By Aaron Aradillas
Veteran. Agitator. Provocateur. Bully. Conspiracy nut. Patriot. These are just some of the labels used over the years to describe Oliver Stone. (Subtle isn’t one of them.) He has spent his filmmaking career charting the currents that propelled America in the post-war era: war, greed, sensationalism, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Stone embraces myth then cuts it up to reveal a truth at its heart. Whether it’s the dark side of the counterculture (The Doors), the moment America entered the media age of paranoia and punditry (JFK), the ambition—and folly—that comes with being the leader of the most powerful country in the world (Nixon), or the corporatization of America (Wall Street, Any Given Sunday), Stone has used film to chronicle the dreams, fears, and disillusionments that marked the last half of the 20th century as the most creative—and destructive—in U.S. history. (Is it really a surprise that Stone’s latest movie is about the defining moment of the 21st century?)
So, what’s all the fuss? Why does the phrase “An Oliver Stone Film” make people tense up and prepare to dismiss Stone’s latest as the work of an irresponsible attention-seeker? It’s not just Stone’s provocateur identity that rankles. It’s his unwillingness to adhere to Hollywood conventions. When he tackles true-life subjects like Nixon or the JFK assassination he is respectful but not reverential. For Stone, to be reverential toward history is to simplify it, put it into its place. Stone understands that the Richard Attenborrough approach to biopics (Young Winston, Gandhi) turns the past into a Sunday school lesson, orderly and good for the soul. Stone prefers to mainline history and entertainment into your system. Fact and speculation crash into each other until they create a truth that illuminates what you thought you knew into something new, cleansed of myth, profound.
Stone didn’t make his first “Oliver Stone” movie until 1986; in the first phase of his career, he was one of Hollywood’s most successful -- and notorious -- screenwriters. His scripts for Scarface (1983), and Year of the Dragon (1985) showed he had a gift for punchy, populist story structure. His Oscar-winning script for Midnight Express (1978) was attacked for taking liberties with real events to jack up the film’s already unbearable tension. Even then Stone knew that in successful films, emotional truth trumps fact. 
His first two directorial efforts, Seizure (1974) and The Hand (1981), are the works of a man who is torn between avant-garde experimentation and exploitation gusto. It would take Stone’s third film, Salvador, for him to announce himself as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. He’s become the point man for the Baby Boom’s collective memory--and the poet laureate for the portion of that generation that didn’t get deferments. To consider his body of work is to see how we’ve processed the past 50 years of American history and culture. His movies aren’t about what happened as what we believe happened, and how we feel about it. He knows you have to grab viewers by the throat to get their attention. Like D.W Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, Stone understands that film, more than any other art form, is best at conveying the emotional spectrum of the human experience, whether its a rock concert, the movement on the floor of the stock exchange, or the gladiatorial battle of football. Stone sees life as spectacle and spectacle as entertainment.
Salvador. (1986) Released in April of ’86, Stone’s agit-prop docudrama about Reagan’s disastrous military policies in Central America should’ve been a hand grenade rolled into multiplexes. It barely made a sound. But those who saw it knew it was the start of something special; it ushered in a resurgence in topical filmmaking that had helped define the New Hollywood 15 years earlier, at a time when earnest and efficient political movies (1983's Under Fire, 1984's The Killing Fields) were overshadowed by powder-wigged period pieces and mass-appeal blockbusters. Stone knew that audiences needed to be shaken out of their Reagan-era complacency. Salvador did that. By telling the misadventures of Richard Boyle (James Woods), an amoral journalist looking to hustle his way into respectability, and Dr. Rock (James Belushi), Boyle’s piggish “friend” who’s looking for a good time, Stone creates his own version of Gonzo journalism disguised as a grungy road movie. It’s Hunter S. Thompson by way of Costa-Gavras or John Frankenheimer--Fear and Loathing in El Salvador.
The film's heart is a career-defining performance by Woods. Manic, impassioned, sleazy, the actor may be portraying the real life Richard Boyle, but the characterization is really a takeoff on Oliver Stone, the crusading young filmmaker determined to say what no one else wants to hear. In Boyle, Stone sees a man driven to capture the Truth at the cost of everything else, even his own safety. In contrast to the "hero's journey" structure of many Stone films, where the protagonist starts out an idealistic youth and loses his innocence, only to have it restored with a wised-up sense of how the world operates, Salvador begins in amorality, with the world’s sleaziest “good guy” at the center.
In a way Stone is right to dispense with any pretense Boyle has lost his “innocence.” Stone knows that in order to function as a journalist in the shadow of authoritarian regimes like El Salvador's you must keep your moral compass to yourself. Stone sees a world where leftist guerillas are branded “terrorists” by a U.S.-sanctioned right-wing militaristic government in the name of fighting “communists.” He sees politics are a series of compromises; therefore, taking an amoral stance is a means of keeping one's sanity. It isn’t until Boyle starts hustling for a good cause that he discovers his idealism. By the end of the movie Boyle’s experiences in the hell of El Salvador, like Stone’s tours in Vietnam, have allowed him to achieve a small form of salvation.
All of this would be a drag if Stone didn’t possess the instincts of a sensational filmmaker. Salvador’s dialogue is coarse and funny. (“Where else can you get a virgin to sit on your face for seven bucks, two virgins for twelve.”) While Boyle and Dr. Rock are vulgar scoundrels, they have human frailties and needs, and as the title suggests, they are not beyond redemption. In the film’s most celebrated scene, Boyle, a lapsed Catholic, goes to confession after a 32-year absence. His reason? To ask God’s forgiveness for leading a wicked life so he can marry the peasant woman (Elpidia Carillo) who’s inspired him to reform, sort of. (Boyle can’t just promise to give up booze and pot; he has to carve out exemptions.) This outwardly simple, dialogue-and-performance driven moment--just two men in a booth, one of them hidden behind a screen--marks the start of Boyle’s tilt away from self-interest. We are literally seeing a man discover what it means to know right from wrong.
Stone’s visual style is just as bluntly elegant. The first film in Stone’s 12-year, 11-movie relationship with ace cinematographer Robert Richardson, Salvador displays a grit and immediacy that must’ve been a shock to audiences grown accustomed to the Laszlo Kovacses and Dean Cundeys of the ‘80s. Richardson’s camera is everywhere at once. It sees but it doesn’t linger. The scenes of street life in El Salvador have a jagged yet fluid sense of motion. Richardson doesn’t objectify the locations, but he sees the beauty amidst the ruins.
Stone knows that his story is charged with pulp sensationalism; he uses it to give the story momentum. But although the threat of violence hangs over nearly every scene, the violence itself never feels like a showman’s trick. In dramatizing the internationally notorious incident in which four nuns on a humanitarian mission were raped and murdered by government thugs, Stone displays extraordinary sensitivity to suffering. The camera keeps its distance but somehow makes you feel the horror from the victims’ points of view. The lack of stylization is what makes the scene so devastating. It’s not just a mass killing; it’s a crime against humanity.
Platoon. (1986) From its opening epigraph by Ecclesiastes (“Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth!”), to the arrival of new recruits in a world not covered in basic training, to the loading of fresh body bags (a scene that Scorsese would echo in Gangs of New York as new immigrants sign up to fight in the Civil War), all accompanied by Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Stings” (remember when that piece of music still had the power to haunt?), Platoon wasn’t just about what it meant to fight in Vietnam. It was about what it meant to live in Vietnam, and to live with Vietnam.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket showed the geographical and cultural factors that separated the first rock ‘n’ roll war from all other wars. They showed that the Vietnam grunt’s existential dread was all of a piece with the era’s drugs and psychedelic rock. But Platoon was something new. To watch Platoon is to understand for the first time in a war movie the disorienting nature of jungle warfare. Stone saw things from a grunt’s-eye view. The result was a series of firsthand dispatches from a man who knew that war is more than a rite of passage, and that to survive it is both a miracle and a curse. (It would take Steven Spielberg creating Saving Private Ryan for us to understand that optimism in the wake of The Good War was also a miracle.)
Stone remembers everything. He gets the details just right. He has very little patience with the way movies sentimentalize camaraderie among the men during wartime. He knows it comes and goes. (This doesn’t mean Stone isn’t guilty of sentimentality in his movies. We’ll see that he’s also guilty of nostalgia in his later movies, too.) Stone understands that friendship amongst men during a pressure-cooker situation like Vietnam is fragile. He knows your newest friend might not make it. He also understands the divisions that occur within a platoon--how loyalties form and fracture along ideological, racial and cultural lines.
Stone illustrates this in a terrific sequence where the soldiers hang out during downtime. Most of the white soldiers hole up in the barracks, drinking beer and playing cards, listening to country music (“Okie From Muskogee”) and venting their resentment of the “gooks.” The majority of the black soldiers hang out in a hooch, trying to unwind by smoking dope and listening to the soothing sounds of Motown. There’s a wonderful moment when Chris (Charlie Sheen) is accepted by the black soldiers; as they dance and sing along to The Miracles’ “Tracks Of My Tears,” the moment achieves the clarity of an idealized memory. This, Stone tells us was how it was--and how it should be.
