Ambiguous to a fault

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 1999)

After all I'd heard about this film, I was pretty disappointed on several counts.
The film makes it pretty clear that Dith Pran stayed in Cambodia mainly for the sake of Schanberg. At first the claim is that because Pran's a journalist he feels a moral obligation to stay behind, implying that he intends to cover the Khmer Rouge's takeover, but later says that he'd "do anything" for his Western colleague. So his intentions are not made clear, and this is a pretty important part of the movie. I could be mistaken, but there seems to be an almost sexual tension between the two main characters. The way the director deftly avoids this issue by allowing Pran's intentions to contradict each other from act to act leaves an unforgivable hole in the plot. And either way, it's not hard to take issue with the outcome: on one hand Killing Fields becomes an unsettling and sadistic paean to self-destructive altruism a la Breaking the Waves, and on the other it's a story of love across cultures, with Schanberg seeming like a domineering and selfish lover.
Nonetheless, Pran is well portrayed as a man who genuinely cares about life. He is forced to steal to keep himself alive, but later selflessly risks his own life to save that of a child. Pran negotiates the release of several journalists, even though in doing so he loses a little pride by almost kowtowing to the captors. Perhaps the variances and apparent contradictions in his character are merely true-to-life portrayals of the extremes to which the vicissitudes of history propel us.