The Talkies/Shawcross on Screen

...But that is not what we see...

...The guerrillas represent no threat at the beginning of the movie...

...Finally, in 1979, Schanberg gets a message from Pran: He is alive and working at the Red Cross tent hospital...

...Pran, Schanberg, and the remaining Westerners in the city take up refuge in the French embassy...

...Meanwhile, Pran makes do as best he can in Pol Pot's labor camps...

...The latest example is the highly praised The Killing Fields, an intermittently great movie about two journalists in Cambodia during the American bombings in the early 1970s and the takeover by the genocidal Khmer Rouge in 1975...

...The two advance upon one another and hug...

...When he rises from the water, he finds that he is surrounded by skeletons...

...Adults are therefore, by their very existence, evil...

...Director Roland Joffe and cinematographer Chris Menges present us with the burned, bloody bodies of children in a clinic filled to overflowing, a harried Scottish doctor pulling bits of Khmer Rouge shrapnel from a child's body, an old man wandering dazedly around the ruins that once were his home...

...He finds work with a Khmer leader, acting as a babysitter...

...The most extraordinary scenes are those delineating the desperate straits of the Cambodian people...

...A simple, universal moral dilemma-which basically boils down in every situation to should I do right, which might not be fun, or do wrong, which would be fun but would hurt people-makes the movies the most accessible of the art forms, and the most populist...

...At one point, Schanberg faces down a villainous U.S...

...Maybe this is what Schanberg did, but that does not matter...

...So was his sacrifice worth it...

...At last he manages to work one up, and there is much celebrating...

...Why didn't Al make Pran leave...

...Schanberg returns to New York, guilt-stricken over Pran's fate...

...Somehow, then, we are to believe that the Khmer Rouge rose magically in response to American actions...

...Should Pierre of War and Peace assassinate Napoleon...

...all that has passed before the Khmer Rouge takeover is to be forgotten...

...In the movie's most preposterous scene, Schanberg sits in his New York apartment in front of a television hooked up to a videotape recorder, watching a documentary on the Nixon bombings in Cambodia...

...By now it is clear that Pran should have left, that the bloodbath is beginning...

...But Al does not have the proper developing equipment, and the picture keeps fading...

...No Nonetheless, the movie makers have already begun delving into political questions they do not, or will not, explain or understand...

...There is no answer...

...That...

...But political dramas can never be that simple...

...You have no right to do this," Schanberg screams, "it violates the Cooper-Church amendment...

...The movie is on firmer ground when it flashes to Pran's experiences in the Khmer camps...

...Unfortunately, politics is not a Hallmark card...

...Haing S. Ngor), his loyal native assistant...

...There is little to do but get drunk...

...Be nice is the ultimate moral of most political films...

...Without making that point, the true horror of the Cambodian situation is never really demonstrated here...

...Does screenwriter Bruce Robinson know what he really thinks...

...The comparison of the problems of two people, even if one is in the hands of the Khmer Rouge, to the slaughter of two million Cambodians is absurd and almost sickening...

...But Pran refuses to leave Schanberg's side...

...And more than that: Movies take the world we know and convert it into something quite beautiful...

...The child dies when Pran steps on a mine and must let it detonate by removing his foot...

...After all the bombing, all the war, all the killing, we get the following message: "If only people would be nice to each other...

...And the second half of the movie gets completely lost in a fog of its own devising...

...He keeps rewinding the tape, and watching it over again...

...And though we offhandedly hear the name of Prince Norodom Sihanouk mentioned, we are given no clue that he is the single most important figure in modern Cambodian history...

...He walks outside and spots Schanberg...

...No, that is not what we are supposed to think, but who knows what we are supposed to think...

...There is a very good reason for these simple formulae...

...Schanberg spots him...

...He shakes his head, and flips the page open to the photo...

...When we watch a movie, we do know that the story is a John Podhoretz is critic at large and features editor of the Washington Times...

...All we get here is that the Americans bombed, and the Khmers came to power...

...We get the sense that the Khmers are running a terrifying regime, but we do not get the sense that two million people have died...

...The basic dilemma in a political drama is about means and ends: whether an ultimately good end justifies immoral actions to reach it, or whether behaving well and morally in the short term will have unforeseen bad results later on...

...He rears in horror, the camera pulls back, and we see a mile of skeletons, all victims of Khmer torture, all lying in the swamp...

...So they wait, and the Khmer Rouge marches into Phnom Penh...

...In a novel, a writer can bring a reader inside a character's mind, reveal what he is thinking...

