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from an earlier thread:
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. 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.”
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