The Films of Oliver Stone: Conclusion & Updated Ranking

I’ve spent the better part of two months now watching the films of Oliver Stone – which has mostly been a joy. I hadn’t seen many of his older film in more than a decade, and hadn’t seen many of his newer films more than once – in the theaters when they first came out. Watching them all in a short period of time really was a fun time.

What it also did though was really draw a line in the sand – a line I knew was there – between when Stone was a great filmmaker, and the present when he is still a wonderful stylist, but whose films, as entertaining as they are, is lacking that spark that made his earlier work so memorable. Stone is a filmmaker who likes to use his films to say something important about America. In his earlier work, he was able to do that, and wrap it up in a neat, entertaining package. It is amazing just how densely packed works like JFK, Nixon and Natural Born Killers are – and how timely movies like Talk Radio and Wall Street remain, without ever quite giving into the urge to speechify. His Vietnam trilogy are three honest explorations of what that conflict meant to the people involved. Of the films Stone made during his remarkable 10 year between 1986 and 1995, I found only The Doors to be disappointing upon re-watching – his masterpieces remained his masterpieces for me, and films like Wall Street and Salvador were actually better than I remembered them.

Something happened to Stone though after Nixon. Part of it is probably that Hollywood stopped making the types of films Stone always made – and audiences stopped going to them. It’s remarkable to think that Platoon was the third highest grossing film of 1986 – and Born on the Fourth of July was the sixth highest grossing of 1989, of JFK was the 17^th highest grossing of 1991 – that wouldn’t happened today. Audiences stopped going to Stone’s films though – Heaven & Earth didn’t crack the top 100 grossing films of 1993, Natural Born Killers did shocking well (25^th highest of 1994) considering how violent it was, but then Nixon barely cracked the top 100 the next year (it was #100). Hollywood was already turning away from the mid-budget films that Stone made, in an effort to get bigger and bigger.

But part of it was also Stone, whose instincts don’t quite seem as sharp in the later stage of his career. U-Turn is too long and too surreal for such a simple story, Any Given Sunday is too overstuffed, Alexander was an ill-advised experiment, etc. The movies in Stone’s later career are often quite fun – they are also quite forgettable, which is something Stone’s best films are not.

Does Stone have a truly great film left in him? I don’t know. I think his latest film, Snowden, is a rather great combination of filmmaker and subject (even if I am likely to disagree with Stone’s take on Snowden, I cannot wait to see it). But Stone does remain an intelligent filmmaker, and a great visual stylist. His newest films may not be masterpieces, but they are better than they are often given credit for. I think it’s a shame that Stone’s films are somewhat out of fashion right now. They deserve better. Stone may not be the filmmaker I fell in love with as a teenager any more – but that doesn’t mean his work should be ignored.

Updated Ranking

As always, there are changes from my preliminary rankings that I did at the beginning of this series, based purely on memory. As is inevitable, some films are better than I remembered them being (hello Wall Street), and some are worse (hello, The Doors) – and many remain the same. So, to close, some updated thoughts upon seeing Stone’s films again. Keep in mind, that the top 3 films could be in any order, and I’d be okay with that ranking – they really are that close.

19. Seizure (1974, Not Ranked on previous list) – There is a reason this film was virtually lost for years, and why Stone doesn’t like to talk about it. If a director Stone’s stature had not directed it, the film would have remained lost, and probably should be. Even by the not very lofty standards of 1970s D-grade horror movies, Seizure sucks.

18. Alexander (2004, ranked 17 on previous list) – A grand folly – the type of failure that only a great filmmaker can make, but still every inch a failure. I’m glad I finally gave another cut of the film a chance, if only because it proves to me that this really isn’t a good film.

17. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010, ranked 16 on previous list) – Not the worst, obviously, of Stone’s major films – but probably his most forgettable. A fun little movie that evaporates from your mind almost as soon as it’s over. It’s good to see Gordon Gekko again though.

16. The Hand (1981, Not Ranked on previous list) – I was pleasantly surprised by The Hand, which has the ridiculous premise of a disembodied hand killing people, but that works mainly because Stone, and star Michael Caine, take the premise seriously. Yes, the film would probably be forgotten today had Stone not directed it, and it’s hardly great, but it’s interesting, to say the least – and actually good.

15. World Trade Center (2006, ranked 15 on previous lost) – A perfectly adequate film, very well made by Stone – with expert sound design and art direction, and a fascinating performance by Michael Shannon, as a man who feels “called” to the WTC in the wake of September 11 to save people, which I think is more nuanced than people give it credit for. Watching the film again though, I am still struck that no matter how good it is, it doesn’t really become as interesting as you would think an Oliver Stone film about 9/11 would be. Perfectly fine, but nothing really else.

14. The Doors (1991, ranked 10 on previous list) – Perhaps the film I was most disappointed in upon re-visiting. The teenage me like this film a whole lot more than the adult me – even though Val Kilmer is brilliant in the lead role as Jim Morrison, and it’s probably the best version of his life I can imagine on screen the film is a long, so slog into oblivion – which may well be accurate, but doesn’t exactly make for great viewing.

13. U Turn (1997, ranked 9 on previous list) – Stone over complicates what should have been just a simple, sun drench neo-noir film, yet he still delivers a twisty, turny, sexy, violent little film. It’s Stone at his least ambitious to be sure – but it’s still an entertaining little film.

12. Any Given Sunday (1999, ranked 13 on previous list) – An overstuffed movie to be sure, and one that in retrospect takes it too easy on the NFL, which considering how controversial it was at the time no one could see coming. Still, it is an extremely entertaining movie, about the contradictions inherent in pro-football – that it is a corrupt and greedy corporate enterprise who cares about nothing but money – but damn it, it’s fun.

11. Salvador (1986, ranked 12 on previous list) – I still don’t see the masterpiece that some see – it’s too uneven, especially as it gets more serious in the second half, but Woods is terrific, and overall the movie is better than I remembered it being.

10. W. (2008, ranked 8 on previous list) – An incredibly odd film, that looks even stranger in retrospect, but one I find endlessly fascinating, with a great performance by Josh Brolin at its core. I think it’s going to take a little while longer for this one to get the critical re-evaluation it deserves.

9. Savages (2012, ranked 11 on previous list) – Just pure, straight ahead genre filmmaking at its finest. I wish Stone had one this a few more times during his career – it may not be overly ambitious, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

8. Heaven & Earth (1993, ranked 7 on previous list) - A film that has been sadly neglected over the years – an important and necessary corrective for Stone and American movies in general – showing the tragedy of the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese point of view, which has been grossly underrepresented. It may not quite hit the heights of the other two Stone films about the Vietnam War – but it comes closer than most give it credit for.