That idyllic moment doesn’t last. It’s followed by a brutal firefight that leads to the movie’s most indelible sequence: a My Lai-like massacre of a peaceful peasant village that is being used by the NVA as a storage facility. The villagers really don’t have a choice in allowing their homes to be used to store weapons, but the platoon treats their explanation as an excuse. Fueled by adrenaline and grief, they see the villagers as ungrateful and impossible to understand; the civilians’ constant pleading sounds like they’re speaking in tongues. Even the usually level-headed Chris vents his frustrations by shooting at the feet of a grinning, mentally retarded man because he “won’t fucking listen.” Bunny (Kevin Dillon), fueled by memories of John Wayne and Audie Murphy, acts out his own hero fantasies by bashing the grinning man’s head in. By the end of the sequence the soldiers have torched the village. This is not just a large-scale version of burning the evidence at a crime scene; it’s the culmination of a series of catastrophic personal choices. What Stone makes clear is that wartime atrocities like these are usually not committed by inherently evil people; they are the result of a series of moral compromises, each one bigger than the last.
Platoon is the first Stone film to feature characters that aren’t merely antagonists, but opposites. Chris’ two mentors–Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe), a sensitive, worn-down leader who uses drugs to keep his demons at bay (and his humanity intact), and Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), a battle-scarred leader who has been in so many skirmishes that he’s almost immortal–come to represent Good vs. Evil, Peace vs. War, Love vs. Hate. They become apparitions of what war does to men. Critics would accuse Stone of dealing in absolutes by reducing his subjects to iconography. Maybe, but Stone is a filmmaker before he’s anything else, and he uses this characters-as-representatives-of-contrasting-ideals technique to powerful effect throughout his movies, whether it’s John F. Kennedy and Anthony Hopkins’ Richard Nixon representing the bright and dark sides of political leadership, or Colin Farrell’s Alexander and Hopkins’ Ptolemy representing the recklessness and hesitation that separates a born leader from a good soldier. Stone may dance with the devil, but there’s always a moral center to his movies, and morality plays require a degree of abstraction. In Platoon Stone creates his first indelible movie image as Sgt. Elias, running for his life from enemy soldiers, reaches out, arms raised up to Heaven, for a rescue helicopter that’s already taken off. It’s an image that’s almost otherworldly. It’s poetry. And its power originates in Stone's decision to conceive his story and characters in mythic terms.
Wall Street. (1987) Unlike most directors who, after becoming an “overnight” success, take time off to contemplate their next career move, Stone immediately jumped into his next film. It was a smart decision. Stone moved away (temporarily) from the theater of war to the battleground of the go-go materialism of the 1980s. Released in December of 1987, just weeks after the stock market crash, Wall Street is a sensationally entertaining morality play. And in the character of Gordon Gekko, Stone creates the first in a long line of characters that would become a part of pop culture. As played by Michael Douglas, Gekko is seductive, ruthless, Machiavellian in his ability to manipulate, a corporate raider whose amorality is not so much a necessity but a badge of honor. Gekko’s famous “Greed is good” line is more than a catchphrase or a punchline. It defines the new work ethic in America. It pinpoints a sect of society where class and race distinctions are secondary to who has the most money. (This is not to make light of the fact that the cast of Wall Street is all white, but the predominant color of the movie is green.) Gekko says, “I make nothing. I own.” Yes, but for how long? What’s the point of accumulating assets if they’re going to depreciate?
Narratively, the movie is like one of those Executive Suite confections of the 1950s. Stone, a graduate of NYU Film School, doesn’t challenge Hollywood conventions; he reproduces them in his own voice. In Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a hungry stockbroker angling to enter the upper ranks of corporate raiders, Stone creates a classic innocent who is ripe for corruption. Sheen, with his fabled real life hedonistic exploits, at first seemed a perfect casting choice, but he comes off as aloof and seems a little out of his depth. Stone’s script compounds Sheen’s misfortune by making Bud too generic--too emblematic of a certain type of 1980s American male. (He’s like Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton writ large.) His “loss of innocence” is schematic rather than organic; he’s not a person, he’s a movie hero hitting the beats you expect movie heroes to hit.
Stone doesn’t idealize his protagonist; the montage of Bud acquiring his dream apartment, scored to Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody),” reveals the director’s barbed sense of humor. But he does insulate him against our scorn; Bud hustles the world to avoid facing his own inadequacies, and when he finally attains The Good Life, he doesn’t really seem to enjoy his perks. But he’s such a cipher that his moral crisis remains abstract. When he stands alone in his bachelor pad, stares at Manhattan’s nighttime skyline, and asks himself, “Who am I?” we’re supposed to recognize it as a man’s first inkling that he might be selling his soul. But it’s a hollow moment because we never believed there was a soul to sell.
Sheen fares better in the working-class scenes where Bud interacts with his union leader father, Carl, played by Martin Sheen in a nifty bit of meta-casting. Martin Sheen in an Oliver Stone movie has a double-edged connotation since Sheen’s Apocalypse Now character, assassin and narrator Capt. Willard, hovers over the Charlie Sheen-narrated Platoon. (The slapstick parody Hot Shots! Part Deux turns the Sheens’ war film lineage into a sight gag: as Sheen’s Rambo-esque hero travels up a Conradian jungle river, he passes his dad’s Apocalypse Now patrol boat headed the other way, and as father and son cross paths, they salute each other and declare, in unison, “I loved you in Wall Street.”) The scenes revealing Bud’s blue-collar roots have the snap of early Elia Kazan films like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But that’s also their problem. Stone makes everything black-and-white—working class nobility vs. yuppie corporate management. There’s no suggestion that one extreme shades into the other--that in real life, these opposing social strata are united by a willingness to compromise their values for money.
That said, Stone’s iconic approach is still unsettling because of its evangelical fervor. Wall Street is a condemnation and a warning, a morality play about a society in decay. The film’s legacy is that it captured the moment when America learned that the key to success--bouncing back--is being able to spin bad experiences into part of your character, part of what makes you stronger.
Talk Radio (1988) The “little” movie that Stone squeezed in during the pre-production of Born on the Fourth of July is often omitted from discussion of his filmography. An adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s one-man play, Talk Radio may look like a throwaway, but it's a major achievement. Stone uses Bogosian’s corrosive insights into the hypocrisies of American culture as a jumping off point to wonder if it is really possible, in a free society, to say whatever is on your mind, no matter whom you might offend. The answer is yes, but at a price.
In the wake of Phil Donahue and Howard Stern, Bogosian’s Barry Champlain, the combative voice of the Dallas airwaves (“The Man You Love To Love!”), engages in verbal warfare as he confronts the shut-ins, conspiracy nuts, neo-Nazis, and sexual deviants who are always on the lookout for that one person who embodies their own view of what’s wrong with the world. That person is Champlain, a wound-up agitator who engages the people on the fringe of society to feed his own demons. Night after night, prowling the studio like a caged animal, Barry says exactly what he wants to say, the sponsors or program manager (or himself) be damned. He turns confrontation into a performance. Barry, like Stone, believes that debating--engaging his audience--is the truest form of communication. Verbal conflict sustains him when he’s not on the air. It’s also what's driving him mad.
The majority of the movie takes place in the radio studio. Attempts to “open up” the play are confined to an extended flashback sequence that’s interesting but unnecessary. We don’t need Barry’s back story to understand his actions or feelings because Stone has already defined them through composition, camera movement, sound design and music. As Barry stalks around his studio, eyes darting back and forth while some network guys watch to see if they really want to syndicate his show nationally, the claustrophobic setting becomes even more intimate, as if we were watching--and listening--to “The Barry Champlain Show.” Depending on Barry’s caller--for instance, a serial rapist who wants help--Barry is framed to look small, vulnerable even. When he’s discussing the finer points of The Turner Diaries with a neo-Nazi he looms large, as if he’s in control. Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson visualize Barry’s growing isolation and paranoia through the use of reflections. When Barry’s supportive ex-wife Ellen (Ellen Greene) calls into Barry’s show at a crucial moment late in the movie, pretending to be a Ms. Lonelyheart because he seems to be losing it on the air, the scene is almost unbearable in its intimacy. A series of beautifully timed close-ups and reflections on the studio glass window lets us see them relive their marriage in one brief, devastating conversation. Ellen throws Barry a life preserver by admitting she still has feelings for him, but he refuses to take it. He’d rather drown.
The movie climaxes with one of the greatest monologues in movie history. Seated at his console alone, Barry rails against the world—and himself. He says:
"I mean who the hell are you anyways, you audience? Yes, the world is a terrible place. Yes, cancer and garbage disposals are going to get you. Yes, a war is coming. You’re fascinated by the gory details. You’re happiest when others are in pain. I’m providing a public service. Your fears in your own lives have become your entertainment. Next month, millions of people are going to be listening to this show and you have nothing to talk about. Marvelous technology is at our disposal, and instead of reaching new heights we’re going to see how far down we can go. The only thing you believe in is me. Who are you if you don’t have me? I come in here every night. I make my case. I make my point. I say what I believe in. I tell you what you are. I have to. I have no choice. I come in here every night. I tear into you. I abuse you. I insult you. You just keep coming back for me. I don’t need your fear and stupidity. If one person out there has any idea what I’m talking about I…"
It’s an amazing moment given a powerful visual punch by having the radio-studio set start to slowly, almost unknowingly, rotate as Barry remains stationary. Barry lashes out at the world while he’s in the middle of it, unable to distinguish his fears from his callers’ loneliness. Stone and Bogosian see a society where talk hasn’t become cheap but beside the point. Why bother talking--listening--if no one can ever understand you?
