Gorgeously filmed and aided by some excellent performances Peter Weir has made a great film in The Year of Living Dangerously. Mel Gibson plays a young Australian reporter stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia under the Sukarno regime. He befriends a dwarf Chinese- Australian named Billy Kwan and romances a Brit journalist Jill Bryant. The look of the film is good- It makes it seem almost akin to a documentary and there is a beautiful glow to each scene. All the actors are in top form- Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and especially Linda Hunt who plays the dwarf. This is a sweeping tale of morality, romance and political unrest. Another highlight is the score by the ever-reliable Vangelis.

Peter Weir's The year of living dangerously is a fantastic film. A fictionalized story based on real world happenings it is drama and romance interwoven against a political backdrop. Both the leads Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver are stunning (in my opinion one of the best movie couples ever committed on film) and Linda Hunt is amazing as the male dwarf (she won an Oscar for her work here). Vangelis has provided a sublime soundtrack, and even by his lofty standards I hold it on a higher level than his other work. Of course the architect of the entire project- The director Peter Weir skillfully directs his actors in various locations around the Indonesian islands and this is a testimony of how underrated the man is(seriously where is his lifetime achievement?) . He has made poetry in motion here.

President Sukarno of Indonesia was able to maintain control of the nation by forging an uneasy alliance with the PKI--the country's communist party. However, this scared the nations of the West and upset both Muslims and the military which tended to be further right politically. This film is set in the mid-1960s....during Sukarno's final days as the true president of his nation. And, at this point the nation might swing to communism or become run by right wing reactionaries. Ultimately, the right staged a coup and kept Sukarno around a bit longer as a figurehead, but General Suharto and his supporters went on to butcher perhaps a million or more communists during a lengthy purge. Someone watching this film today could easily not understand this political context...as well as the country's nearing civil war at the same time Southeast Asia was in crisis.Mel Gibson plays Guy Hamilton, an Australian journalist working in the capital, Jakarta. His assistant, Billy (Linda Hunt) seems drawn to the left and does much to guide Guy's stories. At the same time, Guy has fallen for a British lady from their embassy--though she (Sigourney Weaver) doesn't sound the least bit British. Through the course of the film, the country moves left and then right...and danger abounds.This was a very well made drama, though I did have a quibble about the character played by Michael Murphy. He was an American reporter who could best be described as an evil, lecherous pig and it felt disingenuous to have him be the only American in the film...not that jerks like this guy didn't exist. Otherwise, compelling and worth seeing.

There are few modern directors I admire as much as Peter Weir. His movies have a lean, elegant quality; he knows restraint and the power of understatement. His use of music is masterful. He is a fantastic actors' director, getting from people like Harrison Ford and Jim Carrey the best performances of their careers - here it's Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. Even potential miscalculations - like giving the part of an Indonesian man to an American actress, as it happens with Linda Hunt in this film - strike gold: Hunt won a deserved Academy Award for the role.Even a minor Weir, like The Year of Living Dangerously, captures the sense of alienation - and exhilaration - of outsiders lost in mysterious places, a recurrent theme in the director's opus (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander). Here it's Indonesia during the Sixties, as Gibson's foreign correspondent follows the attempted coup to overthrow President Sukarno.Worth watching, like every movie in Weir's filmography.7/10