7. Wall Street (1987, ranked 14 on previous list) – In many ways, Wall Street is pure 1980s movie at its most excessive, but that works for the film, and Michael Douglas’ performance has always been great. It’s also a hell of a lot more fun than I remembered it being, so despite its problems, I liked it a hell of lot more than I remembered liking it.

6. Talk Radio (1988, ranked 6 on previous list) – Still Stone’s least seen, and most underrated film – an anguished howl of outrage, that manages the odd trick of still being relevant, despite the fact that radio has never been less so. If you haven’t seen it – and most haven’t – correct that.

5. Born on the Fourth of July (1989, ranked 5 on previous list) - A great coming home from war film, about a man who went to Vietnam thinking he knew everything, and realizing he didn’t – and having to reconcile that, and the sacrifices he made, for a war he ultimately feels wasn’t worth it, and his deep love of his country. Has a few flaws, but also contains some Tom Cruise’s best work – and Stone.

4. Platoon (1986, ranked 4 on previous list) - The ultimate grunt’s eye view of the Vietnam War – and all the chaos that meant. Great performances throughout, and fine direction, Stone’s film is straight forward in its moral logic, but more complex underneath. A worthy Best Picture winner – and there aren’t that many of those.

3. Natural Born Killers (1994, ranked 2 on previous list) - I have seen this perhaps more than any other film – by Stone or otherwise – and I doubt thatl change, as I do not obsessively re-watch films the way I once did. I know every beat of this film, and I still love it. I was amazed once again by how well the film worked for me on this viewing – it’s still a brilliantly constructed, ultra-violent love story and media satire – that continues to be relevant. A masterpiece.

2. JFK (1991, ranked 1 on previous list) - Stone’s brilliant counter-myth for the JFK assassination is one of the most complex films ever made, with a huge cast, telling a large story, and yet he keeps everything crystal clear, no matter how insane the whole thing gets. This is a film about the sense of loss, the downfall of idealism that started with JFK’s assassination, and continued for a generation. A masterpiece.

1. Nixon (1995, ranked 3 on previous list) - Why did Nixon leapfrog both JFK and Natural Born Killers on this most recent viewing? It wasn’t because either of those films have diminished in my mind. Perhaps it’s because I had not seen Nixon quite as many times as either JFK or Natural Born Killers – so it was slightly fresher. Perhaps it was because Anthony Hopkins’ Nixon is the best performance in any Stone movie, and easily the most complex character in any Stone movie. Perhaps I simply want to be a contrarian. But, like the other two films, it is a masterpiece that towers over everything else Stone has made – and over most films. I have seen Natural Born Killers more times than any other film in history. JFK is the film that got me started down the path to becoming a film buff/movie obsessive. And Nixon just may be better than both of them. That should tell you how much I love Nixon.

And that’s it for my series on the films of Oliver Stone. I’ll have to wait longer than expected for his latest – Snowden – which got pushed to 2016. I still hope it will be a real return to form.

The Films of Oliver Stone: Savages (2012)

Savages (2012)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: Shane Salerno & Don Winslow & Oliver Stone based on the novel by Winslow.
Starring: Blake Lively (O), Taylor Kitsch (Chon), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ben), Salma Hayek (Elena), Benicio Del Toro (Lado), John Travolta (Dennis), Demian Bichir (Alex), Sandra Echeverria (Magdalena Sánchez), Emile Hirsch (Spin), Joaquín Cosio (El Azul), Mía Maestro (Dolores), Amber Dixon (Sophía), Shea Whigham (Chad).

I really wish Oliver Stone had more films like Savages in his filmography. This is a violent, sadistic little film – with no grand aspirations or political points to make, which is just straight ahead genre filmmaking at its finest. Stone really only attempted this early in his career – with films like Seizure (1974) and The Hand (1981)– and then again with U-Turn (1997), after a strong of more ambitious films. Every other film Stone has made has had some larger point to make – about modern American politics, social issues or something else. Savages doesn’t care about any of that – it is a straight ahead action film/thriller, about two pot dealers, the girl they love and the Mexican cartel they anger. The film may flirt with issues like medical marijuana, and illegal immigration (I think Donald Trump probably loves this movie), but it doesn’t bother with them. It’s just straight up, violent, stylistic filmmaking – and Stone handles it wonderfully. Watching it again recently, I have to admit two things about Savages – it is probably Stone’s least ambitious “late period” film (anything after Nixon) – but also the best of them.

The movie takes place in California, where two childhood best friends, who couldn’t possibly be any more different, make a lot of money selling the best pot around. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) was in the Marines, and brought back seeds from Afghanistan when he was fighting over there. Chon is violent, yet extremely loyal. His best friend Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) double majored in business and botany, and knows what to do with the seeds Chon has brought back, and how to build their illegal drug empire. If things need to get violent – Chon is there. But they don’t often get violent. Both of them are sleeping with O (Blake Lively), but there is no jealously there – they all now the arrangement, and like it. For her, the two men “make one complete man”. What precisely they see in her, I’m not sure – but that’s because the movie is told from her point-of-view, and doesn’t dwell on such questions.

Everyone knows Chon and Ben have the best pot – which is why they come to attention of a Mexican cartel, run by Elena (Salma Hayek), who sends her lawyer Demian Bichir) and enforcer, Lado (Benicio Del Toro) to get Chon and Ben to join them – on a “three year contract”. Their DEA agent on the take, Dennis (John Travolta), tells them to take the deal – they’ll end up dead otherwise, but they don’t listen. They plan to run – so in retaliation, the Cartel kidnaps O to force their hand. Ben, and especially Chon, do not like this.

The violence in the movie is pervasive and strong, almost from the outset. Stone lets you know he is not messing around, and the film is probably second to only Natural Born Killers on his resume in terms of bloodshed. He see grainy videos of what precisely happens to people who anger the cartel – and then we get some live, not so grainy re-enactments of the same types of things. Stone has never been one to flinch at violence before, but even still, there are torture scenes in Savages that are pretty extreme, even for him. I don’t think this rises to the level of “torture porn” – because Stone isn’t getting off on these scenes, which are harsh and brutal, and he provides much needed context for them as well.

