Master Index of Archived Threads


Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Vic Sage May 21 2012 02:00 PM Edited 1 time(s), most recently on Jul 18 2014 07:58 AM

The films of Peter Weir Peter Lindsay Weir (b.1944) is an Australian filmmaker of limited output and limitless talent and imagination. A poet of magical realism, he finds the mysterious in the mundane, sees the heroism in the outsider, and the greatness in the primitive. He speaks of the spiritual dangers to the individual, particularly in "progress" and reliance on technology and the consequent loss of mystery in our universe. He started out in Aussie TV, documentaries and short films in the `60s and `70s, before making a string of feature films of great critical acclaim that helped launch the "Australian New Wave", along with filmmakers Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller and Phillip Noyce, making Australia an important exporter of movies to the International markets (especially the U.S.). The Australian films: The Cars That Ate Paris (aka The Cars That Eat People) (1974) - His first feature, a low-budget black comedy/horror film about a small town that caused car accidents and lived off the consequences. The film's unique POV has allowed it to develop a cult following, but it was badly shot and recorded, and looks and sounds like crap. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) - Victorian school girls disappear after a picnic in the outback; it's slow, ponderous, and deeply profound. It establishes many themes he'd return to -- the dichotomy between westerners and the natural world (including aboriginal peoples); the existence of unanswerable mystery; sexual longing; effects of tragedy on communities. It's also beautifully shot and scored. It's languorous pacing and refusal to provide easy answers doomed it to marginality but is a beautiful piece of art nonetheless. The Last Wave (1977) - A rational man is confronted with the irrational -- a premonition of impending disaster. Richard Chamberlain is the lawyer for an aboriginal defendant in a murder trial. His life spirals out of control as dreams and premonitions take him over. Again, Weir is dealing with the mysterious in the mundane, but this time gives an answer -- it's just not a very happy one. To call it dreamlike is to be redundant. Gallipoli (1981) - Weir offers us an emotional and visually arresting WWI epic based on historical events, suggesting again much that was in HANGING ROCK -- the same 1900s era, Victorian culture and rituals, and a profound loss of innocence for young protagonists. This same lost innocence is suffered by the nation as a result of the use by the Brits of the Australian forces as cannon fodder in the war against the Turks. It features a young Mel Gibson (best known at that point for MAD MAX, the first of which did not get much play outside Australia), a terrific score (particularly the use of the electronic music from Jarre's "OXYGENE" during the running scenes), and a heartbreaking condemnation of nationalism and militarism. Hollywood: GALLIPOLI is often ranked as the greatest film to come out of the Australian New Wave (then or since), and it would be hard to argue, even if I were inclined to do so -- and I'm not. Its international success allowed Weir to move his career outside of Australia and so began his Int'l/US filmmaking career. The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) - An international co-production, Gibson returns as Weir's outsider looking at a non-western culture through his western eyes. The political intrigue of 60s Jakarta is background for the romance between Gibson's foreign correspondent and Sigourney Weaver's Brit diplomat, with Linda Hunt's Oscar-winning performance as the Chinese-Australian "fixer" who befriends Gibson; her portrayal introduces the spiritual mysteries so prevalent in Weir's work, yet Hunt's performance transcends mere symbolism and invests the movie with a humanity that resonates when she/he confronts a betrayal that results in tragedy. If the movie doesn't quite work, and it doesn't, it’s not for lack of ambition. Witness (1985) - Weir hits the motherlode in Hollywood with Harrison Ford as a cop, the rational westerner, among the primitives (this time, the Amish). The purity of their communal values heal him, and redeem him, and make him fit for heroic action. But like Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS, he is a man of violence, and while he is necessary to protect the community, he can never be a part of it. The movie works as "star-crossed lovers" tale, too, with Kelly McGillis never better as the hot Amish fraulein awakened to her own sexuality by the outsider. Russian dancer Alexander Godunov gives a strikingly strong supporting performance, as well, striding through the wheat fields that move like ocean waves. And the wide eyes of Lukas Haas are practically a special effect of innocence. In what could have just been another cop-movie shoot-em-up, Weir transcended the genre. He and the film were nominated for a hatful of Oscars, and it was his biggest BO hit to that point, establishing him as a "Hollywood filmmaker". The Mosquito Coast (1986) - Reteaming with Ford, Weir once again puts the western man into a primitive world. Ford, working with a great cast including Helen Mirren and River Phoenix, realistically renders an intensely unlikeable character whose obsessions leave his family nearly destroyed in a central American jungle, as his inventions destroy the utopia he had hoped to establish there. Fraught with imagery and emotion, the movie offers no connection to an audience, demonstrating Weir's Achilles Heal as a storyteller -- the propensity to sacrifice character and narrative for visuals and themes and, in so doing, leaving the audience behind. Where PICNIC was ponderous, COAST is turgid; where WAVE was dreamlike, COAST is feverish and incoherent; where YEAR is mythic, COAST is dull; and where WITNESS is romantic, COAST is depressing. Probably the biggest misfire for both Weir and Ford’s careers to that point. Dead Poets Society (1989) – Weir bounced back from COAST with a well manicured depiction of oh so safe youthful nonconformity at a private school, with Robin Williams doing one of his “serious” roles as a poetry teacher urging his youthful charges to “seize the day”. The film is well shot, but too polite by half. Still, it was hugely successful and acclaimed, award-winning too, and not too bad an example of the “great teacher” sub-genre. Still, it indicates a direction towards audience pleasing that had been noticeably absent from Weir’s career to that point… a tendency that would ebb and flow over the following years, and not always to the benefit of his films. Green Card (1990) – In full blown “audience pleasing” mode, Weir made this slight romantic comedy with the great French actor, Gerard Depardieu, whose English was only slightly better than that of model/actress Andie McDowell. Weir is to comedy what dancing is to architecture. Fearless (1993) – Weir bounces back once again with his best film since WITNESS. This time he guides Jeff Bridges through the unspoken mysteries of existence, as the survivor of an airplane crash whose new sense of invincibility has distanced him from his family even as it’s bonded him to fellow survivor Rosie Perez, giving an Oscar-nominated performance. This is Weir at his most heartachingly profound. The Truman Show (1998) – Jim Carrey is perfectly cast as the unwitting star of a reality series about his life since birth. Weir’s satire brilliantly balances the mundane and the fantastic, the comic and melodramatic, the real and the unreal, and by so doing, created a prophetic condemnation of media control of culture. It’s also another example of Weir’s plea for youthful nonconformity in the face of society’s oppressive forces, a drum he’d been beating since PICNIC. With all this going on, the film is surprisingly restrained and grown up, and features one of Carrey’s best performances. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) – Back to audience pleasing, this time with Russell Crowe in the Mel Gibson swashbuckling role, Weir tries to pull off epic sea adventure series with sequel potential, but can’t help subverting his efforts by employing ambivalent characters with other things on their mind. As a result, it was less successful than it might otherwise have been, and no sequels resulted. It is a solid entertainment, though, but it’s an incongruent work from Weir, with its square-jawed support of the military elite very much at odds with his work on GALLIPOLI. It feels like a work-for-hire project he did for the money, with little connection to the themes in his other films. After many years of projects that failed to develop, the only film Weir has made in the last decade was The Way Back (2010), a film he wrote and directed based on a true story about a group of WWII prisoners escaping Siberia on a 4,000 mile trek through harsh environs. I have not seen it, but its critical reputation is that of an unrelenting, austere epic of survival, but Colin Ferrell is no Gibson or Crowe, and it's felt that, ultimately, its lack of characterization or emotional resonance did it in for audiences who virtually ignored it. But even as he approaches 70, Peter Weir remains one of cinema's true visionaries -- an artist painting images of magic and daring on a broad canvas -- and i always look forward to the next one. He’s just been announced as helmer for a contemporary gothic thriller called "The Keep," adapting Jennifer Egan's 2006 bestseller. [url]http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118054327, scheduled to start shooting next spring, but we’ll see. It sounds like promising material for him, but his projects have a way of falling apart. With only 13 films in his 37 year career to date, Weir has been less than prolific, but, as Spencer Tracey said of Katherine Hepburn (in PAT & MIKE), “there ain’t much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.”

