Dead Poets Society

Peter Weir is a filmmaker fascinated by outsider protagonists thrust into strange environments that they must navigate, be it an Australian journalist in 1965 Jakarta (The Year of Living Dangerously) or a veteran Philadelphia cop hiding out in Amish country (Witness) or a headstrong inventor that moves his family from the United States to the jungles of Central America (The Mosquito Coast). Dead Poets Society (1989) continues this thematic preoccupation with a shy student spending his senior year of high school at a conservative all-boys prep boarding school in the 1950s where he falls in with a tight-knit group of colorful students and is in turn taught by the new English teacher whose unconventional methods are alien to the traditional ways of the school.

Right from the opening credits, Weir immerses us in the stuffy, authoritative atmosphere of Welton Academy where its students literally carry its ideals a.k.a. the Four Pillars (tradition, honor, discipline, excellence) on banners into chapel with all the pomp and circumstance befitting such an esteemed institution. Like new student Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), we are immersed in this foreign world and watch as he tries to adapt to and make sense of it all. He starts off as an inexperienced blank slate for Neil Parry (Robert Sean Leonard), the artistically-inclined student (despite his strict father’s wishes), and his friends – Richard Cameron (Dylan Kussman), the strictly-by-the-book type, Gerard Pitts (James Waterston), Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero), Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles), the romantic, and Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen), the rebel who’s up for anything – to imprint upon. They even have their own version of the Four Pillars: travesty, horror, decadence, and excrement.

Their first class with Professor John Keating (Robin Williams) is a memorable one as he takes them out of the classroom and into the hall. He quotes Walt Whitman, evokes the phrase carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) and gets them to look at old photographs of students in the trophy case to give an indication of their own mortality and to inspire them to also seize the day. For a brief but pivotal spell, Keating gets his students to think about English literature in a different way than they are normally accustomed to and this starts with having them rip out the introduction to their textbook that posits poetry should be tracked like a graph with its two axises being the poem’s perfection rated against its importance, which then determines its greatness. Through humor, Keating exposes the absurdity of applying a mathematical formula to art. He forces his students to think about poetry differently through the shock tactic of tearing out pages of the book thereby tearing down their pre-conceived notions of how poetry should be studied.

He hopes that they will learn to think for themselves. How could you not be inspired by someone like that at such an impressionable age? However, Keating is not saying that all other disciplines are less worthy – on the contrary, they are often crucial to our day-to-day existence – but a love of literature is good for the soul and enriches our lives. In their own respective ways, Neil and Keating are instrumental in bringing Todd out of his shell – whether he wants to or not. The last 30 minutes of Dead Poets Society take on a considerably darker tone as the boys are forced to grow up fast when faced with the death of one of their own. They must make some important choices that will change their future at Welton as they must decide if they should stick together or save their own skins as the ramifications could affect their future academic career. Weir takes great care to show how this death affects not just the boys but Keating as well in a deeply profound way.

Ethan Hawke plays Todd as a wide-eyed innocent, meek in temperament and soft-spoken with the hint of a nervous stutter. At times, Todd is so quiet that those around him are often barely aware he’s in the room and Weir conveys this visually by the character’s placement in a given shot. Along comes Keating who forces Todd out of his shell as only a charismatic teacher can with the rousing battle cry of carpe diem. It is this ideal that he tries to instill in Todd and his classmates and Hawke does a nice job over the course of Dead Poets Society showing how his character struggles with it. The moment where Keating forces Todd to let go and create a poem spontaneously is a powerful one as we are witness to a personal epiphany and an emotional breakthrough.

Robert Sean Leonard delivers what is arguably the most powerful performance in the film as a student who starts out full of passion for the written word thanks to Keating’s influence and this inspires him to get involved in theater. It is his idea to resurrect the Dead Poets Society and the other boys follow him because he is a natural, charismatic leader. As the film progresses, Neil’s personal arc takes on increasingly dramatic dimensions and Leonard is excellent at showing how the pressure that his father (Kurtwood Smith) exerts takes its toll. What was once a promising future eventually becomes a prison imposed by his father and Neil feels that there is only way out. As a result, he becomes a tragic figure and a potent warning of what happens when you buck the rigid system structure imposed by parents, authorities, etc.

Robin Williams is quite good and very believable as an English teacher. Weir reins him in and not once does the comedian go on one of his trademark manic tears, but still has his funny moments. More importantly, he is incredible at conveying a passion for literature and this in turn inspires his students who resurrect an old tradition of his when he was a student at the school – The Dead Poets Society, a group of boys who met, after lights out, at the old Indian cave off campus and recited their favorite poetry (and even some of their own). Keating is an outsider who used to be an insider – once a student at Welton Academy – and he’s gone on to be a free thinker who tries to impose his out-of-the-box approach on the school. Not surprisingly, he meets with resistance from the administration.

The cast is uniformly excellent and convincingly convey the kind of familiarity and friendship that exists and forms in a boarding school environment with Josh Charles and Gale Hansen being notable stand-outs with the former playing an irrepressible romantic that pursues a girl he pines for from afar and the latter playing a beatnik-in-training, who throws down the first gauntlet of rebellion against the administration. Even though they play archetypal characters, their performances move beyond the clichés into well-nuanced, three-dimensional people that we grow fond of and care about.

Weir perfectly captures the look and atmosphere of the northeast in autumn with orange and brown colored leaves on trees or lying on the ground as winter approaches. He also accurately depicts the rarified atmosphere of private school life: the camaraderie of the boys, the secret breaking of the rules, and the strict adherence to tradition. He shows us glimpses of the day-to-day goings on: chapel first thing in the morning, classes where one learns the standards (Latin, Trig, etc.) and the participation in sports like rowing.

