Bigger Than Hollywood

THE LAST THING moviegoers heard from Southeast Asia was Apocalypse Now, in which Robert Duvall glored in early morning napalm raids and Marlon Brando muttered T.S. Eliot as the flames of the Vietnam War engulfed him. In that ill-fated reworking of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola confirmed the capacity of great directors for self-indulgence, as he frantically flailed to capture all the anguish and horror of a decade of war.

Much the same disease of overambition has quite clearly seized Peter Weir, director of the latest from Hollywood on Southeast Asia, The Year of Living Dangerously. In fact, one is struck by the general stylistic similarities between Apocalypse and this account of a journalist's adventures in 1965 Indonesia. The garbled plot; the unfocused, almost dream-like effect of the storyline: the infuriating sense of deeper meaning--these tell-tale syptoms of Coppolitis ooze through the seams of this beautifully filmed pastiche of Asia.

But Living Dangerously is more than just a pictorial guidebook to Asia. Despite its Apocalypse-like teetering on the absurd. Weir's film packs an allure beyond its surface appeal--a seamy romance and political intrigue set to the backdrop of Sukarno's raging Indonesia of the 1960s.

There is something larger at play here, behind the emotionally gripping collage of inner-city Asian slums, spellbinding rural rice-paddies, and the unfolding violence of the communist coup. Weir also seems to be grappling with the essential human misery of the vast majority of Asia, indeed of mankind--not a new theme, to be sure, but one rarely addressed honestly by filmmakers. Even when directors treat elemental human problems--hunger, disease, poverty--they usually depict them as an incidental sideshow to the more natural cinematic book of political machinations. Misery becomes a political cliche, a problem to be solved with a wave of the hand as soon as the "right" politicians get into power.

The Year of Living Dangerously makes no such claims, and therein lies its appeal. Weir's film doesn't provide all the answers. It only throws these problems out on the table, as if attempting to scratch somewhere beyond the too-easy conflicts of the political arena. The result is crude, very unpolished, but in its own way perhaps the most honest piece of work one can expect from Hollywood on the immense human problems of the Third World.

THE PROBLEM is that Weir's scattershot, almost stream-of-consciousness approach makes this theme almost impossible to unearth With a plot that gets steadily more indecipherable. Weir becomes incoherent with the gravity of his many messages. The signals are confusing from the start. When Guy Hamilton, a rough, unschooled foreign correspondent from Australia, arrives in Jakarta to make himself a name, it looks like we're in for a simple adventure romance. Having decided to put on some decent clothes since his appearance last summer in "Road Warrior," Mel Gibson looks and plays perfectly the stereotypical cub reporter--cheeky, brash, but oh so earnest in his desire to really know Javanese ways.

But the going is tough for Western journalists in Jakarta. Doors are shut to all but the craftiest, and Sukarno has whipped up anti-West feeling to a fever-pitch among the masses. But Hamilton catches the eye of the most fascinating character of the movie. Billy Kwan, a diminutive Eurasian photographer who seems to be the most well-connected person in town. Kwan, played by a woman, Linda Hunt, takes a liking to Hamilton and gets him a prized interview with the leader of the Indonesian communists who are about to launch their doomed coup of 1965. An unlikely team is born.

The plot thickens from here--or rather, it becomes mush Guy falls for a beautiful attache at the British Embassy after a whirlwind, cardboard romance. As the hottest ticket in Jakarta's diplomatic community. Sigourney Weaver again makes heads turn But like the other subplots that spring up every five minutes, their relationship is almost irrelevant to the film's most important point the struggle by Hamilton and Kwan to work out for themselves how to deal with the frighteningly immense human problems they must confront every day.

That concept is a hard once to get across, and the diffuseness of the plot doesn't help. Fraught with crazy twists and turns in almost every scene, the movie just does not hang together, and different viewers are going to take away different emotions, not the least of which will probably be exasperation. Trying to follow the storyline closely will prove disastrous; rather, the plot provides a framework for disjointed images that together evoke a particular mood.

THAT MOOD comes through most clearly in one scene early in the film, one of the first discussions between Guy and Billy. The two are discussing the problems of the Indonesian masses, not with condescension but with an almost abject resignation to the enormity of the suffering Guy, summoning his journalistic instincts goes to where the "story" is, he believes that the "big actors" governments politicians--will bring salvation Billy, by contrast, sees the micro approach as best For him, it is in the small piecemeal actions of even the lowliest members of society that improvement will start.

This crucial question haunts the rest of the film, not explicitly but as the backdrop to the parade of violent--but apparently unconnected--images that flash before our eyes. Is it by government or men that human misery will be cured? As the film ends, it seems that even the most masterful of politicians, a man like Sukarno, is a failure. Weir has no particular ideological axe to grind, but seems to be implying--and one can never be sure about this irritatingly obtuse work--that governments are impotent in the face of the most elemental, human problems. It doesn't make for much Hollywood excitement, but if Peter Weir is right, then The Year of Living Dangerously is fraught with a different kind of significance.