Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously

Best Supporting Actress at the 56th Annual Oscars (1983)

Notable Quote:

“I believed in you. I thought you were a man of light.”

Synopsis:

Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) is an Australian journalist sent to a politically tumultuous Indonesia, where he meets both photographer Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), and love interest Jilly Bryant (Sigourney Weaver). Because there’s nothing like a good coup to really get you in the mood for romance!

The character:

To quote another character who will eventually show up in this column: “Why so serious?” Billy is that friend who wants to remind you that ~people are suffering~ when you just wanna chill out for a moment. And listen, that attitude is important: Indonesia is on the brink of a coup, with many of its citizens dealing with extreme poverty, yet a lot of the film’s characters seem to think that it’s a great time to go on fun dates? So it’s good that Billy is around to point out that children are literally starving in the street while y’all swim in the pool. But he’s also soooo high-handed and condescending about it, always droning on about “the slums of Asia” and the Bible. At one point, he’s SHOCKED that Mel Gibson’s character isn’t the “man of light” he thought he was, and I’m like, really? You thought this hot shot bro of a journalist was a pillar of morality?

Droning is really Billy’s main mode and unfortunately for us, he’s the narrator of the film. This means that half the time, we get to know characters when he reads off their characteristics to us (because he has an actual file on everyone, stalker alert). I’m not kidding about reading a list of traits, here’s a direct quote: “Hamilton, Guy. Born 1936 under the sign of Capricorn. Occupation: Journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Service. Jakarta: first assignment as foreign correspondent.” Stop, just stop. His monologues are absolutely the worst part of the film, and that’s saying a lot.

The performance:

My only familiarity with Linda Hunt is from one of the seemingly hundreds of NCIS spin-offs (NCIS: Miami? NCIS: San Francisco? I refuse to Google.), and I was excited to see her in a less procedural role, but alas, this performance left me cold. First of all, a huge selling point of the win is that Hunt is a woman playing a man, but … that’s not actually interesting? In general, the Oscars are stuck in a gender essentialist hell (I mean, there’s not actually a reason that Actors and Actresses need to be in different categories, as if we couldn’t possibly compare women and men), and I think the idea of someone playing a different gender shocked them into just handing over an award. And the performance is also almost grotesquely racist. Hunt is a White woman playing a man of Chinese ancestry, and they outfit her in yellow make-up and fake ears (lord help me, the ears). It’s hard to watch.

Aside from the nightmarish racism, the performance isn’t very compelling! The Year of Living Dangerously has an oddly flat tone and Hunt only contributes: she’s often got a monotone, low-level of energy that is exactly the opposite of what this movie needed. Deep down, there’s something to the idea of a warm moral compass character amidst a bunch of self-absorbed assholes, but it’s not brought to life.

The movie:

As you may have guessed, I hated this movie! For a film set amidst an attempted coup, it’s oddly dull and self-serious. It’s set in Indonesia, and is nominally concerned with its citizens, but we spend most of our time with White outsiders who need wacky foreign concepts like puppets (!!) explained to them. There’s so much pontificating in lieu of things happening, but even when there’s action, it’s excruciatingly hard to follow. Everything about this movie is off-putting. I’ll close by saying that there are major characters named Billy, Jilly, and Tiger Lily, I mean, c’mon.

Was the Oscar deserved?

Nope.