A Tasteful View of Genocide

Rating: 7/10 (6 February 2005)

"The Killing Fields" is overrated. As a study of journalists caught up in the horrors of Third World conflict it lacks the urgency of "Under Fire" and "Salvador", while even Peter Weir's romantic idyll set in similar circumstances, "The Year of Living Dangerously", seems a nervier, twitchier entertainment. This has the passive feel of a David Lean movie and while it is very well made, you feel removed from the horrors on screen; it gives us a tasteful view of genocide.
The Killing Fields of the title are, of course, those in Cambodia during the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's and Haing S Ngor, who plays the translator, Pran, was himself a non-actor and survivor of the killing fields (and like that other non-actor recreating something akin to his own real-life experiences in a movie, Harold Russell, Ngor was given the Oscar). One would expect, then, a greater urgency than first time director Roland Joffe gives the film.
It is based on Sydney Schanberg's article "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" and Sam Waterson plays Schanberg, wracked by guilt and having left his interpreter behind in Cambodia when he escaped to the freedom of the West. Waterson plays Schanberg with moon-faced sincerity yet he still comes across as a decent, honorable man who probably could have done no more than the situation allowed. The superb cinematography is by the British cameraman Chris Menges who went on to direct "A World Apart" which told another true story about the horrors of apartheid and touched nerves far more deeply than this film does.