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The Year of Living Dangerously Customer Reviews (16 - 18 of 26 Reviews)

Great Movie, more people should see it
This is perhaps the most serious and socially redeeming film that Mel Gibson has done, it is up there with Braveheart on my list of favorite Gibson films would probably fall in the top 100 of my favorite all time films if I ever made such a list.. Real magic in acting is the performance given by Linda Hunt as she plays the part of a man most convincingly. Her portrayal of an Indonesian insider is very good. I am a big Gibson fan, and like almost all his films, but this movie is more than just a good movie well acted.
Up until just recently this movie was banned in Indonesia and for good reason, well, at least for good reason if you happen to be part of a corrupt government. It shows the darker side of revolution and reveals what most governments in backwards and corrupt parts of the world would like to remain hidden; their policies usually result in a huge class of very poor.
Gibson plays a British reporter freshly arriving in Indonesia, he meets some other reporters doing the usual reporting but he gets on an inside track that takes him into the seat of power and also into the country to meet the other side. It really isn't a story about the setting and times so much as it is a story about the people, friendship, loyalty and the terrible realization that life isn't fair or kind to most of the earths inhabitants but that friendship and love between people are enduring.
Even though the film is somewhat dark, I don't feel like it is a "downer" kind of movie, but it is definitely a "thinking/feeling" movie and not at all like the action/adventure/thriller type of movies that Gibson later becomes famous for. I highly recommend this film.

A rare jewel
I reserve five stars for movies that create or recreate a world I want to live in or touch in some way. This is not to say that one film is BETTER THAN "Citizen Kane" or NOT AS GOOD AS "Casablanca." All good movies are their own reward for having watched them. A movie that can truly move you is a rare thing. It is the accumulation of these rare moments that enrich our lives.

"The Year of Living Dangerously" is a rare thing. It is a film that lets you see an alien culture in all its poverty and violence and political turmoil and renders it -- at its heart -- as a frightening and beautiful thing. I know I will perhaps never go to Djakarta, Indonesia. I certainly cannot know the fear the people of Java lived with under the Sukarno regime. I do not know what fears they live with now.

But I am haunted by the voice of Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt in her Oscar winning role) who is himself haunted by the misery and hardships of his adopted people. Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) is the journalist trying to cover a budding revolution the western world watches but doesn't wish to understand. Hamilton is, as I would be, lost in this alien culture, visibly panicked as he struggles to keep up with his callous fellow journalists. Sigourney Weaver is the sophisticated British attache for whom he finds himself falling in love. Ultimately, Hamilton must decide between his loyalty to his job and his loyalty to himself.

Peter Weir's empathic direction and Maurice Jarre's lush score put you in Indonesia in the 1960s and hold you there. Stay. You will go back again and again.

In a foreign land
There have been a lot of political dramas about third world situations undergoing violent upheavals but none have captured their complexity quite as well as this one. In fact though it is a film about a specific revolution or populist uprising Year of Living Dangerously deals with that situation in a philosophic way, making a fable of all its elements which allows this film to speak specifically to that situation as it unfolds and generally about all such situations that occur with unfortunate regularity in the news from places all over the world where mass starvation undermines a current regimes authority.
The film is also about a wealthy nations role in such circumstance. Mel Gibson plays an Australian journalist and that allows him to report events as they occur but not have to get involved in them or think about what they mean. That changes however when Mel meets Linda Hunt. Her character teaches Mel how to care about the people not just the events and that is the most fascinating relationship in the film. Sigourney Weaver is the daughter of an English colonial administrator but now that the political climate is a threatening and perilously unstable one the English are departing. Her father is pompous and very English, his intentions are good ones but his methods have been ineffective because from his lofty English perch he can not see the real needs of the people. Mel falls for his daughter who as a free spirit and free thinker cares for the people and understands their needs in a way her father could not. It is not surprising that Linda Hunt likes her and wishes to see she and Mel together. And she has a fascination with shadow puppets that makes her think of herself as something of a puppet master in the Mel and Sigourney love affair. However there is another puppet show going on and that is the political one. Linda Hunt may play the puppet master in the private sector but other people are pulling the strings in the public arena. Disillusion follows and a very exciting finale. Really one of the few films of the last thirty years I would call perfect in every way. Complex enough to give you a new slant on these events every time you view it. Every element of the film is fulfillingly developed and explored in such a way as to make one feel one has just watched a perfect film.

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