Os Gritos do Silêncio

In 1973, New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) goes to cover the war in Cambodia with Dith Pran as his interpreter. They cover the war along side other journalists like Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) and Jon Swain (Julian Sands). A military adviser (Craig T. Nelson) tries to cover up an accidental American B-52 bombing of an innocent town. Eventually the Khmer Rouge threatens to overrun the country. Dith Pran decides to stay despite the danger while his family leaves. After the fall, Phnom Penh is evacuated and the group finds refuge in the French embassy. The foreigners are allowed to go home but Dith Pran and the locals are not so lucky.

Director Roland Joffé creates a masterpiece. It is shockingly intense without warning. It is deep emotionally. He captures the desperate instability and the unknowable fear of the fall of the capital. The chaos and the random brutality is perfect. The acting is superb. Developing a picture has never been more intense. Then the movie does the unthinkable. It hands over the lead and the movie to a no name amateur Cambodian actor. The great surprise is that the movie is as compelling as ever. This is a historical biopic masterpiece from start to finish.

Oh, this brings me back alright. It was the last days of 1984, and earnest college students like me had much to talk about. Wasn't it wonderful that Walter Mondale had chosen a strong woman like Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate, and wouldn't the Democrats sweep the Northeast at least for that brave move? Does buying a Coke at the local convenience store signal support for the apartheid government in South Africa? Did anyone else see that amazing film about the human price of American involvement in Southeast Asia?

It's nearly 20 years later, and I've managed to shake the ill effects of my youthful liberalism easily enough in most cases. This film, however, packs the kind of punch that isn't explained away by political trendiness.

"The Killing Fields" is a great film that tries and succeeds in capturing much of the carnage and tragedy of Cambodia as the radicalized Khmer Rouge and the U.S.-backed regime of Lon Nol controlling Phnom Penh clash in a fight to the death to be/not be the next domino in the Communist rollover in Southeast Asia. By particularizing the conflict to that of the true-life relationship of two men, New York Times reporter Syndey Schanberg and his Cambodian apprentice and aide-de-camp, Dith Pran, the film forces a level of empathy that is at once uncomfortable and absorbing. It is possible to walk away from this film hating the manipulation, the America-bashing, the easy liberal guilt. But it's impossible to walk away from the human experience borne witness to before the movie's done, if one has any pretense of being human, and that's its great strength.

Oh, it's polemical alright. We hear comments about how the Khmer Rouge's excesses were the direct result of Nixon's secret bombing campaign. (U.S. Counsel: "After what the Khmer Rouge have been through, I don't think they'll be exactly affectionate toward Westerners." Schanberg: "Maybe we underestimated the anger $7 billion in bombing would unleash.") It makes its point, absolves Pol Pot and condemns Kissinger with the same broad brush, and it feels a bit jaded and hollow for that, but I don't know. Schanberg betrays the attitudes of a knee-jerk liberal, and I outgrew that, and maybe I feel superior for that, but Schanberg had AK-47s pointed at his head by 12-year-old brainwashed boys, and I didn't, so shut up already, know what I mean?

The performances are incredible in their verisimilitude, particularly the leads. Sam Waterson burns with righteous anger as Schanberg, and I like his performance for what it is and how he creates that extra level of tension, but he's a butterfly compared to the condor that's Dr. Haing S. Ngor, one of the Academy's most obscure best supporting actor recipients (there was even a joke about it in an episode of "The Simpsons") but someone who didn't just walk the walk. He relived his experience surviving a holocaust that was, per square mile, even more savage than the Holocaust itself. The fact he won a Best Supporting Actor award (Waterson instead was nominated for Best Actor, and lost to F. Murray Abraham for "Amadeus") is one of those perversities of film history, given he carries more of the film than Waterson (who slinks to the background two-thirds of the way in) but also that he personalizes the story in a way that makes the incomprehensible immediate and involving.

We lost Ngor to a senseless murder a few years ago, and have little left to explain what was going through his mind as he relived an experience that cost him his wife and child when he actually lived through it. Roland Joffe does a nice job in the DVD commentary, though, a commentary I put up there with P. T. Anderson's "Boogie Nights" and William Peter Blatty's "The Ninth Configuration" for being worth the price of the DVD and then some by itself. He recalls Ngor's reaction to one child actress whose hard face in enacting a scene convinced Ngor she wasn't just pretending to be Khmer Rouge, and Ngor's request that Joffe participate in one critical scene by muttering real torments Ngor suffered at the hands of the "KR" as a way of enhancing his performance. At one point, trying to convince him to come aboard, Joffe said something about Ngor owing it to his country to bear witness to his story, and that of Dith Pran, and that did the trick, though Joffe seems to wonder if the same sort of manipulation Schanberg pulled on Pran wasn't going on here, too.

It's a great movie because it doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths, because it never loses sight of the human dimension, and because it gave a pretense of understanding to one of the great human traumas after World War II. We never wallow in gore, but the cost of this war is always with us while we watch. The experience is both endurable and humiliating.