...Pran gets his wife and children out of the country, but does not go with them...

...The childish, pacifist utopianism of the song is about the most profound political statement Joffe and Robinson can find, and it sums up the confusion and naivete of this often extraordinary film...

...We see Pran wrapping a bandage around an amputee's leg when he is told that an American has come to see him...

...Despite its force, and the indelible emotional authority of its best scenes, The Killing Fields destroys itself by attempting a portrait of a political situation too complicated for its makers to understand...

...It, too, has faded to nothingness...

...But that is a small point...

...bombings we see at the beginning of the film...

...Most of this is brilliantly rendered...

...The United States, you see, misused Cambodia and drove it into the genocidal arms of the Khmer Rouge...

...Phineas does the right thing, but he basically forsakes his chances of ever becoming more than a secondary minister in a Parliamentary cabinet...

...adviser, and the bomb site, and the Cambodian regular army, which shoots a few civilians in the bombed city and then takes Schanberg and Pran prisoner...

...role in Cambodia...

...What we see is real: real people, real houses, real streets, an extraordinarily accurate representation of the world around us...

...Schanberg is portrayed here as a stick-ly, proud, rather unpleasant fellow whose treatment of Pran is almost dismissively authoritarian...

...the Scottish doctor plays absent-mindedly on the piano, breaking into "When You're Smiling" when the word comes that residents of the embassy are to be flown out of the country...

...You kept Pran with you so you could win this award," Al says...

...Maybe Al, too, is the United States writ small...

...But the dramatic simplicity of the movies adds to their power...

...Pran wanders through the beautiful Cambodian jungle, picturesquely crossing rope bridges and sitting placidly by streams...

...Later, the adviser chillingly repeats the words "no comment" over and over in response to Schanberg's probing questions...

...mission to let the American people know what is going on" would be impossible...

...First of all, almost no one had a VCR in his home in 1976, and there was not a VCR available at the time with fast-forwafd capability...

...When Pran cannot get a plane or a boat to take Schanberg to the site of the inadvertent American bombing, Schanberg is furious...

...A good director and a good director of photography can make an ordinary house look almost magical, can make a street corner that you pass by every day and to which you never give a second thought something quite different, quite unfamiliar, quite remarkable...

...Much too complicated for a movie to explain, certainly...

...Pran is an indispensable Sancho Panza, without whom Schanberg's archly-described...

...This may seem like a terrible flaw, and it is the flaw that makes film an art form considerably lower than the traditional forms with which it is competing...

...Director Joffe cannot restrain himself from making everything beautiful...

...Each different movie genre has some such setup: the Western, with a man establishing order where there was chaos...

...It is Year One...

...But the next day the French ambassador gives Sydney the passport back...

...Movies work best when they deal with dramatic situations that raise interesting but relatively simple moral dilemmas that are easily and comfortably resolved...

...He must arrange for Pran's escape...

...Al the photographer (the remarkable John Malkovich) scurries about the once-grand, now darkened and tattered remains of the French colonial mansion searching for some Polaroid film...

...So a novelist can devote pages and pages to thought alone, in which thought itself becomes a kind of dramatic action...

...Don't tell me can't," he screams, and the ever-eager and aim-ing-to-please Pran, almost desperate in his idolization of the American journalist, scurries away to try again...

...the romantic comedy, where the boy gets the girl, loses her, and gets her back again...

...I'm a journalist too, Sydney," he pleads, his eyes filling with tears...

...He must also face the fact that to make it in London, he needs to make a brilliant marriage, even though he has promised himself to sweet Mary Jones back home in Ireland...

...They are, in fact, the most ambiguous of dramas, and raise insuperably difficult moral questions...

...A child walks up to a chalkboard on which we see stick figures of father, mother, and children, and calmly puts an x across the father and mother...

...we hardly ever see them...

...It is the medium's strength and its glory...

...This is the particular power of the movies, and it is what separates them from the other art forms...

...He is in a swamp, and falls into a puddle...

...He arranges for Schanberg to reach sites that United States army planes have inadvertently bombed, and works as translator, source, and guide...

...All native Cambodians are forcibly evacuated from the capital city...

...Up the Cooper-Church amendment...

...The situation whereby the Khmer Rouge rose to power was an extremely complicated one, and had to do with an alliance they struck with the Prince, who had been deposed by the Lon Nol government...

...For the viewer who does know the truth, the movie is calculatedly dishonest...

...army adviser who will not allow him to take a helicopter out to survey a bombed out town...