When writing the screenplay for Dead Poet Society, every character was based loosely on someone Tom Schulman knew in real life. For example, Keating was inspired by an English teacher he had in his sophomore year of high school and a teacher he had in the Actors and Directors Lab in Los Angeles years later. Of all the characters in the film, Todd is the one Schulmann identified with the most because he was also shy and afraid of public speaking.

Early on, Jeff Kanew (Revenge of the Nerds) was set to direct and he wanted Liam Neeson to play Keating but the studio wanted Robin Williams. The comedian wanted to do the film but not with Kanew. The film was originally planned to be shot outside of Atlanta with sets built but Williams did not show up for the first day of shooting. Afterwards, the studio shut down the production and burned down the sets. Kanew left as a result. In 1987, Peter Weir met with Walt Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg about making a film with them. At the end of the meeting, Katzenberg gave him the script for Dead Poets Society. The director read and loved it as well as the chance to work with Williams.

In order to bond as a group, the seven young actors that played Keating’s students played soccer together and ran through simple acting exercises prior to principal photography. To get them into the spirit of their characters, Weir created an “atmosphere where there was no real difference between off-camera and on-camera – they were those people.”

Weir shot the film in sequence so that the actors would experience the same rollercoaster of emotions as their characters. He was also careful to rein in Williams’ trademark knack for improvisational comedy so that the character’s humor “had to be part of the personality,” and so they agreed “at the start that he was not going to be an entertainer in the classroom.” For the pivotal setting of the fictional Welton Academy, the production used St. Andrew’s School in Middleton, near Wilmington, Delaware with filming taking place from mid-October 1988 to late January 1989. For the most part filming went smoothly, however, in order to keep the budget under control, Disney shortened the shooting schedule, which stressed Weir out to no end. The director finally snapped and straightened things out with Katzenberg.

Dead Poets Society received mixed reviews from mainstream critics with Roger Ebert infamously giving it two out of four stars. He wrote, “The movie pays lip service to qualities and values that, on the evidence of the screenplay itself, it is cheerfully willing to abandon. If you are going to evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you had better make a movie that he would have admired.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Even worse, Mr. Schulman and Mr. Weir seem to accept the Keating character at romantic face value. In allowing him to remain a sort of hip Mr. Chips, they leave unexplored the contradictory nature of his responsibilities.” The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Wilmington wrote, “Ultimately, whatever its flaws, The Dead Poets Society commands respect and affection. It becomes—in ways that most movies don’t even attempt—a cry of passion and rage against the brutality of a conformist society, against the deadening of our capacity for beauty.”

There’s a long-standing tradition of coming-of-age stories set in prep schools both in literature with likes of A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye and films like If… (1968) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Dead Poets Society is very much in that tradition, offering a poignant coming-of-age tale featuring conflicts between individuality and conformity. A way someone comes of age is through experience and taking something away from it. After what happens to Neil and then Keating, Todd is finally moved to assert himself in a way he was unwilling to do so before in a moving scene that manages to end the film on a hopeful albeit bittersweet note. I always get the feeling that Neil and Keating’s respective sacrifices are not in vain and that Todd will carry on their passion for the arts and for life now that he has finally learned how to seize the day. By the end of the film, Neil and Keating have had a profound effect on not just Todd but many of his classmates.

Dead Poets Society would earn Robin Williams a much-deserved Academy Award nomination and launch the careers of Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Josh Charles, all of whom are still working in prominent movies and television to this day. The film would go on to inspire and influence subsequent boarding school movies like School Ties (1992) and Mona Lisa Smile (2003) among others but they all still live in the long shadow that Weir’s film casts. It still resonates today because its themes are timeless.

SOURCES

Anica, Rocio. “Screenwriter Tom Schulman Talks Dead Poets Society Blu-Ray.” I Am Rogue. January 19, 2012.

Brew, Simon. “Why Dead Poets Society’s Sets Were Burnt Down After One Day.” Mental Floss. April 24, 2015.

Griffin, Nancy. “Poetry Man.” Premiere. July 1989.

Mammarella, Ken. “Middletown Marks Dead Poets Society Anniversary.” The Delaware News Journal. March 22, 2014.

May, Grady. “Interview… Dead Poets Society Writer Tom Schulman.” GST. January 16, 2012.

Witness

Remember when Harrison Ford used to make good movies? It’s scary to think that there is an entire generation that only knows him from forgettable fare like Morning Glory (2010) and Paranoia (2013). The 1980s and into the mid-1990s proved to be his most prolific period where, in between huge blockbuster franchises like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, he successfully tackled challenging fare like Blade Runner (1982), Frantic (1988) and the two films he made with Peter Weir — Witness (1985) and The Mosquito Coast (1986). The former was a fascinating look at culture clash and a meditation on the cause and effect of violence.

Ford plays a gruff, Philadelphia homicide detective named John Book. He is investigating the murder of an undercover narcotics agent with a young Amish boy named Samuel (Lukas Haas) as the only witness. Book finds out that the man was killed by corrupt cops and is shot by one of them (Danny Glover) when he gets too close. Book takes the boy and his recently widowed mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), and flees the city, returning to their small Amish community. As Book is nursed back to health, he experiences first hand the simple, decent ways of the Amish people and how it is in stark contrast to his coarse, no-nonsense way of life.

