No Little Brown Brothers here

New York—John Sayles’s latest film Amigo has been getting positive reviews here. And while I am underwhelmed by it, nevertheless I am happy should these accolades bring more people out to see the film, not for any aesthetic reasons—Sayles has done better work than Amigo—but so the colossal ignorance citizens of this country have concerning the history of their once and future colony is diminished, even if by a smidgen.

Sayles is a smart, politically progressive director, whose celluloid works reflect a concern with social issues, as shown in such films as The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Brother from Another Planet, Eight Men Out, Men with Guns, and Sunshine State. Along with Noam Chomsky, Jesse Jackson, Oliver Stone, and other luminaries, Sayles was one of the signatories to the well-publicized “Statement of Conscience,” a 2003 protest against the invasion of Iraq put out by Not in Our Name, a group founded in 2002 (and disbanded in 2008) to oppose the Bush government’s policies after the 9/11 tragedy. Through its examination of one barrio of ordinary indios, Sayles’s looking glass alludes as well to the current quagmires in Iran and Afghanistan.

Seen in the context of Hollywood films that have dealt with the American presence in the archipelago, Amigo is a marked improvement in terms of how Filipinos are portrayed. Sayles depicts them as complex characters rather than just typically little brown brothers, usually in the background, nodding in sage agreement a là Tonto with the Lone Ranger, or, if rebellious, either killed or persuaded to come around to the presumably democratic and fair-minded outlook of the country’s fair-skinned occupiers. The earliest U.S. silver-screen portrayals of Filipinos date back to Thomas Alva Edison’s fake war reels of the 1899 Philippine-American War, where purported battle footage was actually shot in the wilds of New Jersey, with African Americans playing the role of the insurrectos (the tag applied to the Philippine soldiers), such identification foregrounding the racism underlying the conflict.

Many of the later films used war in the islands as narrative material to dramatize and largely to justify the American colonial adventure, whether it was the pacification of the Moros in the 1939 The Real Glory (starring Gary Cooper and David Niven), or the struggle with the Japanese in World War II. Back to Bataan, They Were Expendable, and American Guerrilla in the Philippines cast the GI as the heroic and rugged individual defending the colony against the brutal soldiers of His Imperial Army. Each of the three films was helmed by a noteworthy director: Edward Dmytrk, John Ford, and Fritz Lang respectively, though Lang once said that Guerrilla (with Tyrone Power in the lead) was the least favorite of his films. Back to Bataan alludes to the 1899 war, with one of the characters in the film supposedly Andres Bonifacio’s grandson (played with smoldering Latino intensity by Anthony Quinn). His commanding officer is John Wayne, who we are to believe fought against the original Bonifacio at the turn of the century, a historical impossibility, of course, but historical accuracy wasn’t the film’s strong suit.

Hollywood has also used the country as a stand-in for Vietnam, for instance, in Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, but most spectacularly in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The irony in this was that the U.S. template for the war against the Vietnamese, and indeed for almost all its wars on Third World Nations, including the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, was set in 1899. In effect these Vietnam-centered films revisited the sufferings of the Filipinos at the hands of the Americans. As to be expected, the Filipinos/Vietnamese are mostly faceless, exoticized bit players in these dramas.

In Amigo, the Filipinos possess voices and faces. The film devotes as much if not more screen time to its Filipino characters–and even one Spaniard, the unctuous village friar, acted by the New York-based actor Yul Vasquez–as to its Amerikanos. Much of the dialogue is in Tagalog, which is idiomatic and smooth, thanks to the translation from the English by poet, screenwriter, and journalist Pete Lacaba.

In the role of cabeza de barangay and the amigo of the film (the word was also used to describe the type of warfare the Americans dealt with, villagers being friends during the day and foes at night), veteran screen and TV actor Joel Torre interprets him convincingly as a sober and practical man, a survivor; he, more than the other villagers, is caught between a rock and a hard place. He has to negotiate the torturous, impossibly rocky path between the collaborationist burdens laid on him by the occupying U.S. garrison and the uncompromising demands of the revolutionary forces in the area, one of whose officers is his own brother (Ronnie Lazaro). Rendering his dilemma even more acute is the fact that his son has joined the guerrillas.

But the story sounds better than it is actually played out.  For all its attempts to depict the complexities of such a war, for all the research behind it, the film’s first half is somewhat unfocused, and would have benefited from judicious editing. Too many scenes seem to be of a folkloric nature, meant, I suppose, to infuse the film with “native” flavor. There are fiesta scenes, and a buildup to a cockfight, though the cockfight is never actually portrayed. I couldn’t help but think the miniature mindless combatants would have reflected the larger conflict. Who are these barrio folk, the men in their well-pressed embroidered shirts and the women with their baro’t saya? No one seems to sweat. No one seems to go hungry, even though the town’s carabaos are all shot to death by the U.S. soldiers, commanded by a young lieutenant (Garret Dillahunt). The actual war was one of deprivation, of disease spreading, but the few deaths in Amigo come from a couple of armed encounters. In reality, in the Southern Tagalog region alone, under the ham-fisted rule of Major General Franklin Bell, due to hamletting (which the Spanish had termed reconcentrado and utilized in Vietnam more than half a century later), by the end of 1901 an estimated 100,000 Filipinos perished.

And while budgetary constraints may have factored in, the war feels distant, even though the rebels are encamped not too far from town. Only when the district’s commanding officer (Chris Cooper) shows up to remind the garrison that this is a war, does the film’s pulse quicken, and the narrative focus sharpen. The hunt is on for the rebels, and the prelude to that is to have Torre’s character suffer the water cure, so he will lead them to the guerrilla lair. Would that Sayles had used Cooper, a terrific actor, earlier in the film! But it is too little, too late, rendering the dramatic finale, meant to be a cliffhanger, somewhat of a letdown.

The fact of this Sayles film made me reflect on Philippine filmdom’s treatment of our own history. Of Filipino directors, Eddie Romero, a Philippine National Artist, may be the only one who has consistently tackled historical subjects, taking on the 1896 Revolution and the Spanish-American War in his 1976 classic Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon. His three-hour long Aguila looks at modern Philippine history, including the American colonial period, through the life of its protagonist, played by Fernando Poe Jr. Romero also directed Cavalry Command, originally titled The Day of the Trumpet. Though I haven’t seen it, its plotline somewhat resembles Amigo’s: in 1902, an American cavalry unit occupies a small Filipino village to pacify it and to subdue guerrilla resistance. In such films as Raiders of Leyte Gulf and Lost Battalion, Romero takes on World War II, with the Americans at the forefront of the battle against the Japanese.

So many other feature films have examined the martial embrace of foreign invaders. Some fine examples are Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara’s Minsa’y Isang Gamu Gamo, (Once Upon a Moth, on the malaise spread by the U.S. bases in the country); Peque Gallaga’s Oro Plata Mata (Gold Silver Death), a brutal often brilliant depiction of life on Negros Island during World War II; and Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Tao Walang Diyos (Three Persons Without God), about the complications when the Japanese Occupation becomes personal for three characters. Philippine history is a treasure trove that has been barely touched. I know of scripts that have been written on various historical events, but Philippine producers seem to think none of these will turn a profit at the box office. That they are probably right is a sad commentary on the prevalent taste of the cinema-going public.

Copyright @Luis H. Francia