In 1975, a Cambodian civilian from Phnom Penh, an intellectual highly targeted by the Khmer Rouge, was sent to a concentration camp as a manual labourer as part of Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” directive. Though he was there for a long time and lost loved ones, he persevered and survived -ultimately found his way to a refugee camp in Thailand, and from there to America. That man was Haing S. Ngor, though it was also Dith Pran, the journalist and English translator whom Ngor won an Academy Award for playing in Roland Joffé’s brutal war drama The Killing Fields. The two mens’ experiences under the Khmer Rouge mirrored one another -and they weren’t the only ones. Part of the reason Ngor agreed to play the part in the first place, the accomplished doctors’ first ever acting role, was to show the world how people like him and Pran suffered through the Cambodian genocide -how people were still suffering even then in 1984.
The Killing Fields is a very important movie. It is also a very good one -sometimes those aren’t mutually exclusive, but in this case they are. It’s based primarily on the account of war correspondent Sydney Schanberg, adapted by none other than Bruce Robinson and directed by a simple TV director propelled to his debut feature by the faith of Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam. Roland Joffé is a filmmaker who deserved a better career than he ultimately got, based purely off of his first two features, The Killing Fields and The Mission, both astounding. His career slumped in the 90s and never recovered (perhaps due to his involvement with, of all things, the Super Mario Bros. movie), but in these early works he really demonstrated an intrepid talent that forecast what should have been an excellent body of work.
Shot largely in Thailand, The Killing Fields captures that necessary intensity right from the start, introducing New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and Dith Pran in the midst of chaos in Phnom Penh as the civil war spills into the city. That momentum will let up periodically over the course of the movie to come, but the urgency won’t. For the duration of their time in Cambodia, Schanberg and Pran will always be on the cusp of danger -circumstances change fast and with severity. Our first real sense of this comes when Schanberg is sitting at a café with photographer Al Rockoff (John Malkovich in one of his earliest movie appearances), and the place next door to them is suddenly bombed. On a dime, a situation can become disastrous. While trying to capture the death toll of a bombed out village, Schanberg and Pran find themselves arrested by the rebels –their own allies in this conflict. Later, they are arrested by the Khmer Rouge themselves during the fall of Phnom Penh, surviving only through clever negotiation by Pran. The strife of the region and the work the journalists are doing there is illustrated with absolute intensity, Joffé keeping the filmmaking focused and intimate. Just about all of it is seen through the eyes of Schanberg and Pran, the violence and carnage abundantly clear.
As the movie hones in on the devastation, it tells the story of the personal friendship between both men, who each save the others’ life over the course of their experience in Cambodia and make sacrifices for each others’ sake. Schanberg secures a visa for Pran and his family to escape to America, but while Pran sends his family along he resolves to stay behind himself as a debt of loyalty to Schanberg and to continue their work, which he believes in. The script itself doesn’t develop the relationship emphatically, it’s mostly on the actors –but they do an excellent job. Waterston and Ngor have a very tangible comradery that feels thoroughly lived-in by the time we meet them. They are both professionals with a high degree of respect for each other, not entirely shared by some of their colleagues. Waterston is great as the firm, principled, and politically charged Schanberg who despite working for a major newspaper has the tenacity of an independent freelancer. He plays vividly the guilt too in the latter parts of the film at leaving Pran behind when being evacuated, and the regret that he didn’t do more to save his friend.
It is Ngor though who is the soul of the movie, and more the films’ lead character than Waterston, despite their respective eventual Oscar categorizations. Ngor is yet another case of a novice actor, like Lamberto Maggiorani or Yalitza Aparicio, who rises well above the occasion, delivering a more profound and moving performance than many a professional actor counterpart. A part of that clearly comes out of the fact that he lived a lot of the trauma his character goes through in the second half. According to co-star Julian Sands, Malkovich had made the observation that Ngor “had been acting his whole life –you had to be a pretty good actor to survive the Khmer Rouge.” And it’s true he had plenty to draw upon, which he explicitly does in any scene from Prans’ captivity or escape, where the desperation in his manner is achingly visceral. But it’s not only that, Ngor honestly plays well the aspects to his character that he has no frame of reference for too: the war reporting, the relationships with his western colleagues. You wouldn’t know he had never acted before if you hadn’t looked it up. And I think it’s because Ngor cared so much about the material, about bringing this person and his story to life, that it incentivized him to dedicate so much to the performance. His steadfast desire to shed a light on what happened in Cambodia made him a good actor –maybe even a great one.
Which is fortunate, because Pran drives most of the back-end of the movie. While Schanberg makes public appearances back home criticizing the Nixon administration and checking in with Prans’ family, Pran himself endures four years trying to escape the grip of the Khmer Rouge. Escape is arguably the key theme of the film in relation to the situation in Cambodia –everybody wants out of there as quickly as possible and a considerable part of the film is devoted just to that concern. But Pran doesn’t make it out with his colleagues. Even though they attempt from their refuge in the French embassy to sneak him out of the country through forging a British passport, it doesn’t work. The Americans are forced to turn him over before they can get out. Pran continues to pursue escape regardless though, and it is here where Joffé’s direction is most impressively pointed. He shoots the devastated environment Pran is positioned against with its’ own sense of tragedy -a once beautiful world decimated. The only people we see are native Cambodians communicating in Khmer, yet Joffé uses no subtitles, the context speaking for itself while also rendering the cruelty explicitly foreign -curious, though also obviously problematic. Still, he conveys the scope of those titular killing fields (a term attributed to Pran himself) in the films’ best sequence, where Pran has to wade through what looks like hundreds of decayed skeletons in his attempt to evade recapture. Years later, in his successful escape with a few other prisoners, as well as the young son of their captor (ignobly executed by other officers for a slight defiance), one of the men and the boy are killed by a landmine. That moment with Pran, the last of the escapees, cradling the dead child, symbol of the toll of the excruciating genocide, is frightfully powerful. Joffé knows it is the exclamation point more or less, which is why it’s not long after that Pran makes it to that camp on the Thai border, and on to an emotional reunion with Schanberg.
The Killing Fields ends on this note of a character overcoming extraordinary adversity to reach safety, and it is heartwarming; but it can’t dilute the gravity of what he went through and how real it all was. As well as the ways in which choices and actions depicted in the film have echoed across history and similar conflicts. Watching this movie for me it was impossible not to think of those recent images of American, Canadian, British planes taking off in Afghanistan, thousands of people on the ground still desperate to get out. It’s impossible not to remember all those translators left behind -allies just like Pran forced to stay in the danger while the westerners retreat to safety. The Killing Fields is not about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, not really; nor is it even about the conditions in which war correspondents have to survive in. It’s about the people embroiled in such conflicts, the witnesses and sufferers at the heart of all the chaos and evil, who get lost in the narrative of the bigger picture. And it’s about the necessity of empathy and responsibility to their humanity. This movie stands as a reminder of that and why we must do everything in our power to protect those caught in the crossfire of violence and oppression. Dith Pran and Haing S. Ngor got out of the killing fields -not everyone was so lucky.
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