Like many of his films, Weir creates a real sense of place by paying particular attention to the setting, which in this case is the Amish community in Pennsylvania. This is evident right from the opening credits, which feature a group of Amish emerging from a field of tall grass. He uses the opening credits sequence to not only give us a glimpse into their culture, but also to introduce us to Rachel and show her dealing with the loss of her husband. Right away, we are presented with a window into a world very few of us know much about.

Weir portrays the Amish with dignity and respect. They are a community that likes their privacy and live by modest means without the use of the modern technology that we take for granted. He opens the film with beautiful pastoral scenes of lush, green fields of tall grass gently swaying in the wind and then contrasts this serenity with the dirty, noisy and crowded city. The Amish scenes are leisurely paced, mirroring the laid-back vibe of these people while the Philly sequences are tense and jarring in their urgency; danger seemingly lurks around every corner and it is a relief once we leave there and return to the quiet, peaceful countryside.

Weir cleverly films the initial scenes in the city at low angles so that the camera is at eye level with Samuel. We are seeing the city through his eyes and therefore identify with him. Consequently, we also see the horror of the undercover agent’s death through his eyes. It is brutal and swift. We feel the boy’s fear and horror acutely. It’s not until we get to Amish country that Weir opens things up and shows everything from a more omniscient point-of-view.

In lesser hands, this fish out of water story could have exploited the Amish angle, but Weir avoids this by devoting significant screen-time depicting their customs and culture through Book’s eyes. This culminates in a fantastic sequence where the community comes together to help build a barn from scratch in a day. There is a wonderful sense of community and the simple joy of working with one’s hands, which results in a sense of accomplishment as everyone helps out, with the men raising the barn while the women provide food and refreshments for all to consume.

Harrison Ford has a natural, authoritative presence that suits the cop role he plays. The veteran actor brings the right amount of intensity and then has to turn it around once his character becomes immersed in the Amish community. He shows real warmth in his scenes with Kelly McGillis and Lukas Haas. There’s a nice scene early on where Book questions Samuel about what he saw and the interaction between the two characters is well-played as the gruff detective has to quickly gain the confidence of the frightened young boy. Over the course of the film, Rachel and Samuel humanize Book, especially when he goes back with them to their community. This also softens Ford’s sometimes gruff exterior, which he has relied on more and more in his later years. During the ‘80s, he had the choice of all the plum roles and took advantage of that clout by stretching himself as an actor, dabbling in several genres and working with auteurs like Ridley Scott, Weir and Mike Nichols. It’s a shame that into the late ‘90s and beyond the interesting roles either dried up or the commercial failure of some them caused Ford to retreat to safer material.

The mid to late ‘80s was a good time for Kelly McGillis with the one-two punch of Witness and Top Gun (1986), which launched her career into the stratosphere. At the time, she made Weir’s film McGillis was an unknown actress and brought a touching innocence to the role as a reserved, conservative Amish woman. The more time she spends with Book, the deeper the attraction between them grows. McGillis brings a warm earthiness to the role and does a nice job of conveying Rachel’s internal conflict – her growing attraction to Book and her beliefs that clash against his way of life. This causes friction between them early on, but soon they cannot deny the intense feelings they have for each other. Weir handles their growing attraction well; conveying it via the looks they exchange and this is typified most notably in the scene where Book serenades Rachel to “(What A) Wonderful World.” (It was Ford’s idea to use this song.) There’s a wonderfully loose vibe to this scene as we see the normally reserved Book cut loose and have fun with Rachel.

Weir gets a terrific, sensitive performance out of a young Lukas Haas who, with his big wide eyes, conveys not only the innocence of a little boy, but of an Amish person experiencing things like a train ride or a drink from a public water fountain for the first time. This wonderment changes to horror when Samuel witnesses a murder, which is brief, but brutal. The real fear comes when he hides from the killers and is almost caught. Weir cranks up the tension as Samuel comes close to being found. Haas makes his character’s fear almost tangible and you really get the feeling that his life is in grave danger.

Weir fashions the climactic showdown like a western with the bad guys arriving at dawn with an unarmed Book forced to use his wits and his surroundings to even the odds. As he did with the early act of violence, Weir ratchets up the tension to create the notion that Book is in real danger of getting killed and that his opponents are a serious threat even though we know it’s unlikely that a big-time movie star like Ford is going to get killed. He helps sells this vibe by expertly conveying the fear Book feels from three men he knows who have come to kill him.

Much like the romance in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), the one in Witness is brief and intense due to extreme circumstances. Both Book and Rachel know that it can’t last because they come from very different worlds. Eventually, he has to return to his and she must stay in hers. The final scene between them is well done as Weir opts for no dialogue and instead relies on the meaningful looks they exchange, which says more than any words could. It’s an excellent choice that avoids a potentially cliché-ridden moment in favor of one that feels honest.

Producer Edward S. Feldman sent a screenplay entitled, Called Home (an Amish expression for death), which would later be changed to Witness, to Harrison Ford while he was filming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Feldman envisioned someone like Gary Cooper playing John Book and felt that Ford had the same qualities. At the time, the actor did not want to be typecast as blockbuster action hero and was drawn to the story, but was only interested in doing it if the script could be reworked and “we could attract a really fine director.” Once he was on board, they began looking for a director and wanted someone outside of Hollywood that could bring a fresh perspective and avoid going for a “Dirty Harry Meets the Amish” approach.