As Lado, Benicio Del Toro is essentially playing the opposite character as he did in his Oscar winning role in Steven Soderberg’s Traffic (2000). In that film, he was the one honest man in Mexico Law Enforcement. In Savages, he is perhaps the most amoral man in Mexico – a man who kills without thought or feeling, and will essentially betray anyone if he feels like it. It is a terrifying performance. Salma Hayek is his equal as Elena. In the best role Hayek has had in years, she is wonderful – ruthless and merciless in business, who still has a soft spot in her armor for her children (and grows one for the childlike O as well). Together they are brutal and unforgiving – even to each other – and lets you know from the start of the film that anything could happen here. Travolta is his old, swaggering, over-the-top self here, and it’s fun to see him relish a role this much again. Strangely these three – and some of the rest of the supporting cast – are far more interesting then the three central characters in the film. Lively’s performance as O in particular feels too passive, for someone who is essentially the central character in the film, even though she doesn’t do that much. Taylor Kitsch is all one note rage as Chon, which is what is asked of him, but still wears a little thin. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a little bit better as Ben, but not much.

Then again, part of the reason why the performances are one note, is performance the characters generally are as well. Savages is not a particularly original movie in any way, shape or form, and doesn’t even really play with the conventions of the genre. It is a straight up action thriller, which has style to spare. Yes, sometimes Stone goes a little too far over the top with the style (a giant clock superimposed over a tense car sequence when they’re on a deadline for example) – but when you’re moving at this speed, with this much action, a little over the top is forgivable. The ending is a little weak, because it strikes me as a copout – a way for Stone and company to have their cake and eat it too.

Still though, Savages is one of the more entertaining films Stone has ever made. Unlike much of his filmography, it isn’t trying to do anything more than what it does – it doesn’t strain for importance. At his best, Stone is able to make meticiously crafted, entertaining and important movies. But too often later in his career he sacrificed entertainment value for trying to be “important” or message making. There is none of that in Savages – which goes for the jugglar, and gets it. This may be Stone at his least ambitious – but it’s still at his most entertaining.

The Films of Oliver Stone: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
Directed by: Oliver Stone   
Written by: Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff based on characters created by Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone.
Starring: Michael Douglas (Gordon Gekko), Shia LaBeouf (Jake Moore), Carey Mulligan (Winnie Gekko), Frank Langella (Louis Zabel), Josh Brolin (Bretton James), Eli Wallach (Julie Steinhardt), Vanessa Ferlito (Audrey), Susan Sarandon (Jake's Mother), Sylvia Miles (Realtor).

The irony that Gordon Gekko a character that writer/director Oliver Stone and star Michael Douglas meant as an indictment on Reagan-era greed on Wall Street ended up inspiring a whole new generation of Wall Street brokers, who wanted to be Gordon Gekko, has not been lost on Stone, or his collaborators. Nor has it been lost on them that while Gekko did some horrible things in the 1987 original film, his level of greed and corruption pales in comparison to what all of Wall Street did – apparently legally – leading up to the 2008 Financial Meltdown. Gekko’s actions were bad to be sure, but even had he gotten away with them, he only would have destroyed a few lives, not endanger the entire financial system on the planet. The timing back in 2010 therefore seemed right to make a sequel to Wall Street – and to even make Gekko into, if not the hero of the movie per se, at least not the villain. There was more than enough material to craft a great film about Wall Street greed back in 2010 – but as entertaining as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is (and, it is, entertaining) it never quite gets there. There’s too much yelling, too much posturing, and like the previous film a forced “happy ending” where the bad guy gets what’s coming to him, even if it isn’t realistic in the least. The movie is, if anything, even flashier than the 1987 film – but unlike the original doesn’t quite have the substance to back it up.

The film takes place in the days leading up, and then the month leading away, the Financial Meltdown in 2008. Instead of young, idealist Bud Fox in the lead role, you have young idealist Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) – a young hotshot at a big Wall Street firm that, like the rest of the them, is swimming in toxic assets and has no idea how much trouble they’re in. Like Lehman Brothers, they’re the first domino to fall – and like in real life, everyone else lets them fail, causing its founder, Louis Zabel (Frank Langella), who is Jake’s mentor, to commit suicide. Leading the charge against Zabel was his longtime enemy, Bretton James (Josh Brolin), and Jake wants revenge. Jake is currently dating Winnie (Carey Mulligan), Gordon Gekko’s estranged daughter – and decides to reach out to the old legend – now out of jail for a few years, and making money with a new book. Gekko is his old charming self, and even though Winnie warns Jake to stay away, that Gordon will destroy them, he doesn’t listen. Gordon doesn’t like Bretton either – and Jake thinks he can help get some level of revenge on the man that he has just started to work for.

Making the whole 2008 Meltdown a personal issue is perhaps inevitable in a movie like this – but it’s also incorrect, as the problems were systemic as much as anything, and while there were villains enough to go around, but the film basically brings everything down to a personal level – where Bretton James is the “big bad wolf” that must be stopped, which ignores the larger problems in the system. While Gekko does give some rather long (all be it entertaining) speeches about the level of greed on Wall Street that tries to cover the wider array of problems – and because Douglas is an excellent actor, who slides right back into the role he was born for, these speeches work. But films like Margin Call or the HBO film Too Big to Fail (not to mention a documentary like Inside Job, or any number of This American Life episodes) do a better job at showing just how wide ranging the problem was, and how no one really understood it. In this, the Hollywood version, greed has to be personified, so it can be punished.

There is much to like about Money Never Sleeps – Stone still knows how to direct scenes of excess, and how seductive this sort of lifestyle can be (although Jake is too much of a choirboy for my tastes – I liked Bud Fox more, who was willing to get dirty). The movie has style to spare, and that mostly works. Douglas is excellent, as always, and even if Langella does little but bellow in his extended cameo, he’s fun, and Josh Brolin is having fun as well as the bad guy (even if the math on his age confused the hell out of me – how old is he supposed to be?). LaBeof’s Jake maybe dull – but as an audience surrogate, he’ll do. The bigger problem is Winnie – who the movie never really gets a handle on. At one point, Gekko asks Jake a very valid question that the film never does even attempt to answer – if Winnie hates Gordon so much, why the hell is she dating Jake? For that matter, why couldn’t Winnie just be in the Jake role, and then we could eliminate the whole needless romantic subplot between them – which really only seems to be there to connect Jake and Gordon in the first place? Mulligan is a fine actress, but she cannot save this nothing character – which once again, highlights Stone’s oft-cited woman problem.