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr May 21 2012 02:14 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

I can't say that I consciously stick around and watch Fearless whenever I come upon it on cable; I'm just kind of transfixed and involuntarily sucked in. Apart from his vision and ambition, Weir also is the definition of an actor's director-- virtually all of his leads give career-best (or near it) performances, don't they?

Vic Sage May 21 2012 02:21 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Given how visual a filmmaker he is, Weir has had a pretty good track record with actors, even rivaling Pollack and Lumet.

John Cougar Lunchbucket May 21 2012 02:33 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

I love these little filmographies. You should collect 'em all in a book -- or at least a phone app -- I'd buy a copy.

Vic Sage May 21 2012 02:35 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

done. get me a publisher. you can have 10% of the nothing i'll get for them.

Frayed Knot May 22 2012 08:04 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

'Fearless' is the one of his I've meant to get around to but for some reason never have. Putting it on the list.

Edgy MD May 22 2012 08:14 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Didn't work for me at the time. It might work better now.

The Second Spitter May 22 2012 08:45 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Gallipoli is reviled by British military people for certain historical "liberties". Not Pearl Harbour bad, but even the tour guide at the Australian War Memorial called it "rubbish". Admittedly Weir does go a bit overboard with jingoism. Mosquito Coast was a great missed opportunity of text I love.