Feldman offered the job to Peter Weir who, at the time, was coming off the commercial disappointment of The Year of Living Dangerously, and was trying to get The Mosquito Coast made. However, he was unable to secure financing and took the job directing Witness. The director was honest about his reasons for accepting the gig: “I took the assignment because I decided it was a good idea not just to make films which obsessed me. I wanted to be like those directors in the ‘40s who took assignments from their studios and got on with them.” Weir had concerns that Ford might not be able to convey the nuances of his character: “I was interested that Harrison wanted to extend his range. Then, it was a matter of whether we personally got on, which we did right off, because we had similar concerns for the film.” Ford and Weir reworked the script as the former initially found it to be “stupid, overly violent” and they placed an emphasis on the love story with the moral dilemma and the thriller aspect as secondary concerns.

When it came to casting the pivotal role of Rachel, Ford and Weir offered the part to Kelly McGillis who had her debut in Reuben, Reuben (1983), but whose film career had stalled and she was doing soap operas, movies-of-the-week and waitressing. To prepare for the role, she lived with an Amish family, but didn’t tell them she was an actress because they weren’t allowed to participate on the film due to their religious beliefs. She recorded conversations, which helped her perfect the dialect.

To prepare for his role, Ford rode along with actual Philadelphia cops on their night shifts and even hung out with them after work. The actor was surprised at how dangerous their job was because all he had known was what he’d seen in films and television. Once they had the script locked down, Weir recalled that Ford was open to improvising during filming. “Then it was like, ‘Let’s be loose about it. Let’s see what happens but not be uptight about it.’ So we’d ad-lib or invent scenes as we went along, knowing we had a solid structure to bounce off.”

To make sure that Amish culture was depicted accurately and respectfully, Weir hired John King, a former member of the Amish religion, as a technical adviser. To this end, no Amish people were used in the film and the production shot on location in Lancaster County using a Mennonite family farm. Trouble arouse when Temple University sociology professor John Hostetler, who came from an Amish family and wrote several books on them, complained to the Associated Press that the production was “a major intrusion into the Amish way of life.” He also claimed that the producers offered $200,000 for use of Amish farms in the film and that McGillis lived with an Amish family for several days and did not tell them she was researching for a role in a film. Not surprisingly, the production denied all of these allegations. Weir said that “on every film with a strong theme, you’re always going to find someone who comes out against the film.”

Witness was well-received by critics and audiences alike. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “It is a movie about adults, whose lives have dignity and whose choices matter to them. And it is also one hell of a thriller.” In her review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, “It must be said that Harrison Ford gives a fine, workmanlike performance, tempered with humor … he burrows into the role and gives it as much honesty as it can hold.” Finally, The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “The best things about the film are the actors who play in it. Mr. Ford is very attractive as John Book, a sort of toned-down urban Han Solo, and Miss McGillis, who was so special in Reuben, Reuben, is enchanting as the Amish widow.”

Life is regarded highly by the Amish and in Witness. Violence is portrayed as a painful and ugly experience. It’s not even glamorized in the film’s climactic showdown between Book and the dirty cops. This viewpoint must have come as quite a shock to Ford’s fans that were used to the gory violence in Blade Runner and the high body count in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Ultimately, Witness is about a clash of cultures: Book’s violent world colliding with the peaceful world of the Amish. Can they co-exist? For Book, violence is a necessary part of his job but not for the Amish, which makes any kind of romance between him and Rachel doomed from the get-go. Witness still retains the quiet dignity and humanity that made it a powerful film so many years ago.

SOURCES

Beale, Lewis. “Lancaster County Debate: Will Amish Survive Harrison Ford, Witness.” Chicago Tribune. February 10, 1985.

Mann, Roderick. “Peter Weir Plays Witness to the Amish.” Los Angeles Times. January 27, 1985.

Pfeiffer, Lee and Michael Lewis. The Films of Harrison Ford. Citadel. 2002.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

There is a fascinating air of mystery surrounding Peter Weir’s adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) that captivated me when I first saw it many years ago and continues to haunt me. While the story is a simple yet intriguing one its lack of closure is not. Several schoolgirls and their teacher go missing on a rather imposing rock out in the countryside on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900. The film tantalizes us with just enough clues and evocative imagery to keep us wondering just what happened. There are no easy answers only several theories and this is what keeps me coming back to the film. It is brilliantly directed by Weir and features a maddeningly elusive screenplay by Cliff Green and memorable performances from a cast largely made up of young girls. But perhaps the best performance comes from the most enigmatic character in the film – the Hanging Rock, an impressive geological formation that manages to be unsettling even on a bright, sunny day. Picnic at Hanging Rock is a film that invites repeated viewings because it is the things that are left unsaid and the things that we don’t see that are obsessively analyzed by re-watching what is shown and what we learn from the enticing crumbs of information Weir and Green leave behind.

It is February 14th in 1900 and a group of schoolgirls from Appleyard College venture out to Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon in Victoria, Australia for a picnic. The establishing shot is that of the rock and this is significant because in many respects it is the most important thing in the film – the source of mystery. Weir employs some low level sound effects, a combination of wind and subtle rumbling that sets a disquieting mood. He puts us on edge right away as the opening credits play over a montage of the schoolgirls getting ready for their picnic. There are two shots early on that seem to play slightly in slow motion – that of Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) lying in bed, her eyes opening and looking over at her roommate Sara (Margaret Nelson) who smiles back at her in another shot. She does this in an ever so slightly forced way that seems subtly unnatural. It’s hard to put your finger on it but something is slightly off about these two girls.

After the credits end we are privy to a conversation between the two girls and find out that Sara is obsessed with Miranda to which the enigmatic girl tells her, “You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara. I won’t be here much longer.” What an odd thing to say! Does Miranda mean that she won’t at the school much longer or alive much longer? Is she somehow aware of what will happen later on? Has she planned her disappearance ahead of time? Miranda is a hard character to read as she maintains an unapproachable façade that anticipates some of the femme fatales in David Lynch films.

