being accurate in describing Hunt's character) who doubles as a photographer, and has multiple connections within the Indonesian government. Billy takes a shine to Guy, and starts to elevate his work & credentials within the government, getting him closer to his big break. He also introducers him to Jill Bryant (Weaver), a gorgeous assistant in the British Embassy whom it seems like Billy has a both friendship and an unrequited love thing for, and Guy starts an affair with her. She gives him information that the Chinese government was arming the PKI, potentially putting in danger the lives of any foreign journalists in the country (read: Guy), but he is more concerned about getting the scoop than about saving his own life (and their romance). He finally has an epiphany when Billy, who is the most moral character in the film, denounces Guy and tries to stop the Sukarno regime through protest, only to be murdered. Guy eventually learns his lesson, fleeing the country after the failed coup attempt, not caring about the story but instead boarding the final plane out of the country with Jill.
The movie is...dated. That's the best way to put it, quite frankly. This is a problem for a lot of issue pictures of the late 1970's and into the 1980's, when you frequently cast impossibly gorgeous movie stars (Weaver has never looked more ravishing & while Gibson was pretty much sex-on-a-stick at the time, it's still absurd to see him in this kind of prime) as ordinary people, and inundate your audience with a lot of very specific cultural references. This isn't entirely Weir or the screenwriter's fault-it's likely that in 1983 people would have been more aware of the Indonesian government's recent history, but coupled with antiquated ideas about career, it's harder to understand why, say, Guy going after a major story was such a betrayal to Jill & Billy. After all, don't we want to value the truth? Wouldn't caring about the lives of people in this country and bringing the truth about what is happening to them to the world stage be pretty noble? Yes, Guy's also in it to advance his career, but this back-half thought that you need to prioritize your romance over your civic duty feels weirdly against type for either Classic Hollywood or Modern Hollywood, and the film's politics are muddied as a result.
The movie's sole Oscar nomination (and win) was for Linda Hunt's Billy Kwan (to date, the only nomination Hunt has received, though she still works regularly, currently one of the stars of NCIS: Los Angeles). Hunt's nomination was historic at the time for being the first-time ever that the Oscars gave a trophy to an actor playing a different gender than they identified with in real life (John Lithgow had been nominated for playing a woman just the year before, but lost to Louis Gossett, Jr.). What's more outrageous about it is that there's no wink to Hunt being a woman in the performance; at the time this was only her second movie, and so she wasn't at risk of being recognized, and it's entirely possible that audience members didn't know that she was in fact a woman until the end credits.
The performance is strong and measured, much like a lot of Hunt's work, informed by intelligence and inarguably the movie's acting highlight. There are times, though, that Hunt's performance hedges into over-sentimalizing Billy or trying to understate him to make his complicated relationships with Guy and Jill (does he find them both attractive-is he in love with both of them?) as well as his career aspirations less complex to not steal focus from the leads. It also has to be said that Hunt's nomination is as a Chinese-Australian man, but Hunt is white in real life. The film's use of yellow face reads as problematic now, but honestly...it should have read as problematic then. While we have seen in the past year (with incidents involving politicians like Ralph Northam & Kay Ivey) that blackface was still done in the 1980's, it's hard not to imagine that the team didn't know better in 1983. Celebrating Hunt's sensitive work is more difficult to do knowing that it's still part of a history of discrimination against Asian people, and the fact that it doesn't appear any Asian actors (male or female) were on the shortlist for the role (white actors David Atkins, Wallace Shawn, & Bob Balaban were all considered for the part instead) makes it all the more insulting. Still, this is a fine performance even if it's a problematic one, and I'll try to judge it as such when we eventually get to the 1983 OVP write-ups.
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