Vic Sage May 29 2012 09:37 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

The Second Spitter wrote: Gallipoli is reviled by British military people for certain historical "liberties". Not Pearl Harbour bad, but even the tour guide at the Australian War Memorial called it "rubbish". Admittedly Weir does go a bit overboard with jingoism. Mosquito Coast was a great missed opportunity of text I love. I'm sure it's not as historically factual as pro-military folk can reasonably assert; I'm also sure it's truthful nonetheless. But I'm not sure how Weir is going "overboard with jingoism"; my feeling was that the film is actually anti-jingoistic, challenging the military zeal of the Australian high command in their willingness to put their troops in harm's way as scapegoats and cannon fodder for the British. It's an anti-war film; how is that "jingoistic"? It was certainly nationalistic, in the depictions of the willing martyrdom of the soldiers, and the generally burnished and nostalgic vision of Australian life at that time, but you can support the troops, and the national character, without supporting the war or being a proponent of it, as "jingoism" would require.

Edgy MD May 29 2012 11:20 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Gallipoli worked for me. It had the strange advantage of being the last film my family of six ever went out and saw together as a family. Really strange selection, I guess, but I didn't even know, up until that point, that World War I was a viable subject for a movie. Every time I ran the bases thereafter, the phrase fast-as-a-leopard would churn in my mind.

Vic Sage May 29 2012 11:48 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

The running sequences were great, scored to Jarre's electronic OXYGENE. It's sort of interesting to note that earlier that same year (1981), CHARIOTS OF FIRE was released, featuring great running sequences with Vangelis' Oscar-winning electronic score. It was a great year for electronic running music.

The Second Spitter May 29 2012 11:51 AM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

But I'm not sure how Weir is going "overboard with jingoism"; my feeling was that the film is actually anti-jingoistic, challenging the military zeal of the Australian high command in their willingness to put their troops in harm's way as scapegoats and cannon fodder for the British. It's an anti-war film; how is that "jingoistic"? It was certainly nationalistic, in the depictions of the willing martyrdom of the soldiers, and the generally burnished and nostalgic vision of Australian life at that time, but you can support the troops, and the national character, without supporting the war or being a proponent of it, as "jingoism" would require. Maybe it's my use of the term "jingoism" that's at issue here. I mean it in a colloquial sense, as an extreme form of nationalism, not necessarily implying expansionism. As an American, I can completely understand why how you could miss this or fail to understand what makes it so offensive (and please dont interpret this as if I'm being condescending.) In short, Weir's film perpetuates the myth of the "Anzac spirit" more than any other individual source.  The "Anzac Spirit" embraces virtues such as endurance, courage, ingenuity, good humour, larrikinism, and mateship.  Such lofty sensibilities.  The Australian soldiers in the film were perceived to have been innocent and fit, stoical and laconic, irreverent in the face of authority, naturally egalitarian and disdainful of British class differences.   These qualities have supposedly somehow rubbed off on the Australian national identity and consciousness. It's nationalism in its most fundamental sense -- the use of mythology to forge a national identity. Weir demonstrates an implicit bias portraying Australians superior for exhibiting such virtues. In reality what he's doing is cleansing the Australian identity of its convict origins -- it's most prominent bane. My biggest problem with the Anzac Spirit, aside from being a complete myth, is that it's  exclusionary and discriminatory in every conceivable way - it subjugates everybody who is not a white, anglo saxon male. For this Weir must be held accountable. As one academic put it succinctly: But why should Australians now, 90 years later, be still so eager for some stereotypical reaffirmation of their character? Why the self-doubt? The danger in the transformation - as remembrance replaces memory, and nationalism replaces remembrance - is that the solemnity and the serious purpose of Anzac Day will be lost in an irrelevant search for some kind of essence of Australianness As much as Weir would like Gallipoli to be Australia's War of Independence, it is not. An ancestor of mine perished at Gallipoli. He wasn't an Anzac though. He was one of the 9,000 French soldiers killed there, which numbered more than the Anzacs. However, Weir doesn't feel their story is worth telling. In fact, he barely acknowledges them at all, because to do so would give less credibility to his quest to forge a national identity there.