Born on the Fourth of July. (1989) Before World Trade Center, Born on the Fourth of July was Oliver Stone’s most aggressively patriotic movie--a fact that confounded detractors who’d pegged him as a muckraker whose interest favored flaws over virtues. But Stone’s iconography-laden compositions didn’t work at cross-purposes with his critical impulse, they granted it fuller expression; they looked through national myth and saw harsh reality, just like the film’s hero, Ron Kovic. By dramatizing the story of Kovic—an all-American kid who enlisted in the Marines in order to go to Vietnam to fight communism, only to return a broken man, physically and emotionally, spending years dulling his pain with booze, drugs, and rage before finding meaning in his military service by becoming an anti-war protester--Stone pinpoints the moment when a generation’s blind faith in the rightness of America’s military actions turned into doubt and skepticism.
Stone, co-writing with Kovic, uses American iconography to cover a key 20-year period--1956 to 1976, from the optimism of Eisenhower to the fallout of Nixon--that saw a seismic change in the way people felt about the purpose of going to war. After Vietnam, a portion of Americans would forever question the necessity of sending soldiers into harm’s way simply because their government assured them it was a “just cause.” (Or, would they?) The opening credits sequence is like a series of Norman Rockwell paintings made flesh. Baseball, 4th of July parades and fireworks, kids playing war, are given a slo-mo grandeur that allows them to become a collective memory of America at its best.
With Born, Stone fashions a biographical movie that’s interested in evoking a mood. It is the beginning of Stone moving away from intimate, one-person-against-the-system moviemaking to more conceptual forms of story structure. Starting with Born, continuing with The Doors and culminating with JFK, Stone freed himself from accepted standards of editing and pacing, and he became more inclined to locate the intimate story at the center of culture-changing events. This isn’t just a narrative that aims to cover a man’s life from birth to death. It’s biopic as absolution.
Stone and Richardson aim to create a sense of simultaneous objectivity and subjectivity. They filter the film’s visuals through the American flag, using red, white and blue as a constant color scheme. The Vietnam sequences, shot through dustbowl-red filters, are choreographed differently from the jungle combat of Platoon. You still can’t see the enemy, but the difference this time is that you can’t even see the men on your side. After Kovic becomes paralyzed, the camera is almost always at wheelchair level, yet it distances itself from him so that we can observe the world around Kovic. In a mid-movie student protest that erupts into violence, the camera swirls around the action, taking in the brutality from the margins. Scenes like this, or a dinner table confrontation, force us to wonder: Were families really this divided by war? Did war, assassinations, and social unrest occur during such a short period of time? Can it happen again?
The Vietnam sequences are mirrored late in the movie during an extended Mexico sequence where Kovic loses himself in booze, prostitutes and despair. The sequence reaches a moment of absurd comedy when Kovic and a fellow wheelchair-bound veteran named Charlie (Willem Dafoe), who’ve alienated everyone in the local villa, are left 
by the side of the road to find their way home. The scene shows that Kovic isn’t just paralyzed physically, but emotionally. The movie’s most draining chapter chronicles Kovic’s stay in the VA Hospital. Employing clinically cold white lighting, the sequence taps into the universal feeling of impotence that occurs when you are forced to trust overworked and underfunded caregivers. (There’s a great moment where Kovic is working out in the hospital and Don McLean’s “American Pie” creeps onto the soundtrack, McLean's sunny voice serving as ironic counterpoint to Kovic's suffering.)
At the center of the movie is a rigorous and moving performance by Tom Cruise. Cruise’s fabled work ethic is evident in the homecoming scenes as he navigates his wheelchair through the hallways and doorways of the childhood house where he was once a sterling example of athletic grace. In the early all-American scenes, he embodies the naïveté and drive of youth. His face becomes a monument to the innocence of the early ‘60s. Stone takes Cruise’s ability to project American pride -- the source of his gung-ho performance in Top Gun -- and turns it over to reveal the anger that goes with that pride. Cruise’s opposite is Jerry Levine’s Steve Boyer, a slightly smug college kid who was hip enough to know that Vietnam wasn’t for him. He stayed on Long Island to operate a thriving business. Ron sees in Steve an alternative life he could’ve had. Steve sees it too. When Steve finds Ron drunk and combative at a local bar, there’s a fleeting moment where Steve realizes his luck and Ron realizes his loss. Cruise's work in the Vietnam scenes is less effective. He lacks authority and seems a little overwhelmed. He doesn’t seem to be a natural born leader (though the film suggests that he would learn to be a leader through his anti-war protests).
The film's most badly judged scene is a late night argument between Ron and his mother (Caroline Kava). She’s already been set up as a strict Catholic who instilled in her son a sense of guilt that was a key component of him wanting to go to Vietnam. When Ron confronts her about the ugliness he’s seen and done, she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t “get it.” The scene becomes an overheated shouting match. It's intense and real, but it doesn’t know when to quit. 
Stone mirrors this scene to better effect when Ron goes to Georgia to visit the family of a fellow Marine he accidentally shot and killed in an ambush. (The film suggests that this emotionally traumatic incident led to Ron getting wounded.) Critics who are surprised by Stone’s nonjudgmental approach to middle America in World Trade Center have a poor memory. They need only look at this scene to see Stone’s empathy for middle and rural America. He knows that it’s young men from these forgotten communities who are sent to war. Ron confesses his sin to the family because he hopes they will understand him. The coldness of Ron’s mother is offset by the warmth and forgiveness of the fallen soldier’s mother, played by Jayne Haynes in a remarkable one-scene performance. (Ron is not completely absolved. The dead Marine’s wife can’t forgive him, but she tells him, “Maybe the Lord can” -- and Ron accepts this.)
The film’s emotional epiphany comes when Stone vividly recreates the 1972 Republican National Convention where Ron and his fellow anti-war protesters storm the floor to vent their anger at the American government. Stone and Richardson let the colors go wild as red, white and blue flood the screen. There’s a sense of fulfillment as Kovic discovers that the most patriotic thing you can do for America is question it.
The Doors (1991) Although the prospect of Stone taking on one of the most decadent bands in rock history seemed like a no-brainer, his follow-up to Born was greeted with bafflement and derision. Maybe it's because The Doors isn't a straightforward rock biopic; it's an actual rock ‘n’ roll movie, steeped in drugs, rebellion and self-destruction. Stone uses the music of The Doors and the life of lead singer Jim Morrison as a pretext to explore the moment when music, politics, and a new rebel-youth culture were ever-so-briefly interconnected.
Stone understands that the mythologizing of the Sixties has blotted out the darkness that was all of a piece of the counterculture. For John F. Kennedy to exist there had to be Richard Nixon. Woodstock had to have Altamont. The yippie pranksterism of Abbie Hoffman was twinned with the nihilism of Charles Manson. And The Beach Boys needed The Doors. Dreamy, sensual, improvisational, The Doors' music could not have existed during any other time. Songs like “Light My Fire,” “L.A. Woman,” and “People Are Strange” are memorable because they combine pop sensibilities with trance-out moodiness. The band's albums don’t hold up from start to finish; they’re too delicate; with the exception of their self-titled debut, Doors albums consist of moments of sustained brilliance amidst the filler. Stone’s impression of the band’s career excises the filler. The Doors is like a greatest-hits collection of the band’s--and Jim’s--most memorable moments. Like rock ‘n’ roll, the film is excessive. It’s a trip.
Like Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors is not interested in covering a man’s life from beginning to end. It’s only interested in the end. The movie begins at the end, with Morrison (Val Kilmer) spending three nights in the studio recording An American Prayer, then flashes back to his time at UCLA Film School, where he spent his free time writing and composing poetry and songs. As played by Kilmer, Morrison always seems to be in a daze, as if not fully conscious of his surroundings. But he also has feelers, picking up the slightest bit of criticism then discarding it. It’s a remarkable performance--strange, funny, and a little dangerous. Kilmer’s decision to sing Morrison's vocals instead of lip-synching is crucial to the movie’s effectiveness, because it's in the musical performances that Morrison is most alive and attuned to his inner wild child.
Stone rushes through the typical rock movie bio scenes of the band forming, rehearsing and achieving success because he’s not really interested. (There’s only one rehearsal session before they start playing packed nightclubs on the Sunset Strip.) He wants to get at what drove the band to make such decadent music, and how that music was a part of its time. The movie doesn’t really come to life until The Doors perform “The End” at the Whiskey a Go-Go. With its snake-rattle rhythms and Oedipal imagery, “The End” is shocking enough to get the band thrown off stage. The song’s death-trip grandeur syncs up with a generation that’s striving for change, but also oblivion. The performance of the song is given extra meaning because of its connection to the end-of-the-world opening of Apocalypse Now. “The End” is not only a song associated with Vietnam, it is Vietnam.
The production design favors Native American red and leather-pants black. Robert Richardson’s camerawork is fluid, free-associative, as if the viewer was an angel looking down from Heaven. An extended party sequence at Andy Warhol’s Factory is a marvel of timing and staging as one Pop Art gag follows another, creating a dizzying fun house atmosphere. (The scene is goosed along by the use of The Velvet 
Underground’s love letter to oblivion, “Heroin.”) Morrison’s love affair with death is made flesh by the creation of a Bergman-esque Death figure (played by Stone’s old friend and sometime writing partner Richard Rutowski). Death follows Morrison everywhere; the closer he gets to The End, the more prominent he becomes. The movie’s highlight is the recreation of the infamous 1969 Miami concert that got Morrison brought up on obscenity charges. Stone pulls out all the stops as he turns a rock concert into the death knell for a generation exhausted from its own freedom. (Altamont is just months away.) Lewdness, profanity, fear, Indians taking leave of Morrison’s body: the Miami concert is really the best (and worst) performance of Morrison’s life. The sequence climaxes with Morrison leading a conga line, with Death on his ass, in a back-and-forth performance of “Dead Cats, Dead Rats.” It’s the end of the world and it looks like the greatest party ever.