The headmistress Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) warns the girls not to go exploring the rock and to watch out for venomous snakes and poisonous ants. Are the filmmakers throwing that out there as merely a red herring, another theory to add to the collection? An odd thing happens en route to Hanging Rock. One of the accompanying teachers, Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) dishes factoids about it, in particular the rock’s age, and then goes into something akin to a trance as she talks about how it consists of volcanic rock. This goes on for a few moments before she snaps out of it. Has the rock somehow already put the zap on her? The girls arrive at Hanging Rock and the first shot is a low angle one with it looming ominously over them as they make a toast to St. Valentine. Miranda cuts into a heart-shaped cake with a rather large knife. Interestingly, all the clocks in the party have stopped at 12 and Miss McCraw reckons it is “something magnetic” even though it never happened before.

Marion (Jane Vallis), Miranda, Irma (Karen Robson) and with Edith (Christine Schuler) as a last minute edition, get permission to go up to the rock to make “a few measurements.” Miranda tells her teacher, Mademoiselle de Poitiers (Helen Morse), not to worry as they’ll only be gone a little while. There is a long shot of the girls heading off to the rock. Miranda is last and turns to wave to her teacher. She waves back and Weir cuts to a close-up of Miranda as if to suggest that her teacher and classmates should study this well because it will be the last they’ll see of her. En route to the rock, the girls are spotted by two young men and one of them, Michael (Dominic Guard), becomes captivated at the sight of Miranda as evident in the slow motion point-of-view shot of her skipping across a small creek. This is followed by a close-up shot of her looking up at the rock. He is so drawn to her that he finds himself following Miranda to Hanging Rock but for some reason not all the way.

Once at the rock, all the girls look up with only Edith, who asked to come along, refusing to do so. Weir pans the camera around so that we get a real sense of place – the dense vegetation and woods that surrounds the rock and how the environment threatens to envelope the girls even before they ascend further. Once there, he films the girls from high overhead or from narrow passageways as if someone or something is watching them. Miranda seems to be the only one with an inkling of this and seems to be picking up on the rock’s vibe. While an exhausted Edith rests, Miranda and the other girls take their shoes and stockings off and climb further up the rock in their bare feet – rather unladylike at the time. Edith runs after them. The girls climb higher and look down at their classmates on the ground, regarding them rather clinically while Miranda says cryptically, “Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.” Without a word, all four girls lie down simultaneously and go to sleep while the highest most part of the rock watches over them.

Miranda is the first to wake and she, Marion and Irma climb up further despite Edith’s protests. Edith screams in terror and we see her running frantically down the rock. Weir cuts to the remaining schoolgirls with Mademoiselle de Poitiers who informs Appleyard that they left Miss McCraw behind. She too has gone missing, presumably while looking for the girls. However, no one saw her leave because they were all asleep at the time. Edith returned screaming and all she admits is that the three other girls were still on the rock. She saw Miss McCraw in her underwear (?!). What is it about the rock that motivates women to discard articles of clothing? The rest of the film focuses on the search for the missing girls and teacher and the resulting fallout at the school. We are witness to the cruelty of the other schoolgirls and even the teachers, obviously upset over what happened, taking it out on the survivors. The tone shifts from an atmospheric horror film to a different kind of horror, more of a psychological one as it transitions into a fascinating study of human behavior. Halfway through the film, Weir wanted to “gently shift the emphasis off the mystery element which had been building in the first half and to develop the oppressive atmosphere of something which has no solution: to bring out a tension and claustrophobia in the locations and the relationships.” He shows how the dynamic between the remaining girls, specifically Sara and Edith, changes after Miranda, Marion and Irma go missing. A few more clues as to what might have happened are discovered but instead of providing answers they only pose more questions:

1.             Was it something supernatural? Hence the mesmerized demeanor of the girls and their unexplainable disappearance into thin air.

2.             Snakes and ants. Were they bitten by the venomous snakes that they were warned about earlier? We do see some kind of lizard close to Miranda when she wakes up on the rock.

3.             Were the girls kidnapped or killed by someone or something? Perhaps the girls were taken off the rock once the remaining ones left with their teacher.

4.             Why does the rock spare some but not others?

Like us, Michael is haunted by the whole affair and he can’t let it go. In a way, he is almost driven mad by his obsession with Hanging Rock. For example, his solo journey up the rock is unsettling as he too falls asleep on it, dreaming of seeing the girls walking up the rock as key lines of dialogue are repeated along with Edith’s scream:

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time…”

“Waiting a million years, just for us!”

"Look – way up there in the sky!”

“A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, although it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves.”

I believe that this scene points to supernatural causes for the disappearance of the girls. Obviously, Michael can’t be hearing all of these voices but we are meant to hear them and interpret it as something otherworldly while metaphorically it represents the young man’s confused mind. It is here that Weir’s complex soundscape is at its best and most disturbing as Michael goes off the deep end. He soon passes his obsession on to another young man (John Jarratt) who is soon clamoring his way up the rock despite what happened to his friend.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay was published in 1967 with Penguin acquiring the paperback rights in 1970. It became quite a popular title for them, selling 350,000 copies in the first 15 years. In 1973, Patricia Lovell bought a film option on the book with the intention of screenwriter David Williamson (The Year of Living Dangerously) writing the screenplay and Peter Weir directing. However, Williamson was unavailable and he suggested former Melbourne teacher Cliff Green (Mercury). Weir brought Hal and Jim McElroy (The Last Wave) in to produce and it took two years for them to finalize the film’s $440,000 budget. A year before principal photography began, Weir made a trip to Hanging Rock and took photographs of it. He was initially struck by how it didn’t look all that threatening from a distance and planned to do an optical for the wide shots where he would matte a further outcrop rock above the peak. One of the hardest aspects for Weir was casting the schoolgirls. He knew from period paintings and photographs that they looked a certain way. He saw approximately 200 girls from all over Australia but he found the pre-Raphaelite, 19th century look he wanted only in South Australia. As a result, most of the girls ended up coming from Adelaide.

