![]() ![]() “Amigo” is a well-carpentered narrative, fast-moving and emphatic, stepping nimbly from gravity to good humor. Sayles’s eye is on the present, his storytelling methods are sturdy and old-fashioned. And Lieutenant Compton, with his starchy sense of decorum and his sincere desire to do some good, represents an advance over the old colonial order, whose last vestige is an imperious, nasty priest played, rather too stagily, by Yul Vázquez. The murderous, hard-line proclamations of both sides echo each other, but so do the principles for which they claim to fight. The Americans commit atrocities, including water torture and the deliberate destruction of rice paddies and livestock, and so do the rebels, who cut the throats of Chinese laborers stringing up telegraph lines. They turn San Isidro into a garrison commanded by Lieutenant Compton (Garret Dillahunt) and patrolled by a gaggle of platoon-movie archetypes, among them a brainy signal corpsman (DJ Qualls), a jovial drunkard (Stephen Taylor), a cynical veteran (James Parks) and a naïve, sweet-faced young recruit (Dane DeHaan).īut “Amigo” is not a simplistic parable of diabolical colonialists and their innocent victims. His brother Simón (Ronnie Lazaro) is a leader of the rebel army loyal to Emilio Aguinaldo, whose insurrection the Americans are determined to crush. He is also quick to perceive that the arrival of the American soldiers is going to bring him and his subjects a host of new headaches. The hereditary head man of San Isidro, he is a doting father, a loving husband and a figure of reasonable if sometimes exasperated authority. In this regard, Rafael - played with sly, hangdog brilliance by the well-known Filipino actor Joel Torre - is an exemplary John Sayles protagonist. His moral universe certainly has room for obvious heroes and villains, but in his best films he undermines his Manichean soapbox tendencies by attending to gray areas and focusing on characters whose essential decency is challenged and complicated by circumstances. Sayles dramatizes those contradictions with wit and concision, and with determined fair-mindedness as well as outrage. An early statement of American policy declared that “only through American occupation” was “the idea of a free, self-governing and united Filipino commonwealth at all conceivable.” It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of the contradictions of nation building. Long before the word quagmire was applied to Vietnam, Mark Twain used it to describe America’s Philippines entanglement, which he vigorously opposed. His use of a phrase made notorious during Vietnam (and revived, often without irony, in more recent wars) may sound a bit anachronistic and overly pointed, but it also reinforces a disconcerting parallel. ![]() “We’re here to win hearts and minds,” says Colonel Hardacre (Chris Cooper) as he rides into San Isidro. ![]() Sayles outlines connections between the war the United States waged in the Philippines and later interventions in Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan and Iraq. With precision that sometimes tips over into didacticism, Mr. Through the fronds of jungle vegetation, the subtitled Tagalog and the affectionately noted Filipino customs, “Amigo” invites you to contemplate other, more recently contested landscapes of counterinsurgency. He sometimes resembles a left-wing, baby-boom John Ford, spinning fables of the American character out of the threads of myth, memory and ideology. Sayles gravitates, as a writer (of novels and screenplays) and a director (of 17 features since 1979), toward populous pageants that illustrate his historical ideas. Though he has worked on an intimate scale - in the wonderful “Passion Fish,” for example - Mr. Local circumstances may vary, but the basic dialectic is reassuringly, maddeningly and sometimes inspiringly the same. History for him turns on recurrent themes of power, greed, exploitation and principled, often Quixotic, resistance to those forces. Sayles is not the type of director, to linger in the picturesque past, savoring antique details and restaging bygone conflicts. Although John Sayles’s new film, “Amigo,” is set in what seems to be a remote time and place - a hamlet called San Isidro, in the Philippines, around 1900 - it bridges the gap in a hurry. ![]()
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