What the film lacks is any sense of consideration or detachment. Stone sees Morrison as a misunderstood man of his time; he's claimed he wanted to show that Morrison’s behavior was separate from the music. This is true in the abstract -- as the band was falling apart, they created some of their best recordings -- but the movie never really dramatizes it. (Some more scenes of The Doors rehearsing would’ve helped.) There’s no sense that Morrison brought about his own annihilation. Stone seems to buy into Morrison's belief that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, so it’s no surprise that he’s not interested in the lives traumatized by Morrison’s self-destructive behavior. The Doors didn't need to be judgmental, but it should have considered Morrison’s massive ego and how it correlated with the supposed “no rules, no limits” ethos of that era.
Stone’s near-total embrace of subjectivity has an upside, though: it allows us to be immersed in the era’s transgressive attitudes, the sense of total freedom that makes a scene like Morrison’s night of wild sex with a journalist (Kathleen Quinlan), fueled by wine and ritualistic mutilation, appropriate in its excessiveness. There’s a hilarious scene where we see Morrison and his girlfriend Pam (Meg Ryan) try to have a “normal” Thanksgiving dinner. The evening degenerates into slapstick violence as the duck burns and Pam pulls a knife on Jim. It’s like an early sketch of the sitcom-hell sequence from Stone’s Natural Born Killers. (The scene is given a comic-ironic counterpoint by the song “Love Me Two Times” playing in the background.) Scenes like these show Stone’s gift for screw-loose filmmaking.
But Stone's hero worship eventually paints him into a corner. His blind faith in Morrison as an artist doesn’t allow him to fully acknowledge Morrison's flaws. Stone’s inability to see that a visionary's personal failings can also be a part of what fuels his creativity is what separates The Doors, a good biopic, from Nixon, a great one. (It’s also what led to some of the more problematic story points in Alexander.) Stone’s romantic attachment to Morrison and his music is justified, but at a price. The Doors is a cautionary tale about excess with too much excess and not enough caution.
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Aaron Aradillas is a San Antonio-based critic and journalist and a contributor to Rockcritics.com. This is his first article for The House Next Door. Look for Part 2 on Tuesday, Sept. 12.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Oliver Stone: Natural Born Filmmaker, Part 1
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This looks like a long, whopping good read. I'll have to print it off. And I shall carry it with me all day -- my Thursday companion.
A great article.
I used to be a huge Oliver Stone fan when I was in high school. Unfortunately, his movies, especially 4th of July, Wall Street, The Doors, do not age very well. Neither do I. And while there is plenty to be gleemed from his editing and cinematography, his writing is putrid. Melodramatic, obvious, pseudo-intellectual and just plain lazy and false. Frank Whaley in The Doors: "I played music with Dionysus." Instead of comparing Stone to Godard, maybe you should compare him to Peckinpah. U-Turn is the only movie of Stone's that I can watch without feeling embarrassed. Oliver Stone has never trusted his material to speak for itself. Simplicity is his enemy. He is baroque to the point where it veers into camp and kitsch, which is kind of funny, since I'm sure Stone sees himself as some kind of hypermasculine prototype. His is the p.o.v. of a spoiled, angry seventeen year old boy, which is why I must've like him so much back when I was tooling around the San Fernando Valley in my tricked-out Jeep Wrangler, listening to Simple Minds and brooding about why the big-breasted slut at my high school didn't want to have sex with me. Oliver Stone is the most dangerous man to never have left prep school. His movies are tantrums.
U-Turn? Really?
Salvador, which is in some ways a classic Stone polemic, but in other ways is quite atypical of his ouevre, is the film that does it for me. Perhaps it is Woods' great performance as Stone's proxy that does it, perhaps it is the fact that Stone puts aside his penchant for stylistic excess and chooses a more faux-documentary style as part of a general principle of adhering fairly well to the real story that inspired the film that cinches the deal. I dunno. I just know that it ain't merely Stones' politics that draw me into this film. He's really got something going on in Salvador that I wish he would tap into on a more regular basis.
Dan: Salvador is a nearly perfect movie -- the only slightly misjudged scene is Boyle's lunchtime lecture on American government duplicity, which sounds a bit too much like James Woods reading from Oliver Stone's notebook -- and it's hard to say what's more inspiring to me, its corrosive outrage at our country's actions or its mature sadness at the realization that the "good guys" aren't so much good as they are the lesser of two evils, and once they get in power, they'll become no better than the goons they replaced. And the ending is a heartbreaker.
That said, from a filmmaking standpoint I find the post-Talk Radio Stone more fascinating. His formal gambits -- the Stations of the Cross structure of Born, the woozy, at times almost first-person-omniscent POV of The Doors, the fragmented, speculative paranoia of JFK, the mix of expressionism, psychodrama and Shakespearean grandeur in Nixon -- are more daring than nearly anything being done at the Hollywood level, even by giants like Spielberg and De Palma. Nobody with his profile takes more risks with subject matter and style simultaneously -- a fact Aaron nicely elucidates in his sections on Born and The Doors. But like many of America's greatest living filmmakers, including Spielberg, he seems not to trust his awesome mastery of picture and sound; as Aaron indicates, there are many times where Stone shows you something, then tells you what he just showed you to make sure you didn't miss it. I understand why he does it -- he works with big budgets, and wants to reach as wide an audience as possible -- but anonymous, above, is right when he says that Stone the director is more evolved and sophisticated than Stone the writer. (The director is Godardian, but there's a touch of Sam Fuller plus Stanley Kramer in Stone the screenwriter.) No significant American artist is so consistently full of shit as Stone. His macro politics are complex -- he understands the larger forces that drive politics, war, art and commerce, and it would be foolish to argue with them -- but his specifics are reductive, bordering on comic book logic. In some ways he still does seem like a privileged prep school dreamer at heart -- the Chris character from Platoon evolved into Stan White from Year of the Dragon, whining, "How can anybody care too much?" whenever anyone dares question his motives, methods or conclusions. But he's been around so long that I am able to factor out a lot of what annoys me about Stone, just as I'm able to factor out annoyances that persist throughout the filmographies of other directors who are too vital to be dismissed or diminished. He is who he is, and to paraphrase the last graph of Aaron's piece, it would be shortsighted not to concede that Stone's flaws are part of what drives his virtues.
Nixon is his greatest achievement overall, I think -- the four hour version is even richer than the theatrical cut; the movie is visually/sonically as sophisticated as JFK, and the writing actually matches the technique. But his towering achievement, for all its excess and occasionally fumble-fingered obviousness, is JFK. I put it on my Village Voice poll ranking of the greatest films of the century, and I don't see changing my mind on that anytime soon. In its merger of groundbreaking technique (particularly the editing and sound design) and old school, rabble-rousing storytelling, it's at once classical and radical, like Stone himself.
Matt, Stone is obviously a gifted filmmaker whose willingness to experiment with the medium has produced some remarkable effects, but I find the dialed-back Stone working in Salvador more interesting. This is almost certainly partially due to the fact that the reserve he shows here is atypical of his career, but also largely due to fact that the film's style is put completely at the service of the substance, helping to underpin the film's potent themes. I'm so caught up in the film to feel overwhelmed by the knowledge that This is Clearly an Oliver Stone Picture while watching Salvador.
As you note, a near-perfect film.
Errr....that should read, "I'm TOO caught up in the film..."
Before everyone starts getting too creamy and delicious about Oliver Stone, someone needs to give as much credit as possible to Editor Hank Corwin, who worked on JFK, NBK and Nixon. Read Mitchell Stephens 'Rise of the Image and Fall of the Word.' Full disclosure: I am not Mitchell Stephens.
Yes, Dan Jardine, I said U-Turn. The movie is ridiculous, lurid, wired and nihilistic, just like Oliver Stone.
Great stuff .. Oliver Stone truly is a one-of-a-kind, and one we need so desperately .. I'd have to say my favorite of his works was Salvador, with the wild trip that was U-Turn a close second
'Tis ~tres~ cool to see a fellow San Antonian in "the House". Way to go Aaron! (I used to sell Aaron laserdiscs back when I thought I knew a thing or two about movies.)
This is clearly an exhaustive piece, and I'm not well enough versed in my Stone to make too many comments...
That said - a very, very minor niggle...TALK RADIO was, as far as I know, never a one-man show; it was always performed as a play with a full cast of characters (neither Ellen & the radio big wig Dietz are present in the play, however).
I checked my copy of the play script and Bogosian does in the intro say it "had a long gestation period (beginning in 1982), and a peculiar birth, first as a 'performance' at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, later as the drama published here..." He does not detail what said performance consisted of though - it may well have just been Bogosian. As I said, very minor detail, but TALK RADIO is the ONLY Stone flick I can speak about with any amount of authority, so I thought I'd thrown in a little something.
Regardless...insanely good work, Aaron, and I haven't even read the entire thing. I was, of course, elated to see the attention paid TALK RADIO and you did nicely by it and I appreciated the dwelling on how overlooked/underappreciated it often is.
I do take issue with your assertion that the opening up of the story was unnecessary...well, maybe not. Maybe it wasn't ~necessary~, but it was an *improvement* that infused Barry with an amount of humanity that wasn't present in the play. The Neo-Nazi stuff also was a filmic addition (based on Alan Berg's story) that added major tension.
Blah, blah...I wrote a short piece on the Morgue a while back on TALK RADIO. Check it out if you're up for it - it's not nearly as tight as what Aaron wrote, though.
