When US troops invaded the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, the avowed goal was to throw the islands’ Spanish rulers out of power and bring independence to Filipinos. But American power, in one of its early imperialist ventures, was the guest who stayed.
After defeating the Spanish overlords in 1898, the United States annexed the Philippines and fought a long war against independence-minded rebels. John Sayles’s recent film “Amigo” takes place during the period when American troops suppressed the native revolutionary movement. The promised independence did not materialize until 1946.
Writer and director Sayles has long been making films against the Hollywood grain. His 1980s film “Matewan,” set in a West Virginia coal town, treated the subject of violence employed by company owners against strikers and union organizers in the early decades of the labor movement, a subject largely ignored by mainstream history curriculums. That film gave actor Chris Cooper of Kingston his first feature film role as a union organizer. Cooper has a starring role in “Amigo,” too, portraying a career Army officer whose job is to tighten US control over a Philippine village.
Cooper won an Oscar 10 years ago for his portrayal of a brilliant but rule-bending orchid finder in the movie “Adaptation.”
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Cooper, Sayles, and producer Maggie Renzi will pay a visit to the Plimoth Cinema at Plimoth Plantation on Friday for a screening of “Amigo.” A meet-and-greet reception by the three will take place before the screening, and they will also answer questions from the audience after the film.
The screening came about because Cooper and his wife, actor and author Marianne Leone Cooper, are good friends with Sayles and Renzi.
“Chris has been in five of John’s movies, and John and Maggie are two of our oldest, dearest friends,” Marianne Cooper said by e-mail. “I was in ‘City of Hope’ and even our late son Jesse was in that film. So the whole family has participated at one time or another.”
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In “City of Hope,” she and Renzi played neighborhood friends who learn of pressure on a building owner to burn down his building to clear the way for a profitable commercial development, and take their story to the city council.
The Coopers proposed the screening of “Amigo” to Ed Russell, who books the films for the ongoing cinema series at Plimoth Plantation. He jumped at the opportunity to bring a major filmmaker and an award-winning actor to the local film program.
“I love almost every independent film,” said Russell, who with his wife, Charlotte, volunteers to keep films seldom found in commercial theaters flowing into the Plimoth Cinema.
“He dives into issues,” Russell said of Sayles’s films. “We said we were going into the Philippines to kick the Spaniards out and give the country to the people. . . Where did you hear this [rationale] before?”
“He loves his history,” Chris Cooper said last Friday. “He loves to get it in there in his films.”
But Sayles’s films are nuanced and the characters complex, he said.
“He never gives you an answer. The beauty of John’s writing is he has a number of characters and you get a number of points of view. His idea is that once you step out of the theater he hopes you’ll discuss the issues that have been raised.”
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Cooper’s character in “Amigo” is called Hardacre, a name that suggests his personality, but Sayles’s characters tend to exhibit shades of gray.
In the highly regarded film “Lone Star,” Cooper’s role as honest Texas Ranger Sam Deeds was a real person, warts and all.
“Muscle men were really popular in that period,” Cooper said, recalling the era of hit Arnold Schwarzenegger films. “Everyone has his flaws, and that hearkens back to me an earlier era of screenwriting and characters.”
Renzi began her professional association with Sayles when she was cast in a leading role in his first feature, “The Return of the Secaucus Seven,” a highly praised low-budget film about people who were friends in the calamitous ’60s. An assistant editor on that film, she later became his producer.
Sayles’s films also include “Passion Fish,” “Eight Men Out,” “The Secret of Roan Inish,” and “Sunshine State.” A prolific fiction and screenwriter, he’s also worked as a writer on Hollywood blockbusters and genre films.
Plimoth Cinema says its steady diet of foreign, documentary, and independent films “makes for an enlightening cinematic experience that cannot be found at your local multiplex theater.”
If, as some have defined it, “history is what we say about the past,” Sayles’s films have been saying what other films don’t.
“Hollywood’s fidelity to historical accuracy is notoriously weak, but film producers assume, correctly, that Americans’ knowledge of that history is even weaker,” Sayles wrote in his comments on “Amigo.” “Popular movies, for better or worse, often replace recorded facts with a kind of mythic history that people accept (and often prefer) as truth.”
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“Amigo” at Plimoth Cinema
Plimoth Plantation, 137 Warren Ave., Plymouth
Reception with director John Sayles and actor Chris Cooper at 5:30; film screening at 6:30 p.m. Friday
$15 museum members; $20
508-746-1622, ext. 8336
Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox2@gmail.com.