Farewell to the King movie review (1989)

There is probably a deep-seated personal impulse at work here.

Does Milius imagine his characters shouldering the White Man’s Burden, or does he see them escaping a corrupt civilization to live in an unspoiled natural society? With Kurtz, we never knew, but the Nolte character in “Farewell to the King” gladly embraces his new situation and wants to drop out of Western civilization if he can. At a key point in the film, he shows a visiting British officer a secret valley in the heart of the island, where a sort of Shangri-La has grown up, isolated from the corruptions of the outside. He feels it is his mission to protect this sacred place from the Japanese and the Allies.

It is tempting to consider the politics of this movie, which waver between benevolent despotism and anthropological zeal. But perhaps Milius really has no message. The spirit of the film seems closer to the work of Conrad or Melville than to contemporary politics: Here is an extraordinary man, the story says, who finds himself in an extraordinary situation and takes advantage of it. I was reminded a little of Van Wyk, the Dutchman in Conrad’s End of the Tether who runs his corner of the Pacific more or less the way he wants to, and knows enough about his fellow Europeans to keep them at arm’s length.

In a film like this, the central performance is crucial, and Nolte is absorbed by the character. Just a few days before seeing “Farewell to the King” I saw Nolte as a painter - a manipulator and player in the New York art world - in the Martin Scorsese segment of “New York Stories.” Now here he was half naked in the jungle, dandling an infant on his knee. Nolte’s strength as an actor is that he seemed at home in both environments; he was an inhabitant, not a visitor.

The plot, based on a novel by Pierre Schoendoerffer, is much more predictable than the situation. Learoyd, the Nolte character, is a full-blown tribal king by the time we see him again, and the movie bypasses any attempt to show how he won that status, preferring instead to move ahead to a more conventional action scenario. British commandos, led by Nigel Havers, are parachuted onto the island to try to enlist the American and his tribesmen in the war against the Japanese. Learoyd wants nothing to do with them.