Although the prospect of Stone taking on one of the most decadent bands in rock history
I'll see you 4 Doors and raise you 2 Carpenters. (~snicker~)
TALK RADIO is coming to Broadway this season, with Liev Schreiber in the lead.
Probably even more than Ross Ruediger, or less as the case may be, I am no Oliver Stone scholar. Still, I would like to qualify Aaron Aradillas' categorization of Stone in general in order to disagree with Matt Zoller Seitz' objection to the scene in Salvador that I take to be the defining moment in that film.
It seems to me that Aaron is correct that Stone's films "aren’t about what happened as what we believe happened, and how we feel about it," that Stone does not document history but rather dramatizes it, and that Stone's biographical portraits refrain from Sunday school sermonization. This acknowledged, it is just as correct that Stone is an overtly politicized film-maker with explicit ideological concerns. Sometimes he highlights these concerns with considerably broad didactic brushstrokes. Hence, Matt reiterates Aaron's observation that "there are many times where Stone shows you something, then tells you what he just showed you to make sure you didn't miss it."
Whether or not you feel that Stone is insulting your intelligence will no doubt be a significant factor in how you feel about his film-making. Be this as it may, when it comes to Salvador specifically, it appears that Matt is so insulted. For him, "Salvador is a nearly perfect movie -- the only slightly misjudged scene is Boyle's lunchtime lecture on American government duplicity, which sounds a bit too much like James Woods reading from Oliver Stone's notebook." I agree with Matt that the lecture is indeed a lecture out of Stone's notebook. But unlike Matt, I do not feel that my intelligence is being insulted by the lecture. On the contrary, I feel that it is being confirmed.
And not just ideologically either. Artistically as well. Aaron says that the pivotal scene in the film is when Boyle goes to church in an attempt to do some practical good for another person. Perhaps. But this concrete action is analytically speaking on the level of what Matt defined as "micro." On the "macro" level, it is only when Doyle speaks truth to power - when he lectures the point men of the US military and the CIA - that his politics are fully realized, not just by us, by the character himself. This is the defining moment of the film for me because every now and then I am grateful for some preaching to the converted that I am.
Why does Matt not feel as I do? I ask this because Matt himself indicates about Stone that "he understands the larger forces that drive politics, war, art and commerce, and it would be foolish to argue with them." Personally, I think we are all welcome to argue with them. My point is that we can do so if we wish because they are laid out in the open by Stone. I won't comment on his other films but as for Salvador, I believe the in-your-face political stand Stone takes is what makes the film excellent, especially the scene Matt rejects.
For it seems to me that Salvador holds a unique place in Stone's oeuvre. Correct me if I'm wrong - and I'm not confident that I'm not (see my opening line) - but Stone's other films focus on America IN America, including Platoon, for I do not mean literally "in" America. I mean, from the perspective of America or on behalf of America or how such-and-such history was experienced by America, as Aaron points out, "how WE feel about it," (emphasis added). Salvador does this too but it also gives us some sense of how THEY feel about it. Salvador shows America IN another country. And now I should be understood as speaking literally too. The US military and the CIA were actually in El Salvador. Stone's film shows how and why they were in El Salvador. Personally, I feel that his "nearly perfect" depiction of US imperialism in Latin America earns Stone the right to makes sure everyone in every Cineplex gets it by including a scene where it is expressed as dialogue in no uncertain terms.
Then - Ben --
Ben writes: "Aaron says that the pivotal scene in the film is when Boyle goes to church in an attempt to do some practical good for another person. Perhaps. But this concrete action is analytically speaking on the level of what Matt defined as "micro." On the "macro" level, it is only when Doyle speaks truth to power - when he lectures the point men of the US military and the CIA - that his politics are fully realized, not just by us, by the character himself. This is the defining moment of the film for me because every now and then I am grateful for some preaching to the converted that I am."
Ben, you make me reconsider that scene.
To be clear, I never felt "insulted" by that scene -- just that it was an extremely prosaic, even lecturing moment in a movie that elsewhere expressed its polemics visually and verbally, often simultaneously, so that one mode of attack reinforced the other. (I described it as "slightly misjudged," which is far from a condemnation.)
My objection was more aesthetic than political since, like you (I gather) I agree with Boyle's assessment of the situation and share his outrage. A related problem -- again, mostly aesthetic -- is that at that particular point, I did not believe that those particular words would come out of Richard Boyle's mouth. His emotional through-line, as screenwriters insist on putting it, was so gracefully and intricately developed that it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when Boyle becomes a different person -- and I mean that as the highest praise. (Aaron says it's the confession scene, but I think it had to be somewhere earlier -- the confession scene is really a confirmation of the New Boyle, not a marker of where the New Boyle originated.) This is a personal, subjective response and I don't expect anyone else to agree, but I'll say it one more time just for the heck of it: in that scene, Boyle didn't sound like the Boyle I'd been watching for an hour, and unfortunately he didn't sound like the Boyle showcased in the rest of the movie, either. He sounded like Oliver Stone venting, in language designed to make sure everyone in the audience -- particularly those who had not been paying close attention up to then -- understood his position. That's a hairsplitting distinction to some, but that was my reaction. And again, it doesn't diminish the movie's impact. It's not an insulting scene, just slightly misjudged.
Stone has an inclination toward, and a gift for writing, very long, sometimes brazenly theatrical monologues, and while some of them are brilliant (Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" speech, the Barry Champlain rant quoted by Aaron, and Mr. X's laying out the conspiracy for Jim Garrison in "JFK" spring to mind) they strike me as most persuasive, most forceful, most credible within the context of the drama, when Stone is working conceptually rather than "realistically." Gekko's dramatic speech occurs at a stockholder's meeting, a place where dramatic speeches are expected, and Stone's hyped-up, practically coked up visual style throughout "Wall Street" makes the moment seem even more organic. Ditto Champlain's rant -- the whole movie embraces its theatrical origins while making the material dizzyingly cinematic, a projection of Champlain's emotional state; when the studio begins to rotate, it's such a showy, even artificial touch that it abstracts Champlain's monologue, conceptualizes it -- makes it less "believable" but more psychologically and dramatically powerful, hence more "real." Mr. X's monologue is intercut with feverish flashbacks -- more ominous than even the flashbacks we've seen up to that point, which is saying a lot -- and the combination of jagged cutting, surrealistically processed film stock, clashing grain and Satanically menacing music combines to produce an effect similar to the effect in the Champlain monologue, but on a grander scale: reality is re-imagined as drama and data, broken into component parts, so that it doesn't reflect "life" (in the journalist's sense) but Life -- the personalized facsimile of reality that people carry around inside their own heads. As Aaron points out, starting with "Platoon" and "Talk Radio," Stone started thinking in overtly mythic and/or conceptual terms while retaining his fascination with individual psychology; he found a way to be subjective and objective all at once, no mean feat for anyone working at Hollywood budget levels. He creates worlds that simultaneously reflect the mental states of individuals and whole societies -- worlds that are meant to be taken seriously but not literally. Stone got his knuckles rapped for invoking Shakespeare in "JFK" and "Nixon," but I can't help thinking Shakespeare would have watched both of those movies and been (a) flattered and (b) impressed.
PS -- And yes, dammit, I'm going to watch "Salvador" again, for that scene, and if you're right, I'll say so.
PPS -- Your point about "Salvador" being a rare Stone film that's not solely concerned with the American consciousness and/or experience is well-taken. I'd add "Alexander" to that list -- though it eventually connects to America as well, via thousands of years of Western history, mythology and received wisdom. It could have been alternately titled, "Why We Are In Iraq."
Matt, a great piece as usual.I loved that you never gloss over the details. There are certain moments in a film, no matter how small they are, that can define that film. You always find them.
Two comments from me about these Stone movies. I always thought Martin Sheen's dialog was over-the-top hokie for his character in Wall St.. I just can't get by the line "in this cockamamie world, you're shooting par".I cringe when I know it's coming near the end when Bud is heading to court.
Second, and this has nothing to do with Mr. Stone, but ever since Eric Bogosian played the role of the terrorist in "Under Siege II, Dark Territory" I can't watch "Talk Radio" with the same admiration for him. He ruined it for me.He was so bad in that movie (which I keep hoping was by design) that the stink has stayed attached to him retro-actively, if you know what I mean.
But I do still love "Talk Radio". I can remember clearly the sheer intensity of it the first time I saw it.
Well, that's all for now. Talk to you soon. Tom
Hi, Tom--Thanks for the praise, but it should be directed at the author Aaron Aradillas. I'm just loitering in the comments section on this one.
Funny you should mention "Under Siege 2" -- I liked Bogosian's performance in that movie, sleazy and self-conscious as it was, because it reminded me of Barry Champlain in "Talk Radio" if he'd lived and gone to work for the military-industrial complex and then become sick of it; the character was a super-nerd who got tired of not being respected by his bosses and decided to unveil the full extent of his power. Plus he was a hateful wiseass, and whenever he mocked Steven Seagal or his Pentagon pals, I wanted to cheer. Most of the characters in that godforsaken movie had no discernible personality, including the star. At least Bogosian gave you something, even if it was excessive.
Wow, I just noticed your guest writer. Maybe you should put "I'm Matt Zoller Seitz, and I approve of this article"at the top of the page, the way the pols do!! It was written so well, it looked like one of yours...see ya, Tom.
