The Killing Fields

It is darkly appropriate that Roland Joffé and Bruce Robinson's biographical drama about journalists covering the Khmer Rouge takeover in Cambodia during the early 1970s would celebrate its 40th anniversary the week after the 2024 presidential election. Rewatching The Killing Fields at this particular point in history floods me with many thoughts, but probably the most inescapable one right now is how much I long for the days when ignorant Americans like me got 90% of our understanding of history from movies as opposed to social media posts and podcasts hosted by idiots. At least back in the 1980s, filmmakers, even Hollywood filmmakers, made an effort to contextualize massive amounts of nuanced information, research, and lived experience rather than simply spewing misinformation that they wanted to believe were facts. And British movies, like this one, did an even better job!

Like most 13-year-olds in 1984, I didn't know anything about Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge regime, or its genocidal campaign in Cambodia. And I didn't see The Killing Fields when it was in theaters. I learned about the picture via Jonathan Demme's movie of Spalding Gray's 1986 monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, which is largely an account of Grey's participation in this picture. In his monologue, Grey, who played a small role as the US consul in The Killing Fields, describes meeting director Roland Joffé and having Joffé tell him about the lengthy history of American involvement in South Asia dating back long before the start of the Vietnam War. "Leave it to a Brit to educate you about your own country's history" is a phrase Grey utters twice in Swimming to Cambodia.

Joffé and Bruce Robinson's biographical drama about journalists covering the Khmer Rouge takeover in Cambodia during the early 1970s is one of the very best pictures of 1984. it is a most unusual war movie in that it doesn't focus on battles and political brinksmanship but rather on what it's like to be around a war as it's going on. The film is based on the experiences of two journalists: American Sydney Schanberg, played by a young Sam Waterston, and Cambodian Dith Pran, played by Dr. Haing S. Ngor. Joffé wanted most of the cast of this picture to be unfamiliar faces, preferably non-actors. Thus, the casting of folks like Spaulding Gray, Australian comedian Graham Kennedy, Scottish theater and radio actor Bill Paterson (who right after this starred in Bill Forsyth's 1984 comedy Comfort and Joy), and most significantly, Haing S. Ngor.

Ngor was himself a survivor of Cambodian communist dictator Pol Pot's "Year Zero" experiment, the idea that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed so that a new revolutionary culture can replace it from scratch. Ngor had been a gynecologist and obstetrician in Phnom Penh before the city was captured by Pot and the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Since the regime mistrusted professionals and intellectuals, singling them out for the harshest treatment, Ngor concealed his education, medical skills, and even the fact that he wore glasses. He was expelled from Phnom Penh along with most of its two million inhabitants and imprisoned in a concentration camp. So, his life experience was not at all dissimilar to that of the character he plays in this picture. He had never acted before, though his co-star John Malkovich pointed out frequently that one had to be a damn good actor to survive the Khmer Rouge. Ngor won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work here, making him one of only two non-professional actors to win an Academy Award for acting, the other being the great Harold Russell in William Wyler's peerless 1946 post-war drama The Best Years of Our Lives.

It's notable that Ngor is the supporting actor in this movie. Like nearly every Western film about a complex war in a foreign nation, The Killing Fields centers mainly on Western characters. Many, especially these days, will criticize this picture for making Sydney Schanberg the main protagonist rather than Dith Pran. But The Killing Fields is not Cry Freedom. (I'll stick up for Cry Freedom as a good movie, too, but I get why many people consider that picture's focus on its white journalist character rather than Black anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko unforgivable). When making a film for Western audiences, most of whom are totally ignorant of the history a movie is trying to convey, filmmakers, especially in the 1980s, told their stories through the eyes of audience surrogates for reasons that have less to do with racism and more with narrative expedience. Part of the job of any filmmaker, author, or journalist is to find a prudent and relatable narrative way into a complex issue that can be understood by their intended audience. Contemporary filmmakers have found more nuanced and representative ways to do this, but their movies are usually seen by a tiny fraction of the audience that saw The Killing Fields. While Ngor may be second-billed in this picture, he is, in fact, the co-lead, and Dith Pran is the center and soul of the movie, which also interrogates the roles of Western journalists in warzones in ways modern films like 2024's Civil War only pretend to.

Screenwriter Bruce Robinson—the eccentric actor and novelist who would go on to write and direct the iconic Withnail and I, as well as How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Jennifer 8, and The Rum Diary—adapts Schanberg's account of his time in Cambodian and his colleague's struggle to survive the genocide into a rich, layered, and passionate script. The strength of The Killing Fields is in how quiet a war movie it is. Much more happens in conversations held in hot, cramped rooms and corridors than in fields of battle. When shouting happens, it is often set against a backdrop of vast open space, like the iconic silhouette shot of Schanberg arguing with Pran at sunset while helicopters fly by in the distance, which became this movie's poster and signature image. The film does not sugarcoat the Cambodian Genocide, in which at least 1.5 million people were killed in four years. It is a far more honest picture of the hopelessness and consequences of war than we typically get from a Western movie of this or any other era, and its depiction of journalists, photographers, and translators is spot-on.