I liked Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps more in 2010 than I did on this second time through, although it is still an entertaining little film. It is also a completely forgettable one – which is something I cannot say about too many other Oliver Stone films. Throughout this series, I have been surprised by just how much of other, earlier films of Stone’s I remember – but this one is one I almost completely forgot. It shows Stone can still direct, sure, but it doesn’t feel like a Stone film, which the first did. It isn’t seething with anger – which normally you can count on Stone for. The movie is fun, to be sure, but not a lot else.

The Films of Oliver Stone: W. (2008)

W. (2008)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: Stanley Weiser.
Starring: Josh Brolin (George W. Bush), Elizabeth Banks (Laura Bush), James Cromwell (George H.W. Bush), Ellen Burstyn (Barbara Bush), Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney), Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell), Scott Glenn (Donald Rumsfeld), Thandie Newton (Condoleezza Rice), Toby Jones (Karl Rove), Bruce McGill (George Tenet), Ioan Gruffudd (Prime Minister Tony Blair), Noah Wyle (Don Evans), Rob Corddry (Ari Fleischer), Dennis Boutsikaris (Paul Wolfowitz), Randall Newsome (Paul Bremer), Jason Ritter (Jeb Bush), Michael Gaston (General Tommy Franks), Stacy Keach (Rev. Earle Hudd).

Oliver Stone’s W. was greeted with a collective shrug, by both audiences and critics, when it was released back in 2008 – and not enough time has passed for it to get any sort of real re-evaluation. You can understand why people didn’t much want to see the film then – it was released a month before the election that would bring Barack Obama to the White House, and even Bush’s hardcore supporters were getting tired of him, and wished he would pretty much go away. The Conservative minded either ignored the film or attacked it as a hatchet job – a lot on the Liberal side didn’t see it as hard enough on George W. Bush, and many film critics who loved Stone’s Nixon the decade prior was disappointed that Stone’s new film was simplistic by comparison. To me, that’s always been one of the point of W., the film – that it is a far more simple film for a far more simple man. No matter what one thinks of Richard Nixon, he was a fascinating person, in many ways a brilliant one, who brought himself up from nothing to become President, only to have it come crashing down around him because of his own paranoia. That’s the narrative of a Shakespearean King. In Stone’s view, Bush was nothing more than a spoiled rich kid, with daddy issues – an average man who had the misfortune of being born into a great family, and who was just smart enough to make himself into a great politician, but not smart enough to realize that is the last thing he should have been. Basically, Stone paints him as a man in way over his head, who has no idea what the hell he’s doing. He takes a few cheap shots perhaps – but not many. The fact checking brigade that has greeted other Stone films didn’t find much here – he stays pretty close to the established record on this one. That makes the film all the sadder. It is true that the film is flawed – that it rushes through Bush’s life far too quickly, and has a supporting cast that are basically doing little more than impressions of the famous people they’re playing (my favorite is probably Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld – he may not be in the film very much, but the way he eats pie will haunt me forever). Anchored by a great, Oscar caliber performance by Josh Brolin though, and W. really is quite a good film – one of the best “late phase” Stone films.

The film basically moves back and forth in time, from Bush’s past, starting with his drunken frat days, to his Presidency and back again. Yes, it is kind of silly to see the middle aged Brolin playing a frat boy, but it’s only for a scene (and at this point, because of Walk Hard, these types of scenes always make me smile, so let’s role with it). It doesn’t take long to establish who W. is – and what the relationship is like with his father (James Cromwell). His father is stern, and lets his son know at every opportunity just how disappointed he is in him, and how he wishes he could be more like Jeb – yet he’s also always there to bail his son out of trouble (or jail). Their interaction always reduce the usual over-confident machismo of W. into a little boy who has just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The movie moves quickly through W.’s “jobs” – none of which he lasts long in, as he always gets tired of being bossed around and simply does not have the work effort to stick with it. When he runs for Congress in the late 1970s – with little on his resume – he loses, and vows right then and there that he will never be “Out Christianed or Out Texased” every again – and he never is.

Brolin nails Bush’s voice and mannerisms – and not in a jokey, Saturday Night Live way, but in a much deeper one. He isn’t doing a jokey impression of Bush – which would be easy – but getting the man beneath that surface – at once brash and insecure. He is smart enough to know that those around do not think he is smart enough – and he doesn’t hesitate to put those around him down, albeit in a nice way, if he feels like they are stepping on his toes. He does the seemingly impossible with Bush – especially in 2008 – and makes him into a human being. A sad one to be sure, and one that he makes abundantly clear never should have been President (or really, in any kind of position of power) but a human just the same. The final shot of the movie – of Bush once again dreaming of being a baseball player in the outfield, only this time losing sight of the ball that never comes down is an apt metaphor for his life.

Stone is on solid footing with Brolin as Bush, but he cannot help himself at other times as he goes too far over the top. Richard Dreyfus, as Dick Cheney, has a fairly silly scene in the Situation Room, where he goes on a long, drawn out diatribe about all the things America needs to do become an Evil Empire (without using that term obviously) borders on a scene more appropriate to a film like Dr. Strangelove, except that it is played straight. In fact, none of the rest of the supporting cast really comes into focus in any real way – except Colin Powell should have probably sent Stone a fruit basket or something as he comes across far and away the best of anybody in the film.

At the time the film was made, many thought Stone had jumped the gun – that making the film while Bush was still in office was a mistake, as it didn’t really allow history to judge how he had done, and what the long term consequences of what he did were. This had helped Stone in the past – who made films about Vietnam more than a decade after the war ended, JFK’s assassination nearly three decades after the event, and about Richard Nixon two decades after he resigned. There is some truth to that complaint – and already, in just 7 years, as the President after Bush is getting ready to leave office next year, the film may have dated a little bit. And yet, in the larger scope, I’m not sure that the film would be much different if it were made today – with some hindsight – as it was back in 2008. If W. the film hasn’t really gotten a critical re-evaluation yet, than neither has George W. Bush, the President. He’s still someone Democrats hate, and Republicans distant themselves from – and the historical record hasn’t really helped Bush out – nor has it hurt him more than it already had back in 2008 (his screw-ups were already widely known). The complaint about the film that is true is that it is nowhere near the complex portrait of a President as Stone’s Nixon was. But Bush wasn’t nearly as complicated as Nixon – which is a fact that Stone makes stunning clear. W. is an odd film in many ways – but it remains a fascinating one for me – and one that hopefully, some more people will give a second look to.