...Every shot is so wondrously framed and designed that even the horrifying swamp graveyard is almost surreally lovely...

...He presses the fast-forward button, watches the bloody bodies carted away in double time, his eyes bulging with horror...

...Pran lives, however, and eventually makes his way to a Red Cross hospice...

...More offensively, the second half of the film keeps cutting between Schanberg's moral agonies over Pran's plight and Pran's agonies, as if to compare the two...

...Schanberg does not force the question...

...The Killing Fields, based on Sydney Schanberg's Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times Magazine article "The Death and Life of Dith Pran," takes us through seven years in the lives of Schanberg (Sam Waterston), the New York Times correspondent in Cambodia, and Pran (Dr...

...Why didn't he tell Schanberg all this when Pran was in Cambodia...

...And that is the ultimate sacrifice he makes, for he knows, and we know, that ultimately he would make a superb Prime Minister...

...Can the goal of reforming a political system justify terrorism...

...the adviser screams back...

...The whole scene is dramatically ludicrous: Schanberg saw these events first-hand, so why would he be so horrified to watch them again on television...

...embassy that the Khmer Rouge guerrillas led by Pol Pot are intent on turning the country into a mass graveyard once they take power...

...What we do see is the evil U.S...

...For a viewer who does not know that the Khmer Rouge were powerful allies of the same North Vietnamese troops whose secret bases in Cambodia were the reason for the U.S...

...For all the corpses in the swamp and the plastic bags, there is not a scene of Khmer Rouge destruction to rival the U.S...

...the gangster movie, where the joys of crime are inevitably balanced by an early death...

...And the scenes in the embassy have a comparable power...

...And political dramas raise the problem of personal ambition in its starkest form...

...Why has it taken Al a full year to yell at Schanberg...

...Is war just under any circumstances...

...Schanberg is in torment because he feels responsible for Pran's dire straits...

...The John Lennon song "Imagine" comes in full and clear on the soundtrack: "Imagine all the people/living life in peace...

...The movie takes this at face value, even though it has called everything Schanberg has ever done into dispute...

...of course, is impossible in a movie...

...So it is up to our old friend, Al the photographer, to denounce Schanberg for his ambition...

...bombings in the first place, the guerrillas' sudden rise to power is confusing, and a dramatic liability...

...fiction, an invented series of situations...

...The camera pulls back to show us the march itself, thousands upon thousands walking toward the countryside that will become one large prison camp...

...But if a movie chooses to take a political stand about a real-life situation, it is under the same obligation as any writer: to provide the necessary details...

...Somehow, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the deposition of the Khmer Rouge is left entirely out of the film...

...As the long march out of Phnom Penh begins, we see families carrying the bodies of wounded relatives on stretchers, amputees hobbling their way down the long road, a little child frantically searching for his mother, a mother he will never find again...

...Schanberg, ever in pursuit of the big story, did not force Pran to leave the country when the guerrillas took power, and thus drove Pran into the genocidal arms of the Khmer Rouge...

...As the Lon Nol government begins to collapse, Schanberg hears from his sources at the U.S...

...The other children applaud her...

...Later, we see the child grab an adult by the hand, lead him to a clearing, and place a plastic bag over his head to suffocate him...

...And And there is another problem...

...And what we have here is a comparison between his relations with Pran and the relations between the United States and Cambodia as the movie sees them...

...No," Schanberg stammers, "I'm doing everything I can, I'm writing letters on Pran's behalf...

...The movie buys lock, stock, and barrel the theory proposed by William Shawcross in his book Sideshow that the United States was responsible for the coming to power" of the Khmer Rouge...

...Frantically, Schanberg's photographer friend Al tries to work up a false passport photo for Pran, to stick into the expired passport of one of the British journalists cooped up in the embassy...

...Pran must face life under the Khmer Rouge...

...But that surface power conceals underlying weaknesses...

...That is not, of course, the meaning we are to gather from the scene...

...There are remarkable things in these scenes, but there is a lamentable tendency towards aestheticization throughout...

...THE TALKIES SHAWCROSS ON SCREEN by John Podhoretz Movies delve into politics at their peril...

...Despite his moral quandary, Schanberg still feels confident enough about his morality to accept an award for his work and denounce the US...

...Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn, a young and idealistic member of Parliament, must face the fact that he must sacrifice his ideas for the sake of his party and his own advancement in it...

...Pran escapes from the camp and wanders through the countryside...

...The leader expresses his dissatisfaction with the way things are going, and asks Pran to take his son and escape the country...