Matt, you present a cogent and coherent argument in defense of his position on the "controversial" scene in Salvador, so please don't see this particular missive aimed in your direction. It isn't. Your argument that this character wouldn't make this speech at this moment in the film seems to me an entirely reasonable and rational assessment of the situation. Of course, I'd have to re-watch the film to pass my own judgment on your critique, but for now let's just say that you may very well have a point and move on.
Here's MY point. Generally speaking North American moviegoers and reviewers dislike overt politicizing in their movies. The complaint is that movies shouldn't be overtly political, that this is somehow a failure of the art form, that it should be about people, not politics blah blah blah blah. That somehow inserting one's own political opinions in film is akin to injecting the audience with the plague.
Such nonsense. If you are an artist, you are making political statements every time you display your creation. To pretend otherwise is an ostrich-like head in the sand abrogation of one's responsibility as a public figure (as artists are). Attempts to be "apolitical" are themselves political, as they serve the status quo.
Matt: As before I confine my commentary to Salvador. You state that I have made you reconsider the status of the scene in question. I offer a couple more points that might further influence your reconsideration.
You maintain that Boyle mouthing off at length to the Colonel and the secret agent at a US embassy luncheon is not in keeping with the emotional through-line of the character. I disagree. Understood statically in terms of fixed traits, the character is nothing if not a loose verbal cannon. More meaningful, however, understood dynamically with respect to how he changes, the character's politics are shown to be developing along increasingly radical lines before he launches his climactic word bomb. Most of this is revealed to us through his actions rather than by his words. He protects his personal relations from a lumpen-peasant death squad, confronts the soon-to-be domestic dictator in a press conference, photographs the revolutionary camp with sympathy, and so on. Indeed, he mets with the Colonel and the agent in order to trade these photographs for identification papers his girlfriend needs to survive. Well before Boyle delivers his rant, the Colonel begins to back-peddle on the deal because the photos are useless to him, they offer no evidence of Soviet backing and therefore provide no legitimating pretext for US involvement. The Colonel accuses Boyle of being a commie-loving traitor and it is THEN that the character unloads.
Matt, you refer to Boyle becoming a "different person" and the "New Boyle." This implies a sort of epiphany transformation but I prefer to focus on the THROUGH aspect of the emotional through-line you conceptualized, the evolutionary arc. This is why I previously referred to the big lecture as the point at which Boyle's politics become "fully realized." On this score, I repeat here something already posted by me at Dan Jardine's Cinemania:
"Navigating through both his own personal degeneracy and the corruption around him, he increasingly steers his way along a solidly social-democratic path, eventually taking a stand and making a speech, in keeping with Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra movie... The whole film is the artistic soapbox for this speech and it is ultimately a tribute to Wood's performance throughout that he earns Stone the right to give us the big lecture in this scene."
I said I had a couple of points and here's the second. Matt, you place full responsibility for the screenplay on Stone, but Richard Boyle is also listed in the credits. As you find that Stone commits certain screen writing sins in many of his films and not just Salvador, "blaming" Richard Boyle for the scene under discussion may not strike you as especially worthwhile. But I find it worthwhile insofar as it counters your statement that "I did not believe that those particular words would come out of Richard Boyle's mouth." I suspect you are right about the real Richard Boyle at the time but I hold that you are wrong about the dramatized Richard Boyle after the fact. To quote my Cinemania post again:
"Personally, I'm always starving to hear any truth about U.S. imperialism spoken out loud and I admire Richard Boyle for doing it in a movie, even if he probably never got the chance or had the guts to do it in real life."
Then - Ben
Dan: "The complaint is that movies shouldn't be overtly political, that this is somehow a failure of the art form, that it should be about people, not politics blah blah blah blah. That somehow inserting one's own political opinions in film is akin to injecting the audience with the plague."
Just to be clear, I never have argued that movies should be less overtly political -- quite the contrary. To cite three recent movies I panned, I objected to "Crash" in part because it defined racism mainly as an individual, internal problem -- the Oprah approach -- glossed over the larger social framework that enables it; "United 93," which reconcieved its title event as a triumph of the human spirit, divested of any larger context; and "Cinderella Man," which playacted class resentment during the Depression and then embraced the false notion that Braddock, who was exploited by his chosen profession pretty much from the word go, as a People's Champion, because he truimphed against the odds, behaved more politely than his opponent, and refused any "handouts" from either the government or his masters in the boxing commission. (It wasn't just ahistorical, there were times when it felt like a lost Hollywood blockbuster from the Reagan era.)
I don't want to keep fixating on this, because I love "Salvador," that particular scene isn't an embarassment at all, and I admire Stone for being willing and able to talk about class, race and the practice of politics when few Hollywood directors are even willing to go there. What you and Ben love about the scene -- its slightly out of context intensity; the sense that Stone the director is possessing the character of Richard Boyle and explicitly stating the movie's POV -- is what I found jarring about it, because it was inconsistent with the rest of the movie. I think Spike Lee handles similar fourth-wall-breaking moments more adeptly, even though his movies are a mess as often (or more often) than Stone's.
PS, to Ben and Dan: Your defense of this particular scene is very persuasive, and I don't take the slightest bit of offense at your telling my why I'm wrong about it. I haven't watched the film all the way through in years, but I intend to do so again, based in part on this discussion.
Side note: I know the scene isn't literally fourth-wall-breaking, but I think you know what I'm getting at.
Dan, you are open to the possibility that Matt is correct about the big political speech in Salvador being out of place, yet your purpose is to legitimate the place of explicit political statements in art. I have already noted that Stone is didactic or pedantic or whatever we might want to call him for failing to rely exclusively on images, for resorting to language per se, and for not trusting the narrative itself to do it's thematic work, for falling into, well, speechifying. Furthermore, I have conceeded that this can be intelligence-insulting. But while we're all so certain of our politics - (aren't we?)- what insults our intelligence might just raise the consciousness of some other folks. In that scene in Salvador, Stone and Boyle stick it to the fucking man! And even if Matt and you ultimately find that the speech is beyond the credibility of the character, I still hold that it is intrinsic to the film as a whole, as I say "earned" and therefore not as Matt says "slightly misjudged."
And just to ensure that I loose the friends I think I may have had, "slightly misjudged" is evasive euphemistic rhetoric. To be crude about it, what Matt is saying- implicitly and perhaps even unintentionally - is that Stone crosses the line of acceptable ideological discourse in cinema, the radical critique is spelled out too boldly in art, the dialogue is TOO POLITICAL. It is this implicit assertion that Dan means to oppose, albeit as indirectly as the assertion itself was made. Personally, I crave a lack of subtlty when it comes to exposing the history of US imperialism and as much as I enjoy film-for-film's sake, I embrace such exposition wherever and whenever I can find it, even when it stretches the limits of narrative rigour and character veracity. Nobody is promoting the reduction of art to propaganda but can we not allow for a type of poetic licence that is precisely political?
Then - Ben
Ben: "And just to ensure that I lose the friends I think I may have had, "slightly misjudged" is evasive euphemistic rhetoric."
Well, I've tried to explain exactly what I meant by that -- that it's a criticism of one scene in a movie I love, and that the objection has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of Boyle's statement or its appropriateness in this movie (of course it's appropriate, it's what the movie is about!) I've also pointed out that I am not now, nor have I ever been, inhospitable to unabashedly political filmmaking, coded or explicit -- that in fact I cheer it and want to see more of it, particularly at the Hollywood level, where such works are as imperiled as the North American grizzlies. You're determined to believe otherwise, though, so I'm not going to invest any more energy in arguing this particular point.
Matt, You defend yourself with respect to respecting politics in art. I'm sorry for putting you on the defensive, even if it was mostly Dan who did so, I subsequently beat you up for your phrase "slightly misjudged" and I now regret this. For what it's worth, I took a back-handed shot at Dan too. I said that Boyle is a loose verbal cannon. Well, it takes one to know one. In a desperate attempt to win back your love, please allow me to highlight that I did not address your attitude about politics in art generally, I attended exactly to what I suppose is at the heart of your problem with that one scene in Salvador. As that scene MAKES the film for me, I was up in arms. As you hardly proposed that that scene BREAKS the film, far from it, I believe you are right that it is time for me to stop fixating on it. As always, thanks for letting me drop in.
Then - Ben
"United 93," which reconcieved its title event as a triumph of the human spirit, divested of any larger context;
You mean "World Trade Center", right?
Jesus, we're starting to sound like the two chipmunks in that Warner Bros. cartoon. Stop by anytime, Ben. You make me question my premises, and that's always a good thing.
Matt sez: I never have argued that movies should be less overtly political
Matt, I know you aren't part of the problem here; in fact, you're a large part of the solution. Hence, my immediate disclaimer ("[p]lease don't see this particular missive aimed in your direction. It isn't.") My complaint is aimed at the broader North American viewing and reviewing public, not at you.
Geez, if we backpedal any faster, we'll reverse the Earth's rotation.
Jeffrey: I haven't seen "World Trade Center" yet, so I can't agree or disagree.
Matt, if it makes a lick of difference, I've got your back on U93. The film's determinedly apolitical stance is completely lacking in insight into the larger issues. The film's champions argue that this isn't the point of the film; I argue that you if you are going to use 9/11 as a backdrop to your film, you had damned well better make that at least part of the program.
Now, back to your regurarly scheduled program.