The Films of Oliver Stone: World Trade Center (2006)

World Trade Center (2006)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: Andrea Berloff based on the true story of John McLoughlin & Donna McLoughlin and William Jimeno & Allison Jimeno.
Starring: Nicolas Cage (John McLoughlin), Michael Peña (Will Jimeno), Maria Bello (Donna McLoughlin), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Allison Jimeno), Michael Shannon (Dave Karnes), Armando Riesco (Antonio Rodrigues), Jay Hernandez (Dominick Pezzulo), William Mapother (Marine Sergeant Thomas), Stephen Dorff (Scott Strauss), Frank Whaley (Chuck Sereika).

World Trade Center is not the film about 9/11 that you would expect a firebrand like Oliver Stone to make. During the course of his career, he has made numerous controversial films about sacred American institutions, and has called out American foreign policy at every turn. But there is no talk about America in the bigger picture in World Trade Center – not even any mention of Islam or terrorists, or George W. Bush or anything else. The film is pretty much a straight ahead tribute to the heroism of the NYPD and NYFD on 9/11 itself, and in its aftermath. It is extremely well made and acted, but perhaps overly sentimental. The film debuted just a few months after Paul Greengrass’s United 93, and were the first two American studio movies about that day, so it makes sense that the film is so respectful of the events. You would expect this film from a director like Ron Howard, not Oliver Stone. Only the portrait of Staff Sergeant Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon – in the role that first brought him to my attention) even hints at anything darker in the American psyche – which is what Stone’s film are usually about. Why did Stone make this film? Perhaps, because despite all his criticism of America over the years, he still loves it – there is still a part of him that is that naïve college kid who volunteered for the Vietnam War.

The movie tells the true stories of John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) – two Port Authority police officers, who on 9/11 were dispatched the WTC. As part of a four man group, they were assigned to help evacuate one of the towers that morning, but end up trapped under a lot of rumble when the buildings came crashing down – the only thing that saved them, is that they were able to make it the elevator shaft before it actually did collapse. The pair of them spend days down there, before miraculously they were discovered and rescued. As the movie tells us, only 20 people were pulled out of the rumble alive after the towers collapses – McLoughlin and Jimeno were numbers 18 and 19.

The early scenes of the movie are truly terrifying, as Stone captures the utter chaos of that morning – when no one really had any idea what was going on. All these cops knew is that a plane had hit one of the towers – before they were loaded onto a bus and shipped down to help out. On the way, they here they other tower has been hit – but they’re not sure if they can believe that. When they arrive, they find utter chaos – people covered in blood, others already leaping from the buildings to try and survive. McLoughlin, as the senior officer, tries to get everyone to focus on the task they have been assigned – block out the rest, and try to help people. It is a truly frightening sequence.

After the towers collapse, the movie cuts between different kinds of scenes – scenes where McLoughlin and Jimeno are trapped under the rumble, trying to stay sane, trying to stay awake, and trying to help each other stay alive as much as they possibly can, when they are both trapped far away from each other. Then there are flashbacks to happier times – the pair with their wives and kids, and other scenes of those same wives and kids and family members on the verge of losing it, as they have no idea what has happened to their husbands and fathers. Finally, there are scenes of the rescuers – most notably Michael Shannon’s Dave Karnes, a former marine, and now an accountant working in Connecticut, who feels his place is in New York to help – and he somehow gets there, and helps to locate the two men, still alive, and get them help.

Stone has never been a sentimental filmmaker. For the most part, Stone is far more cynical in his depiction of family life and relationships, which in most of his movies are painted in a negative light (which leads to Stone’s “woman problem”, particularly in his earlier films, where the female characters seem to exist only to be used by the male characters). The relationships in World Trade Center then are probably the healthiest he has ever portrayed – with both men clinging to the memories of their families to try and stay alive (Jimeno also has a vision of Jesus – which is one of the only positive portrayals of religion in a Stone movie as well). In short, the movie doesn’t feel like an Oliver Stone movie – although that doesn’t mean it’s a bad one.

The one element that did remind me of Stone is the Dave Karnes character, played with scary intensity by Michael Shannon. Some hated his performance – saw it as one note, but that’s not the case for me. Shannon has the unique ability to play a character like this, and not mock his characters for their beliefs, nor glamorize them. His Dave Karnes is a man driven by God and sense of patriotism to do what he does – and he ends up a hero. But it’s also a more than slightly insane plan he has – and they fact he ended up re-enlisting and serving two tours of duty in Iraq because of this day makes him a somewhat sadder character. Shannon is a terrific actor – and he has done better work since then – but his is the best, most interesting character in the movie.

In part that is because the rest of the characters are one dimensionally good and decent people. You cannot fault Stone, nor screenwriter Andrea Berloff, for doing that – this really isn’t the type of movie that is built on complex characters. The movie is a reminder of what happened that day, what those who were there went through. This isn’t a movie about the causes of September 11, nor what happened afterwards – but a positive portrait of humanity in the wake of a devastating event. No, you do not expect Oliver Stone to make that movie – but he did with World Trade Center. And he did it well.

The Films of Oliver Stone: Alexander (2004)

Alexander (2004)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis.
Starring: Colin Farrell (Alexander), Angelina Jolie (Olympias), Val Kilmer (Philip), Anthony Hopkins (Old Ptolemy), Jared Leto (Hephaistion), Rosario Dawson (Roxana), Christopher Plummer (Aristotle), Elliot Cowan (Ptolemy), Gary Stretch (Cleitus), John Kavanagh (Parmenion), Nick Dunning (Attalus), Marie Meyer (Eurydice), Joseph Morgan (Philotas), Ian Beattie (Antigonus), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Cassander), Denis Conway (Nearchus), Neil Jackson (Perdiccas),  Garrett Lombard (Leonnatus), Chris Aberdein (Polyperchon), Bin Bunluerit (King Porus), Rory McCann (Crateros), Raz Degan (Darius III), Francisco Bosch (Bagoas), Annelise Hesme (Stateira), Toby Kebbell (Pausanius).