I just wish they reshot that ending, with "Imagine." Joffe in his commentary even notes the lyrics are the sort of thing Pol Pot would have gone along with. It feels forced. Did Yoko Ono give her approval after they explained the scene her dead husband's song would appear in, or after they told her the first nasty execution scene would be shot while "Band On The Run" issued forth from a soldier's radio?

A great movie, of an awful moment in human history. If we have any chance of overcoming man's sorry past, it will be because movies like this one get made once in a while.

I can't put my finger on exactly what it is about this film that gets to me so much, but it is THE most haunting, emotional film experience... and I've only ever seen it on video.

Excellent performances from Waterston, Ngor and Malkovich. A brilliant score by Mike Oldfield. Scenes of high emotion, tension, drama, horror and even one or two pieces of light relief (well, it has got Australia's Graham Kennedy of comedy fame).

The stand-out scenes for mine are those in the French Embassy; I can never watch the final scene from this sequence with a dry eye.

An excellent film and the soundtrack is not a bad investment either.

Thoughtful and thought-provoking war-drama based on the memoirs of N.Y. Times correspondent named Sidney (Sam Waterston) and his relationship to journalist assistant and guide named Pran (Haing S Ngor ) . Extraordinary feature debut for Ngor who won Best Supporting Actor Academy Award . Haing S. Ngor a real-life doctor who had never acted before and who lived through the deeds depicted at the movie , he became the first Southeast Asian , and the first Buddhist , to win an Oscar ; furthermore also first film for John Malkovich who gives an awesome portrayal as an intrepid photographer . Ngor's own experiences (in real life he lived Cambodian war ) echoed those of his character and usually played Vietnam roles (Tortures of war, Heaven and Earth , In love and war , Vietnam Texas , Eastern condor) until his violent death by an Asian band . This exciting story depicts the war chaos , Cambodian turmoil and primal bloodletting , but most of the movie is a shattering re-creation of hell on Earth . Marvellous cinematography by Chris Menges who also deservedly won Academy Award and filmed in Phuket , Railway Hotel , Hua Hin, Thailand and Royal York Hotel , Toronto, Ontario, Canada . Screeching and sensitive musical score by Mike Oldfield that accompanies perfectly to the film . Roland Joffe's direction shows a generally sure-hand with a bit of melodrama at the end . Alain Resnais's seminal documentary ¨Nuit et Brouillard (1955)¨ was a touch-point for both director Roland Joffé and prestigious producer David Puttnam when they were preparing this magnificent movie .

This excellent movie contains a relentless criticism to Pol Pot regime , but also US and an exact description about historic events . In power , the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into "Old People" through agricultural labor. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation. In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about "two or three kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three days." Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the "threat of American bombing" and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned.Money was abolished, books were burned, teachers, merchants, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered, to make the agricultural communism, as Pol Pot envisioned it, a reality. The planned relocation to the countryside resulted in the complete halt of almost all economic activity: even schools and hospitals were closed, as well as banks, and industrial and service companies.During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who had the potential to undermine the new state (including intellectuals or even those that had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses) and killing many others for even breaching minor rules . The Khmer Rouge forced people to work for 12 hours non-stop, without adequate rest or food. They did not believe in western medicine but instead favoured traditional peasant medicine; many died as a result. Family relationships not sanctioned by the state were also banned, and family members could be put to death for communicating with each other. In any case, family members were often relocated to different parts of the country with all postal and telephone services abolished. They committed crimes against humanity , the Khmer Rouge government arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed "enemies". Today, examples of the torture methods used by the Khmer Rouge can be seen at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The museum occupies the former grounds of a high school turned prison camp that was operated by Khang Khek Ieu, more commonly known as "Comrade Duch". Some 17,000 people passed through this centre before they were taken to sites (also known as The Killing Fields), outside Phnom Penh where most were executed (mainly by pickaxes to save bullets) and buried in mass graves . Of the thousands who entered the Tuol Sleng Centre (also known as S-21), only twelve are known to have survived.

I watched this movie with my father shortly after it came out on video, so I would have been only 9 or 10 at the time. I did not see it again until this year, but I could still remember the scene of a lone man stumbling across a field strewn with the skeletons of his countrymen. Watching it again was both a moving and a worthwhile experience.

There are so many scenes which will, as the movie case says, haunt the viewer long after watching. The scene already mentioned, Waterston and Ngor wandering through the remains of the homes of Cambodian civilians destroyed by American bombs, a little girl, her hands over her ears, crying and screaming, surrounded by explosions and gunfire.

The acting performances are top notch all round, particularly, of course, by Dr. Ngor. The team of Joffe and Menges is superb, as they also are in The Mission. Both films are in my video library.

As an aside, whatever happened to Joffe? Super Mario Brothers? The Scarlet Letter? The Mission and The Killing Fields are such rich, well-crafted films. It's a shame that actors and directors are pulled towards Hollywood. Artistic integrity is priceless. Perhaps that's why it's given away by so many.