Principal photography began on February 2, 1975 at Hanging Rock and lasted six weeks. The rock’s lack of menace from a distance continued to bother Weir until one morning he noticed a rather dramatic-looking mist come across the plain, which gave it the eerie look he wanted. To distract the audience from realizing that the film was a mystery with no solution, he proceeded to create “an ambience so powerful that it would turn the audience’s attention from following the steps of the police investigation into another kind of film.” To this end, he experimented with camera speeds, often in the same scene. For, example, he would shoot a character talking at normal camera speed and then shoot the listener at a slower speed, instructing them not to blink or make any extreme movements so that the slow motion wasn’t easily apparent. This would produce a certain kind of feel that was enhanced by a soundtrack that utilized white noise or sounds that were inaudible to the human ear to evoke “a strange disassociation from time and place.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock had its premiere in Adelaide to critical acclaim. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “As a tantalizing puzzle, a tease, a suggestion of a forbidden answer just out of earshot, it works hypnotically and very nicely indeed.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Among other things it knows that there are some romantic longings, especially in the young, that are so overwhelming they simply cannot be contained. The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.” Time magazine wrote, “This horrific tale is told with marvelous shadowry indirection and delicate lyricism. It is full of enigmatic silences, which create a nice, ironic tension between the film's genteel manner and its really quite ferocious theme.” In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Stack called it “one of the most hauntingly beautiful mysteries ever created on film.” However, Newsweek magazine wrote, “His movie is stylish and entertaining, but what he is pushing as metaphysical profundity is closer to metaphysical mush.”

After the film was released author Joan Lindsay hinted that the events depicted in her novel were based on a true story. She never said conclusively and no one could ever find actual proof in old newspaper accounts. A few years after her death, the book’s publishers released a new version with an additional chapter that spelled out what happened to the missing girls and thereby dispelling part of the story’s allure – its enticing mystery. Weir said, “It was never of interest to me whether it had happened literally or not … It was a metaphor of some kind, for Joan Lindsay. People disappear.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock’s prevailing theme is that of obsession. First, there is Miranda’s obsession with Hanging Rock. There’s Sara’s obsession with Miranda. Finally, there is Michael’s obsession with finding Miranda, which he passes on to another young man. It is one of those horror films where the environment itself is the threat or monster. There is definitely something not right about Hanging Rock but Weir never tells us for sure. He is content to simply show how it affects those that come in contact with it. This is a film for those that like cinematic puzzles, watching them repeatedly to uncover some clue or detail perhaps overlooked previously. Unlike most horror films, Picnic at Hanging Rock is just as interested in the horrific event as with its aftermath. We see how the incident affects the townsfolk that reside near the school and also get glimpses of how the media have exploited it, shaping people’s views. It was Weir’s intention to “take the idea of the red herring and to embrace that cliché and pass through it and beyond it, to make so many allusions and connections with images that they were no longer red herrings, but something powerful and unknowable.” The disappearance of the girls has shattered lives and left others haunted forever, which Weir suggests are equally disturbing.

The Year of Living Dangerously

Based on Christopher Koch’s 1978 novel of the same name, The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) was among a small group of films that came out in the early 1980’s depicting the struggles of Western journalists to document the plight of Third World nations – Under Fire (1983) in Nicaragua; The Killing Fields (1984) was set in Cambodia; and a few years later Salvador (1986) came out with an unflinching portrayal of the volatile conditions in El Salvador. The Year of Living Dangerously is set in Indonesia during the attempted coup of President Sukarno by the 30 September Movement Communist party in 1965 and follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta covering the increasing unrest.

The film’s title is a quote that refers to a famous Italian phrase used by Sukarno – vivere pericolosamente, meaning “living dangerously.” He borrowed the line for the title of his Indonesian Independence Day speech of 1964. Sukarno was a hero for leading his country’s independence from the Netherlands. He became the first President of Indonesia and during his reign he gave each year a name. In his 1964 speech he named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously,” as if anticipating the increasing friction between two radical political forces: the Communists and the Muslims, both of whom were trying to overthrow his government. Sukarno also planned to cut his country’s ties with the West.

We meet Australian journalist Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) as he arrives in Jakarta on his first foreign correspondent assignment to find that his predecessor has already left without briefing him. He leaves the airport and we are immediately assaulted with the sights and sounds of the chaotic city – streets congested with cars, people and livestock – but he quickly moves through it to an air-conditioned hotel where all the western journalists hang out. It is there that he meets Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), a freelance photographer that did a lot of work for Guy’s predecessor. He takes Guy on a guided tour of the slums of Jakarta to show him how most of the country lives and to gain his confidence. Billy also does this so that Guy doesn’t see the country like other journalists, namely Pete Curtis (Michael Murphy), a correspondent for the Washington Post.

The next day, Guy tries to get an interview with Sukarno and is easily rebuffed by the President’s staff. Later on, Billy proposes a deal: he’ll use his personal contacts to get Guy an interview with the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party if he can be his exclusive photographer. Guy’s interview with the Communist Party leader earns grudging respect from his fellow journalists and an initial flush of jealousy from Curtis who had been trying to get the same interview for months. The Post journalist doesn’t like the Indonesian people. They are there just for his amusement. Jakarta is just another assignment for him and Michael Murphy is not afraid to play up the unlikable aspects (of which there are many) of Curtis.

