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" gives us an Australian foreign correspondent desperate to prove himself in his career, a marvelously strange character as his photographer sidekick, sets the whole thing in the politically tumultuous Indonesia of the 1960s, and then can think of nothing better to do with any of this material than focus on a boring love story between two white people.Ah well. At least one of those white people is played by Sigourney Weaver, who is always watchable even if not given a very interesting character to play here. The other is played by, of course, Mel Gibson, who's not much of an actor now and wasn't then either, but is easy enough on the eyes. The movie's shining asset is Linda Hunt in the role of the photographer, an American Chinese dwarf named Billy Kwan, whose mysterious and ambiguous motives give the film what suspense it has, and far more than the "will civil war keep our two lovers apart?" story line that comprises most of the film. Linda Hunt won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Billy, to date the only time in Oscar history that an actor has won an Oscar for playing someone of the opposite gender.Grade: B

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.

Writing a two star review for a film that has an IMDb rating of 7.1 must look like spite, but let me make my case. Firstly, the plot line is confusing, quickly ticking off events from the book, without the viewer getting to understand their full significance. So we do not get to understand Billy's love of the Sigourney Weaver character, his bitterness as someone who has not had love reciprocated and thus his spiral out of control. We do not really get to understand Mel Gibson's motivation as a journalist either, only his romance with Sigourney Weaver. So, we do not really understand why he deliberately loses the swimming race with the British military attaché - (this was done to befriend him and get more scoops). This messes with the dramatic impact, meaning that we not only do not get to know the characters, nor the complexity of the political backdrop of Indonesia under a dictatorship with communist revolutionaries and Muslim generals. My second problem is with the casting. Mel Gibson and Siguourney Weaver are the fabulous looking Hollywood stars brought into attract an audience, but Gibson is wooden and wholly unbelievable as a foreign journalist. He overuses a cigarette as a prop as if that is the main characteristic of a journalist. He only comes alive when offended and given a chance for violence, (which explains his future casting in Braveheart/Lethal Weapon). Weaver gives a reasonable English accent, but the role calls for someone with a cut glass voice to emphasise how foreign her posting in Jakarta is. Similarly Linda Hunt does well as Billy Kwan, but why bother? With a billion Chinese on this earth why opt for a white female to play a male half-Chinese man?