intense and moving, full of brutal violence but also about the good in people

Rating: 9/10 (19 September 2015)

In the Killing Fields, there may be some things politically that you'll either not be fully aware of going in, or need to be brought up to speed on. The short of it that I know for sure is that the Vietnam war didn't stay completely within its borders, but rather spilled over into Cambodia, with the kind of guerilla warfare being raged, but more crucially (along with Nixon's own butchery intentions) rival gangs and groups were looking to gain control - and all of this at the cost of thousands of lives, mainly civilians' lives. What's good about the film politically is that it doesn't ask you necessarily to take a big side on one or the other in the Cambodian conflict, except as far as Pol Pot making madness and chaos even more extreme, and that the violence of these street gangs made into larger forms was horrible. But what's even better is that the emotional core, the pathos, is strong: this is a movie about friendship (writer Bruce Robinson, coincidentally, would make another key movie about friendship in the 80's in Withinail & I, on a totally different context of course).
The friends - one might almost say lovers in the non-romantic, heterosexual sense - is author Sidney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and Dith Pran (Hang S Ngor, who won a deserved Oscar for his acting, which often feels very raw and wholly convincing, basically as though he was/is there). Sidney is there in Cambodia to get the scoop as a New York Times reporter, and not only won't soft-pedal anything, he despises the reporters sent/allowed in who will. Pran is nominally his translator, but he is a reporter as well (we don't see much of that aspect, but it's not difficult to see his serious intentions to get things down as they are). The two of them finds that they're stuck in the country as things become even more harried; the greatest tension and suspense of the film isn't even about being under the barrel of guns held by certain guerilla soldiers (though that's part of it) - it's simply how to get Pran out of the country.
One may ask why Sidney just didn't get Pran out when he does, in fact, get Pran's family out. Maybe there was just more work to do. Maybe it was simpler that way and for Pran to stay it was necessary for the very on-the-street-on-the-run reporting that Sidney was looking for. But whatever the motivation, the centerpiece of the film for me all comes down to a photograph - this is what's needed for Pran to get a passport and go along with the Americans and French out of the country (it is explained why Cambodians can't leave, but it's not completely clear, or at much as it could've been for me).
We see how Malkovich, as a photojournalist, takes the painstaking task of taking pictures on a beat-up, nearly broken camera, and has to develop the film in a very cramped bathroom with unlikely chemicals. It's not totally a spoiler to say it doesn't end up working - for half of the film, Pran is in a prison camp and it then becomes a 'how-does-he-escape' scenario - but this section is for me the most effective: trumping the violence of the world through the process of photography (if not art, then close enough), and just seeing the moment-by-moment events of that sequence is staggering.
Of course, there's much violence here, and in a way this was a nice antidote to the barrage of mindless, at best usually guilty-pleasure action fare of the 1980's. Instead of something like Rambo 2, where one man goes in and single-handedly takes on the entire Vietnamese army, this is more like 'hey, you really have to be very, very careful here, because the one wrong thing said or done can get you shot in the head, immediately, or, if in prison, worse via torture'.
Some of the events in the first act move rather quickly, but the important thing is that we get to learn who these people are, especially Sidney and Pran, and this is crucial for the emotional stakes: will they be torn apart, and if they are, can they reunite again? I kind of wish I hadn't looked up the trivia for the film ahead of time as I got in a way spoiled as the ultimate outcome (one hopes for the 'happy ending', though here that's especially relative). The tension mounts so well in the second half because we know, as capable as Pran is at thinking on his toes and acting quickly, he's up against a truly formidable, horrifying presence in these soldiers, all trained to the gills for brutal executions.
If there is a political message it comes in a rather operatic moment: Sidney is back in New York and watching what looks like a primitive version of a VHS tape of some old news broadcast; it talks about Nixon's message to the American people about what the plan was for Cambodia, and how it was not the bill of goods he was selling. One almost gets the sense that had Nixon really had his way, Pran could've been wiped out by a barrage of bombs. But, again, The Killing Fields is interested in politics only up to a point: the power of the film comes from its male bond, and its depiction of survival and how one can keep a head when surrounded by death and destruction. A very good film of its time, and it holds up extremely well.