Stone’s about equally exhilarating and annoying for me—but I consider that to his credit. The urgency and inventiveness that mark Stone at his best are inextricably welded to the distended bombast and ham-fisted witlessness of his worst, both (as Matt and Aaron correctly note) brought on by a need to connect with an audience that leaps past populism and strains for the touchingly impossible goal of immediate empathic response. (One of the reasons I consider THE DOORS Stone’s finest hour, despite portraying one of my least favorite bands and celebrities; rather than try to win the audience over, the film assumes you’re with it or not from the starting gate and proceeds on its merry way indifferent to your outrage or confusion. Which itself reveals a tougher truth about the sixties than most backward-glancing boomers care to acknowledge.) (Says the guy born in 1969.)
Aaron: “When he tackles true-life subjects like Nixon or the JFK assassination he is respectful but not reverential.”
I really like your piece, Aaron, and look forwards to the concluding installment, but I couldn’t disagree more with this statement. Stone’s worldview can be starkly Manichean, and his early films, at least, are full of white knights, suitably tarnished with acceptable vices, as Stone’s too intuitive a dramatist to offer up absolutely flawless characters. Willem Dafoe’s Elias; Martin Sheen’s elder Fox; JFK offers not only a stolid, earnest Jim Garrison, in fact one of the slickest, most self-aggrandizing figures surrounding the Kennedy assassination (as his showy cameo attests), but a genuinely hagiographic portrait of the slain prince.
Stone’s gotten much better about this recently, a healthy development that makes me agree with Matt about the greater worthiness of his post-TALK RADIO output. And then COMMANDANTE popped up. All props to Stone for having gone back for another, more critical look (I hear and believe, though I’ve not yet actually seen his second Castro film), but the naiveté of Stone’s political inquiry in this lazy game of softball toss passing off as an interview suggest he’s still prone to seeing the world as made up of titanic heroes and villains thrashing on the plain of history.
(I should make clear that while my own view of Castro is utterly negative, I’m not complaining about Stone’s admiration for the man—any more than my certainty of Oswald’s sole guilt diminishes the best parts of JFK. Chris Marker’s GRIN WITHOUT A CAT contains a marvelous and unforgettable sequence idolizing Castro and comparing him favorably to the sclerotic Soviet regime, which culminates in the unforgettable image of the Cuban leader, speaking in Russia, finding his engaging tic of adjusting his microphone as a dramatic pause stymied by the fixed mics on the Moscow stage. I disagree with Marker’s thesis, but admire his canny appropriation of found imagery and the surprising way the argument is made. No, I’m distressed by Stone’s utter trust in the pontifications of an authority figure; it suggests how muddled his own purportedly anti-authoritarian thinking is, how much politics for Stone is about emotion trumping reason.)
Anonymous: “Instead of comparing Stone to Godard, maybe you should compare him to Peckinpah.”
Actually, I consider that a better fit as well. The macho streak in Stone is as defining as any of his other characteristics; remember the return of Garrison’s potency when his paranoia is confirmed, the riding-high backroom boys bonhomie of WALL STREET, Alexander’s proving himself on the battlefield; every frame of ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (another favorite of mine). Not that Godard hasn’t got his own masculine hang-ups; or made more than a few tantrums disguised as movies.
If you’re the same anonymous who points to the invaluable contribution Hank Corwin made to Stone, absolutely. But note also that THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE is about as un-Stoned as a movie can be; Corwin didn’t bring everything to the table.
Anonymous: “Full disclosure: I am not Mitchell Stephens. “
OK, but are you Corwin?
Ross, I agree that TALK RADIO is actually a fine example of how to open up, and even contemporize, a play. The solder joining the Alan Berg-influenced bits and Bogosian’s original is seamless.
Ben Livant: “Correct me if I'm wrong - and I'm not confident that I'm not (see my opening line) - but Stone's other films [beyond SALVADOR] focus on….the perspective of America or on behalf of America or how such-and-such history was experienced by America, as Aaron points out, "how WE feel about it”….”
Well, there’s HEAVEN & EARTH, a film I find more admirable in its intent than its execution, and one in which the stirring point is made that this is an American story as much as any other. But generally, yeah. And, honestly, I’m fine with that. Stone’s excesses, quest for absolutes, and trust in the potency of narrative to change hearts and minds all mark him as a genuine Native Son.
Matt: “[ALEXANDER] could have been alternately titled, "Why We Are In Iraq."”
Also, “How We Fared In Vietnam (Again)”, as Stone even contrives to take out the first Greek soldier in India via a lightening strike in a scene that looks for all the world like stepping on a landmine. This engagement with history as a living force is the great strength of ALEXANDER, an underrated film. Not tragically underrated—it’s too uneven, now sober, now goofy, to be fully redeemed, but there’s much of worth in it.
Matt: “Stone got his knuckles rapped for invoking Shakespeare in "JFK" and "Nixon," but I can't help thinking Shakespeare would have watched both of those movies and been (a) flattered and (b) impressed.”
Even (c) motivated to pilfer some of the better parts.
Ben: “Personally, I crave a lack of subtlty when it comes to exposing the history of US imperialism and as much as I enjoy film-for-film's sake, I embrace such exposition wherever and whenever I can find it, even when it stretches the limits of narrative rigour and character veracity.”
Fair enough. But drama is drama and lectures remain lectures; Woods’s political awakening is clearly expressed throughout the rest of the film, but the scene in question leaps out from the film that surrounds it not because of its conviction, but its clumsy haranguing. Though in fairness I probably come right between you and Matt on the worth of this scene, as I agree with you that Woods has be a reckless motormouth incapable of discretion from moment one. That his verbal assaults switch focus from the representatives of religious and moral decorum to this star’d-and-bar’d phalanx is hardly out of character.
But for a political confrontation that clarifies, rather than bumps awkwardly, I’d point to NIXON’s Lincoln Memorial confrontation, the pathetic efforts at small talk and glad-handing shot down with righteous force by the protesting youth, Nixon forced to acknowledge he’ll always be the whining, confused shadow at the feet of his purported idol. It’s as didactic as Stone has ever been, but bracing and humane where other examples, even in NIXON, come off brittle and one-sided.
Matt:
I actually did think you were just making a typo when you made your remark about United 93 as a 'triumph of the human spirit' which I find a fairly confounding statement, both on its own and in comparison with Stone's movie.
In an attempt to not go off-topic by addressing the misreadings of Greengrass's film, I'll just say that the exchange pointed out something rather surprising to me, that in this entire article and talkback there are only a couple of passing mentions of World Trade Center, which makes it stick out even more in Stone's oeuvre, as his most impersonal, decontextualized, and basically hollow film since before Salvador. If any film this year deserves the comment 'determinedly apolitical' from Dan, it is WTC and not the richer, more textured U93.
jeffmcm: Well, my views on "United 93" are a matter of public record, so I won't rehash them here. (The NYPress piece is here.) And not having seen Stone's film yet, I can't compare them.
I am curious, though, to know how you think the movie was misread, and if you mean that it was misread by the sizable majority of critics who raved about it (or were at least solmenly respectful toward it) or the minority who voiced objections of one sort or another.
Whoops, I went on the U93 tangent after all when my point was that WTC is the exception in Stone's modern oeuvre that proves the rule, and is all the more exceptional for it. It's a film that roundly refuses to be about anything except for a very narrow slice of melodramatic life.
Jeff, I also have yet to see WTC, so I cannot compare it's level of apoliticalness to that of U93. The reviews, however, have not been promising, and you may well be correct in your assessment that it also deserves a spanking for ignoring the white elephant in the room.
Matt, to answer you, I think U93 was misread by the minority, such as yourself and Dan, who didn't care for it. Like I said, I'm totally perplexed by the notion of it as 'apolitical', I found it to be a deeply politically engaged film, albeit in a way that Oliver Stone would never follow (to try to get back on subject), to wit, finding the political in the personal in a very subtle, non-underlined way. But I think it was also misread by the majority who were carried away by its surface qualities, its rawness and emotional force, to miss its more thoughtful elements.
But again to get back on subject, World Trade Center, which is both within the mainline of Stone's work and as far outside of it as any film since The Hand. It's a film where Stone expresses his sympathy with the working-class heroes he depicts, and (more problematically) his traditional interests in patriarchy and masculinity are at play.
But it's also a film that refuses any interest in political context - the movie could just as easily be about an earthquake or tornado than a politically motivated attack. Despite fine performances from Cage and Pena, neither cop's character is developed with an eye towards their individual, unique sociopolitical background. And formally the movie is bland and safe, with the exception of a couple of odd fantasy interludes starring Jesus.
Basically, the shocking thing about this movie is how it reveals Stone, post-Alexander, as an artist with his tail between his legs.
Clearly I require therapy. I tried to stay away and shut up about THE scene in Salvador, but here I am again. I promise to get help.
Bruce Reid takes the middle road. He agrees with me that the speech is not out of character for Boyle and his development, if I may paraphrase him, but insofar as he says the speech is "clumsy haranguing" and that the political confrontation between Boyle and the Colonel "bumps awkwardly," Bruce also agrees with Matt. I want to enter into this in an attempt to walk Bruce's position over to my side of the road.
I have already proposed that Wood's delivery of his rant in Stone's film should be appreciated along the lines of a Jimmy Stewart speech in a Frank Capra movie. Indeed, it seems to me that a comparison of political values between Stone and Capra would produce some solid parallels. But even if this sounds wrong-headed, all I am asking for is that Stone be permitted the same latitude as Capra when it comes to reaching a climax both dramatically and thematically through the tried and true convention of a speech. Or are these only to be permitted in a Kansas courtroom, on the steps of the Whitehouse or some other corn field setting signifying the goodness of American democracy?