Director Peter Weir is careful to make the distinction between Guy and Curtis (and the other seasoned journalists) and how the former looks at the way the latter delights in the humiliation of the locals with disgust. Guy is young enough not be jaded like Curtis and Billy recognizes this, which is why he latches onto Guy. Billy believes that he can influence Guy to write articles that tell the real story of the Indonesian people and perhaps make a difference. For example, there’s an intensely visceral scene where Billy and Guy cover a protest outside the American embassy by the Communist Party. What starts off as a peaceful march quickly turns ugly as the protestors throw rocks with Billy and Guy stuck in the middle of the angry mob. Once their car gets surrounded, you really start to fear for their lives as the danger they’re in is palpable. Weir does a good job conveying their peril by showing the chaotic masses swirling around their car.

Billy introduces Guy to Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), the assistant to the British military attaché, and who plans to leave for London in three weeks. Her introduction provides occasional moments of levity, like when she, Billy and Guy attend a house party and everyone dances to Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On.” We see the initial attraction between Jill and Guy emerges through the looks they occasionally give each other. The next day, she drops by his office looking for Billy and he offers to drive her to the photographer’s place and wait for him. Jill is very much Guy’s intellectual equal, good-naturedly criticizing one of his articles as being too melodramatic. She ends up accompanying him on an assignment and at one point they end up getting caught in the rain. He charms her with his willingness to look silly and make her laugh. They share a brief, meaningful look that shows how their attraction towards one another is growing. There is a loose, improvisational feel to this scene as it really seems like the actors are in the moment, which only enhances the chemistry between their characters.

Weir never lets the love story overshadow the political one as Guy finds out from Jill that the Communists are planning to overthrow Sukarno’s government and he tries to figure out how they’re going to get weapons into the country. She told him in confidence and he plans to use it in his article, which, of course, puts a strain on their relationship. Even though I know how the film ends, every time I watch it I still get caught up in the tension of Guy’s race to escape the country as it descends into chaos. Weir ratchets up the pressure so that it is almost tangible and you really fear for Guy’s life.

The carved images that appear over the film’s opening credits depict mythical Indonesian figures: Prince Arjuna, the hero who is “fickle and selfish”; the “noble and proud, yet headstrong” Princess Srikandi; and Semar, the dwarf who serves the prince. These figures nicely foreshadow the film’s three main characters: Guy is the fickle and selfish hero, Jill is the noble yet headstrong princess and Billy is the dwarf that serves the prince.

Made early on in his career, Mel Gibson is well-cast as Guy Hamilton, a young journalist on his first big assignment. The actor manages to portray someone who is smart but inexperienced – a basically decent guy that makes mistakes but tries to do the right thing. Over the course of the film we watch as Guy learns on the job and also falls in love with someone probably for the first time. Gibson wisely doesn’t play his character as a wide-eyed innocent – just someone who hasn’t seen much of the world. He isn’t afraid to play a flawed character and still find admirable qualities within him – perhaps even a hint of redemption.

Sigourney Weaver probably wouldn’t be your first choice to play a British woman but she quickly makes you forget that and focus on her behavior and how she carries herself. Weaver is one of those rare actresses that can convey intelligence while being an undeniable beauty. Jill knows that what she’s doing probably won’t last but is compelled by her emotions to get involved with Guy anyway. Weaver is also able to effortlessly convey a complex range of emotions simply through facial expressions, like when Jill wanders through a marketplace in the rain and it looks like she’s contemplating her relationship with Guy and we see how it impacts her, motivating what she does in the next scene. Jill has a complicated relationship with Guy that is brought together by political conflict and is also threatened by it.

The chemistry between Gibson and Weaver is incredible as they do a fantastic job of depicting a brief, yet intense love affair amidst a volatile situation. Weir develops Jill and Guy’s relationship gradually and realistically. They don’t automatically fall in love but get to know each other by hanging out. It’s a classic scenario of a doomed relationship that can’t last but they go for it anyway because the attraction between them is undeniable. You feel the want and desire between them in the way they look at each other and through their body language. The country’s volatility can create a kind of vulnerability between two people and this is the case with Jill and Guy. They are brought together by the volatility of the situation. The two of them know that they have very little time to be together but can’t deny their intense attraction to each other.

Linda Hunt is simply astonishing as Billy Kwan, the savvy photographer who cares deeply for his fellow countrymen. He believes in helping whomever he can, even if it is a toy for a sick child or a bit of money for someone who is starving. Through his voiceover narration, we find out that he is quite a good writer, documenting the plight of his people as well as Guy’s story. Hunt disappears completely into the role. She plays Billy as a tragic figure, a romantic who wears his heart on his sleeve. Perhaps he cares too much, or, rather not enough people around him care as passionately about making a difference as he does. The scene where Billy loses it after being betrayed by Guy is powerful and painful as we sense all the hurt and frustration bubbling up to the surface as the photographer commits a final, desperate act. Your heart really goes out to Billy and Hunt is so good at conveying her character’s last attempt to make a difference.

A friend of director Peter Weir’s recommended he read Christopher Koch’s novel The Year of Living Dangerously but its political content held no interest form him and he delayed reading it for months. Weir finally did read it and was so taken with what Koch had written that he immediately bought the film rights. Weir was particularly impressed with the character of Billy Kwan and felt that he was the heart of the novel, “the figure around whom the novel is constructed.” The director was already intrigued by Indonesia as his favorite vacation spot was Bali: “I had in my mind all the smells and sounds of an Indonesian street or market, the mysteries there had always appealed to me.”