No one can doubt Oliver Stone’s passion for Alexander (2004) – a film he labored over for years to get made, and has been laboring over ever since to try and get right. There are now four different versions of Stone’s epic about Alexander the Great – the 175 minute theatrical version, that was greeted to bad reviews and worse box office in 2004, the 167 minute “Director’s Cut” – that deleted some footage, added back other footage and restricted the film for DVD release in 2005, the 214 minute “Final Cut” released on DVD in 2007, which added back a lot of footage, and was meant as a whole, epic roadshow cut like the films Stone loved as a kid, and finally the “Ultimate Cut”, which 206 minutes long, and played at a film festival in 2012 before coming to DVD back in 2014. (For the record, for this viewing, I watched the 214 Final Cut – I would have watched The Ultimate Cut, but as far as I can tell, it is not commercially available in Canada – the great Bay Street Video does not have it, iTunes didn’t have it, and on Amazon.ca, you can order it, but it lists it as an “Import” – which isn’t true of Amazon.com). Stone’s passion therefore cannot possibly be questioned. The results, however, can be. I hadn’t seen Alexander since opening day back in 2004 when I watched the theatrical version, admired Stone’s audacity and ambition, while not much liking the end result. Over the years, I had heard from various people I should check out one version or another of Stone’s film – that he had indeed made the film better with his continuous tinkering with it. When I started this project to go back and re-watch all of Stone’s films, Alexander was the film that filled me with the most anticipation, and dread. Maybe there really was a great film somewhere within all the footage Stone shot – that he finally came up with – then again, maybe a longer version of the film would simply amplify all that was wrong with the film in the first place. The end result ending up splitting the difference for me – it is better than the theatrical cut, as it does fix much of the frustrating structural issues with the film, but it sure as hell isn’t very good, and at three and half hours was mainly a chore to sit through. It is the type of grand folly of a film that only someone as talented as Stone can make. There are those who will claim it’s some sort of masterwork – perhaps they are the same crazy people who will tell you that Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate isn’t an incoherent mess. They would be wrong.

In the film, Alexander the Great is played by Colin Farrell – complete with an Irish accent, that many of the supporting cast also try to adopt supposedly for consistency, which was a mistake since everyone now just sounds silly – the great conqueror who expands Macedonia’s Empire more than anyone thought possible. In the movie’s version of events, he basically does this because he has a massive Oedipus conflict. His well respected father, Phillip (Val Kilmer), was loved by his men, but became a drunken and abusive lout. His mother, Olympia (Angelina Jolie), donning a bizarre Russian accent, hates her husband and drives her son to do bigger and better things. When the movie came out, many read the film as an allegory for George W. Bush – a man driven to conquer a land that didn’t want to be conquered in an effort to get out of the shadow of his highly successful father. This is certainly Stone’s vision of W. – as his 2008 film about him would show – but if that is the case with Alexander, than the allegory is confused at best, and incoherent at worst. The movie seems to be of two minds about Alexander – at times admiring his audacity and vision, and at times seeing him as a madman. Had Stone found a compelling way to reconcile these two halves of Alexander, he may have been onto something – a complex vision of the man, but he doesn’t (making things more confusing, the movie is actually being told from a specific point-of-view – that of Ptolmey (an aging Anthony Hopkins) – who when we hear him speak, basically does so in glowing terms about Alexander, which isn’t the portrait we get in the movie. Again – had Stone found an interesting way of showing this contradiction – like Terrence Malick does in films like Badlands and Days of Heaven, where he plays memory off of reality by contrasting the narration with the visuals – he could have had something? But again, he doesn’t.

A major part of the problem with the movie is the casting of Farrell in the central role. Farrell has gone on to deliver quite a few fine performances in the decade since Alexander, but here he has no idea what he’s doing. He isn’t helped by a screenplay that often requires him to deliver long, dull speeches, and star longingly at Jared Leto’s Hephaistion, who he is in love with. Farrell basically plays Alexander like an emo teenager – always seemingly on the verge of tears. It leaves a rather large whole at the center of the film that cannot be filled.
 

Stone makes other missteps along the way as well. He doesn’t sidestep Alexander’s homosexuality in the film – it is clear that he and Hephasistion are in love – but Stone does seem uncomfortable with it. The most sexual characters in the movie are undeniably Angelina Jolie’s Olympias and Rosario Dawson’s Roxanna, Alexander’s first wife – both of whom seem to want to devoir Alexander in every conceivable way. By contrast, Leto sits around looking like a lost puppy dog.

It must be said though that the battle scenes in the movie are generally quite good – bloody, visceral and entertaining – even if Stone doesn’t quite seem to be able to convey everything visually at all times, providing captions to tell us what side the various armies are on at any given time. Like Any Given Sunday, there is a lot of talk about strategy, that doesn’t quite translate to the actual “on field” battles, which Stone wants to make violent and bloody. They work – but pretty much only in isolation to everything around them.

I admire Stone for making Alexander in the first place, and admire him more for being so stubborn that he refuses to let it go until he has delivered the best possible version he could. That takes commitment – the kind of commitment that so few directors are capable of. However, now having seen two versions of the movie, I have to say that I don’t think any amount of editing is going to save this one. It is an audacious failure – but still very much a failure.

The Films of Oliver Stone: Any Given Sunday (1999)

Any Given Sunday (1999)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: John Logan and Oliver Stone and John Logan.
Starring: Al Pacino (Tony D'Amato), Cameron Diaz (Christina Pagniacci), Dennis Quaid (Jack 'Cap' Rooney), James Woods (Dr. Harvey Mandrake), Jamie Foxx (Willie Beamen), LL Cool J (Julian Washington), Matthew Modine (Dr. Ollie Powers), Jim Brown (Montezuma Monroe), Lawrence Taylor (Luther 'Shark' Lavay), Bill Bellamy (Jimmy Sanderson), Andrew Bryniarski (Patrick 'Madman' Kelly), Lela Rochon (Vanessa Struthers), Lauren Holly (Cindy Rooney), Ann-Margret (Margaret Pagniacci), Aaron Eckhart (Nick Crozier), Elizabeth Berkley (Mandy Murphy), Charlton Heston (AFFA Football Commissioner), John C. McGinley (Jack Rose).

Given everything we now know about the NFL – the epidemic of domestic violence amongst its players, the long term ramifications of concussions that have led to several suicides, the non-stop corporate greed etc. – it’s almost hard to believe now that they league was so upset that Oliver Stone was going to make Any Given Sunday, they refused to grant him permission to use team names, logos or stadiums, and actually threatened to sue him, resulting in a film about a league that isn’t called the NFL, but we all know is the NFL. What Stone intends to do with Any Given Sunday – and mostly succeeds at – is showing us the two sides of professional football – the side that is all about greed, making money any way possible, and if players get hurt permanently, or rules of broken, fuck it, no one cares, as well as the side that shows just how entertaining and great professional football can be – the excitement of the fans, the camaraderie among the teams, etc. If football wasn’t so much damn fun to play and watch, then a league like the NFL wouldn’t exist – people wouldn’t stand for a league that was so callous about its player’s health that rakes in money hand over fist, and then asks for handouts to build new stadiums, that benefit no one except for the teams. But everyone loves football.