I feel compelled to stress again that Boyle delivers his rant at a US embassy luncheon, in an enclave of imperialist power supposedly established to protect the likes of Boyle himself but actually entrenched to prop up a dictator who will do the bidding of foreign capital in his country - all in the larger context of the Cold War. The latter context is key for the scene. For, as I have already recounted, the Colonel red-baits Boyle. It is precisely this red-baiting that ignites Boyle. Sure, sure, when the encounter becomes a war of words won by Boyle, it is not especially plausible, it is somewhat contrived, just like it is when Mr. Deeds goes to Washington. Yet, that the encounter occurs is in no way ludicrous, as both characters' motives for entering into the exchange in the first place are entirely credible.
If Bruce is correct that there is some clumsy haranguing at work in the scene, it resides with the Colonel - a mere device to provoke Boyle to unload - but not with Boyle's reactive rant itself. If Bruce is correct that the political confrontation between Boyle and the Colonel bumps awkwardly, the fault lies with the latter antagonist and not the former protagonist. Whether the blame should fall to the writers or the actor performing the role I will not consider. I will simply acknowledge that the character of the Colonel is too crassly sketched. The way the red-baiting is conducted is too mechanical. It is just an excuse for the speech that follows it.
Nevertheless, it remains that the speech itself is not out of character for Boyle and his development. So further, it is not out of place in the film as a whole. The exact opposite, it is the climax of the film, what everything has been leading to, the point at which Boyles' politics become fully realized, by him and by us. What comes afterwards is pure denouement, Boyle and his family fleeing El Salvador, and a coda, his family being deported from the US. Dramatically, this denouement and coda are more realistic than the speech scene. But thematically, ideologically, the high point of realism in the film is the speech and without it, the rest of the realism in the film runs the risk of being for naught. The scene is absolutely necessary for Salvador as a whole. To recognize this is to allow for what I have previously termed poetic licence that is precisely political.
Then - Ben
Ben: The elaborated Capra comparison sways me. Damn you, man. You persuade me more with each new post. Water on a Stone, I guess.
PS -- Until therapy, this blog will have to do.
Matt: You are too kind to me. I appreciate your willingness to seriously consider my take and to show how appreciative I am, let me now display just how much therapy I need.
Bruce took the middle road for the scene in question. While I stand fast on my side of the road for that scene, I lean towards the center of the lane when we reflect on Salvador as a whole. This is to say that, unlike you Matt, I cannot state that Salvador is a "nearly perfect movie."
Over at Cinemania I said it is "occasionally melodramatic and lacking in narrative elegance." Picking up on the Capra comparison, while I might not want to accuse him of the latter, I definitely would hang the former around his neck and it seems to me that Stone in general is also prone in this direction. Specifically in Salvador, I have already criticized the red-baiting Colonel. Now I add that the portrayal of Major Max and his inner circle is positively corny, smacking horribly of hack Hollywood villainy. I could highlight other little things that reveal the director of Salvador to be the screenwriter of, say, Midnight Express, a trite and sensationalist movie in my estimation. However, I restrict myself (there's a change) to what is most far-fetched and against the grain of the realism of the picture. I am thinking of the eleventh hour phone call from the ambassador that saves Boyle from being butchered by the border guards. This pretty much functions on the same dramatic level as an angel stopping a guy from jumping off a bridge to make him see that it's a wonderful life.
Unlike Aaron Aradillas and probably most of the individuals who have posted in response to his article - good article, looking forward to part two - I have seen only six of Stone's films. Of these six, Salvador is by far and away my favorite. It came out the same year as Platoon, 1986, and it went relatively unnoticed while Platoon was named best picture and Stone best director by the Academy. Well, I think Salvador is a better film, a much better film, (although I must confess that I saw it for the second time less than a month ago whereas I haven't seen Platoon since the year of its release).
Salvador is my favorite because of Woods' wonderful performance. Like the finishing stain on a piece of furniture that wasn't perfectly sanded beforehand, the performance covers over certain flaws in Stone's conception. But Salvador is also my favorite because of Stone's conception. As I have previously recognized here, compared to his other films, Salvador doesn't just look at America unto itself and its own but rather firmly locates America in the world and looks at America from the outside, at least somewhat through the eyes of others; in short, providing a bit of revolutionary El Salvadorian perspective. Nothing of the sort is offered in Platoon. You might think that a film about America in Vietnam might provide the perfect fucking cinematic opportunity to look at the story with some revolutionary Vietnamese perspective. You might.
I have devoted what I don't doubt appears to be a fanatical amount of attention to Salvador and one scene in it. But I challenge all of us participating in this Oliver Stone retrospective to dwell on the deepest and most dominant ideological currents of our culture when assessing his output. It is no accident that Salvador was allowed to fall into relative obscurity while Platoon was promoted and celebrated through the most powerful channels of mainstream commercial advancement. Platoon is a critique of America in Vietnam only to the extent that US foreign policy decomposes to the point of Americans cannibalizing other Americans. Salvador is a critique of America in the world to the degree that US foreign policy is composed to enable America to cannibalize people in other nations. And the winner is... hold on, hold on, I broke a nail ripping the envelope...
Then - Ben
Ben: "Platoon is a critique of America in Vietnam only to the extent that US foreign policy decomposes to the point of Americans cannibalizing other Americans. Salvador is a critique of America in the world to the degree that US foreign policy is composed to enable America to cannibalize people in other nations. And the winner is... hold on, hold on, I broke a nail ripping the envelope...'
I wouldn't have dreamed of arguing "Platoon" was superior to "Salvador" in the first place, and even if I had, I'd been foolish to try after the above statement. You're right: after all, the narrator's summation at the end of "Platoon" is, "we didn't fight the enemy, we fought ourselves." To which a Vietnam veteran uncle of mine who hated the movie replied, "Oh, yeah? Well, who was I shooting at, then?"
Matt: Of course, I hope your uncle also asked further, "WHY was I shooting at who I was shooting at?" But even if he didn't, I respect his condemnation of Platoon. Even though I am just a school boy and cannot speak with the authority of a veteran, I remember the film as an exercise in tragic - and therefore supposedly profound - Americana, self-flagellation over past sins against the self, masochistic masturbation. Yet another back-to-me American treatment of Vietnam. But as your uncle drives home, this sort of one-sided historical treatment actually does not empower genuine self-reflection because the self is conceptuallly removed from the real social struggle in which it was embedded.
Capitalist-generals necessarily command their worker-grunts to abstract the designated other-enemy right out of its human skin. Taken up by the mills of culture, the good ol' war movie is all about US, glossy or grizzly, in great detail, with only the most cursory, stock, faceless, nameless targets filling in for THEM. One of the academic darlings of postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard, putting forward the notion that simulacra have effectively replaced or even become our experience of reality, once claimed that Apocalypse Now was now more real than the real, historic war. Oh yeah Jean? Tell it to the Vietnamese! In their own country! In person!
And to add tear-jerker insult to ideological injury, Oliver Stone used Samuel Barber's Adagio
For Strings six years after David Lynch had used it in The Elephant Man and three years after Gregory Nava used it in El Norte, both far far better films than Platoon.
Matt, I am curious to know how your uncle felt about Stone's Born Of The Fouth Of July.
Then - Ben
Ben: He thought the details of recruitment, battle and recovery were impeccable, liked the period details and thought the actors were good. But he thought the movie degenerated as it went along. And he particularly hated the scene where he tells the dead soldier's family that he, not the enemy, is responsible for the killing shot. He thought Ron's motivation was purely selfish -- all about making himself feel better, with no regard for the family's feelings -- and the movie validated his selfishness by having the family take the news so incredibly well (the Lili Taylor character's remark nothwithstanding). In all, I think more of the scene than he did -- the movie's about telling the hard truth rather than continuing to blissfully accept the official story -- but it does seem that the parents' reactions are written in a way that unrealistically lets Ron (and the audience) off the hook as quickly as possible.
He also echoed something Pauline Kael said in her negative review -- that there was nothing in the movie to indicate that Kovic's becoming a protester was really about him thinking Vietnam was a bad war -- that it was all about having been wounded and wanting to get some sense of control over his life again.
There it is again. Self-flagellation over past sins against the self. Thanks for sharing a bit of your family, and Pauline Kael, with me.
Then - Ben
Matt, your uncle's critique of Born on the 4th of July is spot-on. Despite being a veteran of it (unlike many of those privileged kids whose protests were, quite logically, borne largely out of the self-interest of self-preservation) Kovic was an ineffectual symbol or figurehead for criticism of the Vietnam War largely because he didn't focus the attention on the vast injustice of American global imperialism. Instead, he was mostly concerned with the treatment of American vets, which was (and is, given the shit they are still being served by their government) certainly a worthwhile cause, but lacked the larger, more altruistic and globally-involved perspective of a strong anti-war activist.
Am I allowed to say that even though I've never met Matt's uncle, I'm sure I would have liked Born on the Fourth of July more if he had played the part of Ron Kovic instead of [SFX: HEAVY SIGH] Tom Cruise?
Then - Ben
Ben: Well, he was a veteran of Korea first, then did two tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret, so by the time the movie came out, he looked more like Gene Hackman than Tom Cruise, so it would have been a totally different movie. Also he was a Reagan conservative from Alabama, so I doubt he'd have wanted to appear in that particular story in the first place -- although the Mexico brothel interlude and the Kyra Sedgwick courtship scenes might have swayed him.
Matt: Korea and two shifts in Nam. That's a lot of war. So much war. Too much war. Too much.
Then - Ben
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