Customer Reviews

The Films of Peter Weir

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"The Films of Peter Weir" analyzes the body of work of the Australian director from his earlier art house movies up through the Hollywood movie The Truman Show in 1998.

The chapters each analyze two of Weir's movies. Sometimes this is interesting (the chapter on Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously), but in other chapters, it's kinda weird (Dead Poets Society and Green Card?). I thought the best information came in the chapter on Picnic at Hanging Rock and the chapter about The Year of Living Dangerously, in which the author compares the structure of the film to a wayang, or a Javanese shadow play.

The book was a slow read for me, though, and I think it's because the writing felt like an academic trying to write on a popular subject rather than a popular writer writing about it, (if that makes any sense). If you're a die-hard Weir fan, you will definitely want to get this book. But I see there are a few other books on Weir out there, so those might be more suitable if you're just a casual fan.

I only read the 1998 first version of this book and I was so disappointed that I read very little of it. Each chapter discusses two Peter Weir movies almost as if paragraphs about each movie were shuffled together so the paragraphs jump jarringly from one movie to the other, from one set of characters to the other. Characters are often referred to only by first name or last name, so if you don't know the cast list for each movie really well, it is often unclear which movie a particular paragraph is referring to. Each paragraph seems to pick a new idea out of the blue that has nothing to do with previous paragraphs, so there is no sense of presentation or organization or development of ideas. To make matters worse, the writing style is dull and pedantic as in this example "That a satisfactory generic ending may be reached, despite the evident subversion of codes, is suggested by further development of the same stylistic features."