Stone crams a lot in Any Given Sunday’s two hour and forty minute runtime – too much in fact (I wish he had taken the project to somewhere like HBO and made a 6 or 8 hour miniseries out of it). He’s got subplots about the daughter of the late owner of the Miami Sharks, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz) and her greed – as she has slashed the team’s payroll budget, and still expects winning results, pushing the team’s medical staff to keep unhealthy players on the field, trying to get money out of the Mayor’s office for a new stadium, and conducting covert negotiations with the city of L.A. about relocation. There’s the team doctor, Harvey Mandrake (James Woods) who idea of treatment is to pump everyone full of drugs so they just keep playing. There’s the legendary, aging quarterback Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid) who has suffered another injury – this one that could end his career. There’s the third string quarterback, Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), who becomes an unexpected star, by ignoring everyone else and just doing what he feels like out there. There’s another aging player, Shark Lavay (Lawrence Taylor) willingly sacrificing his health to try and get a bonus. There’s a young coach (Aaron Eckhart) who feels ignored. There’s a selfish player (LL Cool J) who doesn’t care if the team wins or loses as long as he gets his carries. Trying to balance all of these people is Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino), the coach whose own life may be in shambles, but he knows football, but wants to do things the “old school” way – in a league that is constantly changing. That’s a lot of subplots for any movie – especially one that for half its running time is just bone crunching football sequences – scenes where all the strategy that is talked about is seemingly thrown out the window, because Stone is more interested in the visceral impact of football than all the strategy that goes into the game.

To give Stone credit, Any Given Sunday is never less than entertaining. The film moves at a break neck pace, both on and off the field. The heart of the movie is the relationship between Pacino’s coach and Foxx’s brash, young quarterback. Foxx plays Beaman with excessive confidence – the world may be shocked that he has become a superstar, but he certainly isn’t – he always knew he was great, he just needed the world to catch up to him. Beaman embraces all the trappings of stardom – he drops his longtime girlfriend when he becomes a star, does a ton of ads, and even releases a rap video (which is surprisingly catchy – hell, the damn song is still in my head days later). He doesn’t much care if Tony doesn’t like him changing his plays – he knows he has no one else to replace him, so he’ll do what he wants. And if he rubs his teammates the wrong way, who cares? This is the Willie Beaman show now. Foxx – for whom this was his first real dramatic role – handles this brashness easily, but he also succeeds at conveying the insecurity he feels behind that bravado. Foxx was a comedic star when he made this film – but this was the film that compelled to bigger, better things – including an Oscar a few years later for Ray (2004).

For Pacino’s part, he is for most of the running time at full bore, over the top, crazy Pacino mode – but the good kind of crazy, over the top Pacino, not the one that can grow tired really fast. The film was released the same year as Michael Mann’s The Insider – which showed that Pacino could still do understated and subtle, and is admittedly a better performance in a far superior movie. But Pacino was undoubtedly the right performance to play this role – better than others under consideration (Clint Eastwood and Robert DeNiro among them) – because Pacino has the crazy energy to keep this movie going. His huge, inspirational speech is one of the best of its kind, and Pacino relishes every moment.

To a certain extent, Any Given Sunday is too much fun for its own good. The film reminds me of Stone’s Wall Street – which he meant to be an indictment of corporate greed on Wall Street, and ended up inspiring a whole new generation of Gordon Gekko’s. Stone is trying to say a lot of thing about greed and corruption in professional sports in Any Given Sunday – but to a certain extent it is lost underneath all that bone crunching football action, and a third act that tries to put a happy spin on everything, even when it has some of the movie’s most pointed critiques – which are mainly brushed aside quickly to get back to the football.

As a result, I don’t think Any Given Sunday is quite the film Stone wants it to be. But what it is, is terrifically entertaining, well-acted and well directed. Stone bites off more than he can realistically chew here – but it’s an awful lot of fun watching him try.

The Films of Oliver Stone: U-Turn (1997)

U Turn (1997)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: John Ridley based on his novel Stray Dogs.
Starring: Sean Penn (Bobby Cooper), Jennifer Lopez (Grace McKenna), Nick Nolte (Jake McKenna), Billy Bob Thornton (Darrell), Jon Voight (Blind Man), Powers Boothe (Sheriff Potter), Joaquin Phoenix (Toby N. Tucker), Claire Danes (Jenny), Liv Tyler (Girl in Bus Station), Laurie Metcalf (Bus Station Clerk), Julie Hagerty (Flo).

Back in 1997, Oliver Stone’s U Turn was viewed as an odd choice for the director – and ended up being a critical and commercial failure –and it hasn’t really gotten much of a critical re-appraisal in the years since. If anything, it now looks more clearly like the beginning of the end for Stone – a director who mainly had one success after another for a decade, winning two Best Director Oscars, being nominated for a third, and constantly being a director whose films – whether you loved or hated – had to be reckoned with. Now, coming on the heels of two of his most controversial films – Natural Born Killers and Nixon – he made this – a very strange little exercise in neo noir. The film lacks the ambition of Stone’s best films – hell, there’s hardly any ambition in the film at all, which often feels like it’s just Stone and company goofing around. And perhaps, that is precisely what it was – which, coming off some very heavy films, you can kind of appreciate. Personally, I’ve always had a soft spot for U Turn – which despite its obvious flaws, is a distinctly bizarre film. It almost reminds me of something David Lynch would make – although he would follow it deeper into the surreal abyss than Stone does. U Turn isn’t a great film – it isn’t even necessarily a very good one – but it’s bizarre and unforgettable just the same.

The film stars Sean Penn as Bobby – a man driving across the Arizona desert in his 1964 ½ Mustang Convertible, with thousands of dollars in his backpack, and just a few days to get to California to pay off some very bad men who have already done some very bad things to him, and will do worse if he doesn’t get them money soon. It’s Bobby’s luck that he breaks down on the outskirts of Superior, Arizona – a one horse town if ever there was one – and he is able to get his car to the lone mechanic in town, Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton), a cross eyed hillbilly we immediately assume will be the weirdest character in the movie, and we are wrong. The car needs a new radiator hose – and Darrell says he can probably find one, somewhere. Just give him a few hours. Had Bobby known what was coming, he probably just would have stayed at the garage with Darrell. But instead, he walks into town and precedes to meet one crazy character after another – and get sucked in the domestic arrangement between Jake (Nick Nolte) and his much younger wife Grace (Jennifer Lopez). It doesn’t take long for each to approach Bobby about killing the other – each with different incentives. Money from Jake, and money, and something else, from Grave. There are other strange characters – a Sheriff (Powers Boothe) who seems to cruise around all day looking menacing, a headstrong teenager (Joaquin Phoenix) and his flirty girlfriend (Claire Danes), a blind Indian beggar with a dead dog (Jon Voight).

