Beyond Rangoon. - movie reviews

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by John Simon

ANOTHER quasi-political film -- it becomes so much of a personal thriller that it loses sight of the broader issues -- is John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon. Boorman -- part Dutch, part British -- has made relatively few movies over the years, but all strikingly different: some noteworthy (Point Blank, Deliverance, Hope and Glory), some competent, and one or two abysmal. But he is never boring: even his mistakes tend to have minds of their own.

Beyond Rangoon was written some years ago, and though circumstances in Burma -- now Myanmar -- have changed little, the script, by Bill Rubenstein and Alex Lasker, may have suffered a bit from adjustments. More to the point, these screenwriters never quite hoist themselves into writers. Still, dialogue can scrape by where plot and setting do so much of the work. Laura Bowman (Patricia Arquette) is a young American doctor who one day discovered her husband and little boy brutally murdered. (No adequate explanation for this.) Her sister and fellow doctor, Andy (Frances McDormand, and fine), has dragged her along on a guided tour of Southeast Asia to prod her out of the deathly lethargy she has sunk into.

The tour group hits Rangoon, and we see opulently exotic sights which the globe-trotting Boorman and his able cinematographer, John Seale, know how to show off to best advantage. A young traveler falls off a giant Buddha and injures himself; Laura, recalling her tragedy in flashback, is unable to minister to him. The stage is set for the kind of redemption through hardship that runs through Boorman's otherwise disparate films. Sleepless on her last night in town, Laura wanders through the streets of Rangoon and stumbles upon a great historic event: the lovely Aung San Suu Kyi leading her pro-democracy-party supporters against the primed guns of the soldiery as she smilingly marches past them. Like others in the crowd, Laura is deeply moved, and something in her stirs. Unfortunately, her passport is stolen.

Getting a new one from the embassy takes time; she must stay on, to rejoin the tour in Bangkok. Alone in Rangoon, she is picked up by the gentle U Aung Ko (played by an amateur actor of the same name), a professor dismissed for his liberal views, now driving tourists about in his old Chevy. She agrees to be taken to parts closed to tourists, and encounters, along with sublime scenery, very unpretty sights.

Aung educates Laura politically even as he sneaks her past various check-points. The countryside swarms with men in uniform, whose curt commands, gruff manners, and inquisitorial gaze augur ill for the excursion. After near-disaster strikes at the house of some students devoted to their former professor, Aung and Laura travel by boat and on foot through scenes whose excitement never abates. Most of it rings true, except for one episode in an abandoned village, where Laura forages for medicine for Aung, who has been shot in the arm. This proves a shot in the arm for Laura, too: her doctoring comes back to her, along with her will to cope and live.

The horror is wisely kept at a distance. Human beings are shot like dogs, but in long shot and short sequences; our emotions are aroused, but not played with or preyed upon. Even when nurses rushing to help the wounded in a student demonstration are mowed down by the military, we are not allowed to wallow in self-congratulatory compassion or admire the cinematic technique. This way of dealing with shocking scenes is remarkably seldom understood by writers and directors.

The film changes character: now it is no longer Laura and Aung alone, but a whole group of refugees burrowing through a jungle and trying to make it across a river into Thailand. At this point it becomes very hard to avoid cliches, but Boorman does a creditable job of not milking them overmuch. The now fully humanized Laura and much-battered U Aung Ko deserve a bit of epic treatment, and after all that judicious understatement, the audience too has earned some fortissimo.

Patricia Arquette's blandly teenagerish face does register emotions when pressed, but does less well when trying to suggest thought. One wonders how she got through medical school, or how she manages to take command in such a desperate situation. But U Aung Ko epitomizes the quiet dignity of the Orient and the spirit of passive but unyielding resistance.

Spalding Gray, as the American tour guide, conveys nothing so much as a debauched finishing-school teacher about to bring shame on his New England family. Adele Lutz, the actress and costume designer, lacks the spiritual radiance of the real-life Aung San Suu Kyi, and Boorman commits his one strategic error by ending with a still showing the real woman, and thus retroactively wiping out her onscreen double.