Review #962: The Killing Fields (1984)

Title: The Killing Fields
Year: 1984
Director: Roland Joffe
Country: UK
Language: English

Imagine your country is going through a civil war; a genocidal cleansing of "undesirable" individuals & intellectuals who know far too much about the past. Imagine your nation's children being raised to unquestioningly serve a totalitarian dictator who demands we believe that you exist in the year 0. Imagine having to do mindless physical labour for no pay and very little food. This is what life was like for Dith Pran, a former doctor turned journalist, in Cambodia. 

The Killing Fields is primarily about a journalist (Haing S. Ngor) who is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody "Year Zero" cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million "undesirable" civilians. 

The film is based upon a remarkable memoir, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, by Times Metroplitan editor and Times Cambodia correspondent Sydney Schanberg, who would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1976. Part of the film is about Schanberg's (Sam Waterson) struggle to keep his Cambodian assistant Dith Pran from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge while the other part is about Schanberg's failure and Pran's struggle in Year Zero. Pran's experience is the much more enticing part of the film, as it shows exactly what horrific things had happened to the individual under Pol Pot's regime.

The actor who plays Pran, Haing S. Ngor, is a remarkable actor considering this is his first film. One startling reason for his great acting may be that the man had actually experienced the same genocide that the film is about! Many times the actor had to leave the set due to his ptsd kicking in. The cinematography can be breathtaking and haunting depending on the scene. Some scenes are quite graphic, but that is par for the course in a film about genocide. 

Ultimately this is a tale about survival, friendship and guilt. A faithful honest adaptation of Schanberg's work, The Killing Fields is a picture that will leave viewers in deep thought long after the run-time is over. I found myself deeply impressed.