Weir co-wrote the screenplay with Koch and David Williamson, an acclaimed Australian playwright who had worked with the director previously on Gallipoli (1981). While working on it, Weir began to appreciate the story’s politics for the first time: “I began to see how the political atmosphere is acting upon the characters, and how the larger politics and the politics of the personal are inextricably locked together.” He was also careful to achieve a balance and it took many drafts to achieve it. Weir admitted to having a “bumpy” relationship with Koch because he told the author he was going to “attempt to make this into a good film. He took that for doubt or uncertainty on my part, whereas it was really just being honest.”

The Year of Living Dangerously was in development when Weir got the offer to make Gallipoli and so the project was put aside while he did that one. While making Gallipoli with Mel Gibson, Weir knew that he wanted to cast him in his next film. After they made a deal for The Year of Living Dangerously, Mad Max (1979) came out and Gibson became an international movie star. After casting Sigourney Weaver, it took months for Weir to find someone to play the pivotal role of Billy Kwan.

Three weeks before principal photography was to begin, he had still not found the right actor. He was shown a photograph of Linda Hunt and was struck by her face which he thought looked like an “elf or a goblin.” Weir agreed to meet her and after doing a screen test of her in Eurasian makeup and men’s clothes, he decided to cast her in the role: “My feeling was that it was worth the gamble.” She was “scared to death” at the notion of playing a man but found herself drawn to the character and his relationship to the people of Indonesia and “to his passion about injustice.” Her initial worry was that she could not do it and no one would believe it. Hunt even admitted that during filming she was terrified 95% of the time. To transform herself into the role, her tropical shirts were padded slightly across the shoulders to give her a wider back and she always had something in the breast pocket.

Gibson and Weaver had very different working methods but they didn’t break the ice until the rain scene in the car. For the sequence, they were drenched by fire hoses with the car portion shot in Sydney on a very cold night. Gibson said about his romantic scenes with Weaver, “That kind of thing is always a touchy area with actors, I would think. Or maybe it’s just me. But I think we managed to get a few sparks going.” Weir was more worried about these scenes then the violent crowd scenes that employed thousands of extras. Gibson remembered, “We unloaded truckloads of rocks and things and told those young blokes, ‘Hurl these rocks through the windows. We’ll be down here with the cameras.’ You could yell, ‘Cut! Cut!’ but it didn’t stop the fight.”

Due to the controversial politics of the film, Weir did not consider filming in Indonesia and instead picked the Philippines. However, the production ran into trouble there. Four weeks into a scheduled six weeks of filming in the spring of 1982, the cast and crew began receiving written and telephoned death threats from Muslim extremists that feared the film would be anti-Muslim. Airing on the side of caution, the production left the country and finished filming in Sydney, Australia. At the time, Gibson downplayed these threats: "It wasn't really that bad. We got a lot of death threats to be sure, but I just assumed that when there are so many, it must mean nothing is really going to happen. I mean, if they meant to kill us, why send a note?"

The Year of Living Dangerously received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars and called it, “a wonderfully complex film about personalities more than events, and we really share the feeling of living in that place, at that time.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Linda Hunt’s performance: “Not exactly dominating these performances, but providing the film with its dramatic center, is Miss Hunt's haunted Billy Kwan, who keeps detailed files on everyone he loves, weeps at the purity of the voice of Kiri Te Kanawa and, when the chips are down, is capable of the film's single grand gesture.” However, the Washington Post’s Gary Arnold wrote, “It's unlikely that anyone who sees The Year of Living Dangerously will ever forget Hunt's performance or Weir's orchestration of a foreboding atmosphere. Still, there's no particular reason why these marvelous aspects couldn't be coordinated with the story in an organic way, so that Billy's character, the characters of the lovers and the ominous intimations all paid off in coherent dramatic terms.” Newsweek found the film to be “an annoying failure because it fritters away so many rich opportunities.”

Along with The Road Warrior (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously helped launch Gibson’s international career and it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. It also showed that he had some serious dramatic acting chops and wasn’t just some hunky pretty boy. Weaver’s career also got a big boost and it was the beginning of a great run during the ‘80s that saw her move effortlessly from comedies like Ghostbusters (1984) to dramatic fare like Gorillas in the Mist (1988). The Year of Living Dangerously also helped launch Weir’s career and like Gibson he soon started making films in Hollywood but managed to make them on his own terms with thought-provoking efforts like The Mosquito Coast (1986) and Fearless (1993).

At one point in The Year of Living Dangerously, Billy says, “What then must we do?” This is also the question that the film asks not only of its protagonist but also of its audience. Don’t waste the rest of your life asking this question – do something. It’s all fine and good to become interested in important causes but will you step up and take an active role in something you believe in? Weir avoids delivering a preachy, statement-driven film by expertly balancing a love story with political unrest in a foreign land and how they become intertwined. He makes the politics personal by showing how they impact the characters. It all comes back to Billy’s rather poignant question – “What then must we do?”

SOURCES

Bennetts, Leslie. “East and West Meet Amid Mystery in Peter Weir’s New Film.” The New York Times. January 16, 1983.

Bennetts, Leslie. “Breakthrough Season Arrives for Linda Hunt.” The New York Times. February 12, 1983.

Hanrahan, John. Mel Gibson. Little Hills. 1986.

Moore, Peter S. "The Year of Living Dangerously." Moviegoer. February 1983.

Wadler, Joyce. “When Seeing is Believing.” Washington Post. February 18, 1983.