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Vietnamese translator tells story of his escape8am Waterston, left, Is a journalist who befriends his transistor, Dr. Haing S. Ngor (right) in The Killing Reids”There’s a strange thing about stories based on what the movies insist on calling ‘‘real life ” The haphazard chances of life, theunanticipated twists of fate,have a way of getting smoothed down into Hollywood formulas,Roger Ebertfilm criticso that what might have once happened to a real person begins to look more and more like what gnight once have happened to John Wayne.One of the risks taken by “The Killing Fields” is to cut loose from that tradition: to tell us a story that does not have a traditional Hollywood structure and to trust that we’ll find the characters so interesting that we won’t miss the cliches. It is a risk that works, and that helps make this into a really affecting experience.The “real life” story behind the movie is by now well known. Sydney Schanberg, a correspondent for The New York Times, covered the invasion of Cambodia with the help of Dith Pran, a local journalist and translator. When the country fell to the communist Khmer Rouge, the lives of all foreigners were immediately at risk, and Schanberg got out along with most of his fellow Western correspondents. He offered Pran a chance to leave with him, but Pran elected to stay. And when.the Khmer Rouge drew a bamboo curtain around Cambodia, Pran disappeared into a long silence.Back home in New York, Schanberg did what he could to discover information' about his friend; for example, he wrote about 400 letters to organizations like the Red Cross. But it was a futile exercise, and Schanberg had given up his friend for dead when one day four years later word came that Pran was still alive, and had made it across the border to a refugee camp. The two friends were reunited in one of the rare happy endings to come out of a period of great suffering.The Killing Fields★ ★ ★ ★Sydney Schanberg: Sam Waterston; Dith Pran: Dr. Haing S. Ngor; Military Attache: Craig T. Nelaon; Dr. Sundssval: Athol Fugard; AI Rockoff: John Malkovich.Warner Bros, presents a film directed by Roland Joffe and pro-duced by David Putnam. Screenplay by Bruce Robinson, beeed on an article by Sydney Schanberg. Music by Mike Oldfield. Classified R.As a human story, this is acompelling one. As a Hollywoodstory, it obviously will not do, because the last half of the movie is essentially Dith Pran’s story, told from his point of view. Hollywood convention has it that the American should fight his way back into the occupied country (accompanied by renegade Green Berets and Hell’s Angels, if possible), blast his way into a prison camp, and save his buddy. That was the formula for ‘‘Uncommon Valor” and “Missing in Action,” two recent box-office hits; and of course in “The Deer Hunter” one friend went back to Vietnam to rescue another. Sitting in New York writing letters is not quite heroism on the same scale.And yet, what else could Schanberg do? And, more to the point, what else could Dith Pran do, in the four years of his disappearance, but try to disguise his origins and his education, and pass as an illiterate peasant — one of the countless inmates of Khmer Rouge work camps? By telling his story, and by respecting it, “The Killing Fields” becomes a film of an altogether higher order than the Hollywood revenge thrillers.The movie begins in the early days of the journalistic coverage of Cambodia. We meet Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and Pran (played by Dr. Haing S. Ngor, whose own story is an uncanny parallel to his character’s), andwe sense the strong friendship and loyalty that they share. We also absorb the conditions in the country, where warehouses full of Coca-Cola are blown up by terrorists who know a symbolic target when they see one. Life is a routine of hanging out at cafesand restaurants, and official briefings, punctuated by an occasional trip to the front, where the American view of things does not seem to be reflected by the suffering that the correspondents witness.Dith Pran would, of course, have really disappeared, and we would have followed the point of view of the Schanberg character. But this movie takes the chance of switching points of view in midstream, and the last half of the film belongs to DithPran, who sees his courttry turned into an insane parody of a one-party state, ruled by the, Khmer Rouge with instant violence and a savage intolerance for any reminders of the French and American presence of the colonial era. Many of the best scenes in the film’s second half are essentially played without dialogue, as Pran works in the fields, disguises his origins and waits for his chance.The film is a masterful? achievement on all the technical levels; it does an especially good job of convincing us with its Cambodian locations. But the best moments are the human ones, the conversations, the exchanges of trust, the waiting around, the sudden fear, the quick bursts of violence, the desperation. At the center of many of those scenes is Dr.»Haing S. Ngor, a non-actor who was recruited for the role from the ranks of Cambodian refugees in California, and who brings to it a simple sincerity that is absolutely convincing.Sam Waterston is effective in the somewhat thankless role of Sydney Schanberg), and among the carefully drawn vignettes are Craig T. Nelson as a U.S. military attache and Athol Fugard as a leftover colonialist.The American experience in Southeast Asia has given us a great film epic (“Apocalypse Now”) and a great drama (“The Deer Hunter”). Now here is the story told a little closer to the ground, of people who were not very important and not very powerful, who got caught up in events that were indifferent to them, but never stopped trying to do their best and their most courageous. “The Killing Fields” is one of the best films of the year.In a more conventional film,(HIGHEST RATING)— Kathleen Carroll, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS- Gene Siskel, CHICAGO TRIBUNE — Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMESE8 — Gazette Telegraph, Friday, Feb. 1, 1985
Newspaper Details
Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph
Colorado Springs, Colorado, US
Fri, Feb 01, 1985
Page 50
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 14 Jan 2020
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