After Saigon fell in 1975, ending the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge took control of neighbouring Cambodia under Pol Pot's merciless regime. The West, unlike during Vietnam, would mostly turn a blind eye, but one American could not. After his employers at the New York Times sent him there in 1972, journalist Sydney Schanberg met local doctor Dith Pran in 1975 just before the Rouge entered Phnom Penh, with Pran becoming Schanberg's guide and protector. But when Pran was shortly thereafter imprisoned, Schanberg now spent four years in this foreign land seeking news of Pran's fate while the Rouge decimated over two million of their own people.
Nominated for six 1984 Academy Awards including Best Picture, The Killing Fields is based on The Death and Life of Dith Pran, Schanberg's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980 New York Times article covering his experiences in war-torn Cambodia with Pran, who thankfully did survive to be reunited with Schanberg. By 2018 standards its violence is relatively tame, but in some ways that remains a key strength for a war film because it can mean restraint, not preachiness. Regardless, English director Roland Joffe nonetheless doesn't balk at depicting plenty of the Khmer Rouge's atrocities towards Cambodians (and foreigners) with objective compassion and honesty and maintains a fair amount of suspense and rhythm particularly in these sequences. Bruce Robinson's screenplay achieves the balancing act of convincingly evoking Schanberg's reality as a fish out of water and eyewitness to history, and the Oscar-winning cinematography and editing by Chris Menges and Jim Clark respectively really help to enhance the effect of the movie's pointed but non-sensationalised agenda.
But surely what anchors us most deeply into this awful story here are the two central performances. Sam Waterston is electric as Schanberg, the whole way brilliantly evoking his mounting anger at the Cambodian forces and the West for their ignorance towards the situation, and real-life KR survivor Haing S. Ngor won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor award for his screen debut here. Aussies should also keep an eye out for Graham Kennedy (yes, that one) in a cameo as an Australian diplomat.
Inevitably but fittingly, the movie ends with a reunion to the tune of John Lennon's Imagine (and tragically Lennon, of course, had himself been recently murdered). Like that song, today The Killing Fields holds up superbly and unfortunately remains no less relevant around the world.
Inevitably but fittingly, the movie ends with a reunion to the tune of John Lennon's Imagine (and tragically Lennon, of course, had himself been recently murdered). Like that song, today The Killing Fields holds up superbly and unfortunately remains no less relevant around the world.
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