Vic Sage May 29 2012 01:16 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography Edited 1 time(s), most recently on May 29 2012 01:33 PM

I have no particular knowledge or insight into Australasian culture in general, or "Anzac spirit" in particular, nor its internal debates about race, gender, national identity, etc., but i don't think they are unique in having such tensions, nor in having myths about who they are as a people. Never having heard of this "anzac spirit" thing, i looked it up (though I found much in your post to have been lifted directly from Wikipedia, without attribution in some instances, i don't wish to get us sidetracked by that issue). It seems to me that the "anzac myth" is like many of the myths of western civilization with which I am familiar; it's a cultural myth of martial values. As such, it seems to this outsider as one that is more positive and benign than the Spartan myths, for example, and those of Imperial Rome that followed. That being said, i can understand if some within the culture find the myth exclusionary or otherwise politically unacceptable to them at this point in history. But if Weir must be "made accountable" for reviving such a myth, so then must Homer, John Ford, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and all the rest of the canon. And maybe they should be, too. But for every myth there evolves a counter-myth; a critique that evolves to either dubunk, limit, undermine or contextualize the prevailing myth. The disenfranchised in a culture always have an incentive to undermine the dominant mythology that they believe is oppressing them, but that doesn't make them necessarily "right", nor the myth-makers necessarily wrong, or held "accountable" (or any more accountable than any of their critics, at least). But that is the discussion that culture has with itself, and history is then rewritten by the victor. In any event, to assert a myth of martial virtue is not the same thing as "jingoism". To assert that your soldiers presented certain positive character traits when confronting combat is not the same thing as advocating that they go to war. But i look forward to seeing work by any filmmakers taking on the Anzac myth with a counter-myth of their own, if they can present it in as beautifully moving a way as Weir did. And the only thing for which i'll hold them accountable is the same standard by which i judge Weir... the craft and conviction evident in their film.

Frayed Knot May 29 2012 01:29 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

[responding to SS] Isn't it also the case that the doomed-to-failure tactics* depicted in the end was in reality as much the decision of Aussie brass as it was British but the movie essentially saddles it all on the British to better fit the film's narrative and possibly also to feed into nationalism you describe? * Of course most of WWI was fought with 19th century tactics in the face of 20th century weapons so this wasn't just a problem unique to Gallipoli

The Second Spitter May 29 2012 01:39 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Vic Sage wrote: Never having heard of this "anzac spirit" thing, i looked it up and found much of your post having been lifted directly from Wikipedia (without attribution, in some instances). . "Much of my post" equates to two sentences in the second paragraph and an academic quote that was attributed. Seriously? The Wikipedia article doesn't even mention Weir's film. I quoted the article for accuracy not because I can't formulate an orginal idea. Please spare me the sociology lesson. If you can't explain to me why the Gallipoli identity should be viewed as more inherently Australian than French or British, without blugeoning me to death with Nietzsche then this conversation is uninteresting to me. However please allow me to reiterate in fewer words: the Anzac identity is racist and Weir is its harbinger. Vic Sage wrote: The disenfranchised in a culture always have an incentive to undermine the dominant mythology that they believe is oppressing them, but that doesn't make them necessarily "right", nor the myth-makers necessarily wrong, or held "accountable". Like all those pesky Jews in Germany in the 40's.

Vic Sage May 29 2012 03:04 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

First of all, I had already edited my post before you responded, because i too felt that the Nietzche discussion was unneccessary and that, while still feeling it was necessary to note your plagiarism (in a post busy casting aspersions about moral accountability), i didn't want to make so much of it. If you can't explain to me why the Gallipoli identity should be viewed as more inherently Australian than French or British, without blugeoning me to death with Nietzsche then this conversation is uninteresting to me. I wasn't asserting that it was more inherently Australian; neither was Weir, as far as i can see from all the way over here. That debate is, as i said, an internal one going on within your own culture. What i was responding to were the characters and themes of the work presented, which was laudatory about the soldiers. What you are asserting is that, by being laudatory about the white males fighting the fight, it was necessarily being derogatory about everybody else not shown in the film. Which may play well in the hipster bars of Sydney but i think is entirely spurious. Like all those pesky Jews in Germany in the 40's . yeah, when you go there, you lose all credibility. see Godwin's Law, from your favorite source, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law also, Reductio ad Hitlerum -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

The Second Spitter May 29 2012 03:39 PM Re: Peter Weir: A Selected Filmography

Vic Sage wrote: . That debate is, as i said, an internal one going on within your own culture. What i was responding to were the characters and themes of the work presented, which was laudatory about the soldiers. What you are asserting is that, by being laudatory about the white males fighting the fight, it was necessarily being derogatory about everybody else not shown in the film. Which may play well in the hipster bars of Sydney but i think is entirely spurious. . Look it's no coincidence I've chosen live large portions of my life away from this country. In all the places I've lived in around the world, the one place I can guarantee to be treated as a second-class citizen is the country of my birth. There are places in Sydney I avoid for fear of my personal safety because of the way I look. I never had this problem living in the United States, Canada, Britain, France or any other country even though I was less culturally adapted and spoke differently. When I lived in America, I felt less of a foreigner than the country of my fucking birth. Can you see a fundamental problem here? I don't need to be patronized by some Peter Weir mark who has no fucking idea what the fuck he's talking about, yet has the temerity to accuse me of plagiarism. yeah, when you go there, you lose all credibility. Of course, I do. Because it falls squarely into the paradigm you provided and makes you look like a complete ass-clown.