The film is clearly a take on film noir (specifically The Postman Always Rings Twice) – where an innocent man is suckered into murder by a femme fatale, and gets more than he bargained for in the process. The twist here is that Bobby is hardly innocent when the movie begins – if he was, he wouldn’t be there in the first place – and the fact is that he steps into a town full of nothing but crazy people. U Turn really is the most damning portrait of small town American life this side of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. This is one of those sun noirs – where instead of everything taking place in the dark back alleys of the big city, everything happens right out in the light where everyone can see. It’s the first screenplay – based on his own novel – by future Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave), and it is certainly bizarre. One of its flaws is that it shows why most noir films run 90 minutes or less – at just over two hours long, there is not enough story to sustain the entire runtime of U Turn, which runs out of gas in its last act, full of double and triple crosses. Stone over directs some part of the movie – adding unnecessary visual flourishes to many scenes, as if to make the film feel like more than what it is.

But even with the flaws, the performances for the most part work. Penn is very good as the put upon Bobby – the type of character we normally hate, but this time have to relate to. Lopez is at her sexiest here (well, not quite – that would be the following year’s Out of Sight – but its close) – as Grace, who seems sexually aggressive and crazy in equal doses. Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, Joaquin Phoenix and Jon Voight all go over the top – but hell, what do you expect them to do with roles like this?

Despite its obvious flaws, U Turn is a film that has stuck with me. I haven’t seen the film in probably 15 years, and probably only twice in total – and yet it is amazing how much I remembered of it. The film is bizarre to be sure – and Stone’s over direction is both what hurts the film, yet also makes it stand out so much in my memory. In retrospect, yes, U Turn was the beginning of the end of Stone’s time as one of the top American directors. After Nixon, he would never really direct a film that enjoyed the kind of success that his career had until that point. But as we’ll see in the upcoming parts of this series, there is still a lot to love about Stone, post Nixon. He may have been done making masterpieces – but he wasn’t done making interesting films. And U Turn – for all its flaws, is one of them.

The Films of Oliver Stone: Nixon (1995)

Nixon (1995)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: Stephen J. Rivele & Christopher Wilkinson & Oliver Stone.
Starring: Anthony Hopkins (Richard M. Nixon), Joan Allen (Pat Nixon), Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig), Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt), Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover), E.G. Marshall (John Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler), David Hyde Pierce (John Dean), Paul Sorvino (Henry Kissinger), Mary Steenburgen (Hannah Nixon), J.T. Walsh (John Ehrlichman), James Woods (H.R. Haldeman), Kevin Dunn (Charles Colson), Fyvush Finkel (Murray Chotiner), Annabeth Gish (Julie Nixon Eisenhower), Tom Bower (Frank Nixon), Tony Goldwyn (Harold Nixon), Larry Hagman ('Jack Jones'), Edward Herrmann (Nelson Rockefeller), Madeline Kahn (Martha Mitchell), Dan Hedaya (Trini Cardoza).

During Kevin Costner’s epic closing argument in JFK, he references Shakespeare when talking about the assassinated President, urging the jurors not to forget their “dying king”. Stone’s Nixon, made four years later, does more than just quote Shakespeare – it’s practically a Shakespearean play for America in the late 20^th Century, taking Richard Nixon as its tragic figure – a man who was undeniably brilliant and ambitious – a man who could have (and did) accomplish a great deal in his life, but who is brought down by his own pettiness and paranoia. There is a scene late in the film when it’s all crashing down around him that Nixon, all by himself, looks up at a portrait of JFK and says “When they look at you, they see how the want to be. When they look at me, they see who they are” – which is worthy of Shakespeare, and so brilliantly written, acted and directed that it just may be the best single moment in any Stone film. In fact, the more times I see Nixon, they more I think that maybe, just maybe, it’s the best film Oliver Stone has ever made.

For the most part, Nixon focuses on Richard Nixon from the end of the 1960 Election, where he narrowly lost to JFK, in part due to his poor performance in the televised debates, to the moment more than decade later when Nixon resigns from being President in the midst of the Watergate scandal. Throughout the movie, Stone does flash back to Nixon’s childhood, in black and white scenes, that show how he was shaped by his mother’s religion, his mother’s hard driving ways, and the death of his beloved older brother. These scenes aren’t strictly necessary – the do reek of classic biopics clichés – but they do help to inform the man we see – and help to do something wholly unexpected in a biopic of Richard Nixon by Oliver Stone – who clearly does not like the man – which is to paint Nixon in a largely sympathetic, and human light. While many at the time the movie was released (some, most likely, who never saw the film) accused it of being a hatchet job on Nixon, it really isn’t. It isn’t a glowing portrait of the man – but he isn’t the monster he is often portrayed as either.

As played by Anthony Hopkins (in a role that everyone from Warren Beatty to Jack Nicholson turned down), this Richard Nixon is an ambitious man, who is driven by his own insecurity to get to greater heights. He thinks everyone hates him, so he is driven to try and get people to love him – which they never really do, but he works so hard, that he gets far anyway. Hopkins doesn’t much look like Nixon – but he embodies the man in all of his contradictions – a sweaty, paranoid, profane man, who is capable of great cruelty, but also of a little bit of charm. You cannot help but feel sorry for him when he’s trying so hard, and getting nowhere. One of the more surprising aspects of the movie is the relationship between him and his wife, Pat (played by Joan Allen, who is as great as Hopkins). Pat Nixon always seems so passive in old clips of her – the personification of the dutiful political wife standing by her man no matter what. But surprisingly here, she is far from that – she is a strong character, one who, yes, does stand by her man – but also stands up to him. The political biopic often dismisses the various women in the lives of the politicians – and Stone is a filmmaker whose previous (and future) films often have a “woman problem” – with female characters who are one note at best. Allen’s Pat Nixon is the strongest female role in any Stone film – and the most unlikely one.

The film has a large, brilliant cast – many of whom are only playing small roles – as the film tracks Nixon’s rise and fall. The best of the supporting cast is probably Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger, and the roles for James Woods and J.T. Walsh as the ever loyal Haldeman and Erlichman, along with David Hyde Pierce, as the not so loyal John Dean. Yet, there is hardly a bad performance from the large cast – including a great of great scenes with Larry Hagman as an angry Nixon supporter.

The film has the classic arch of a biopic – the rise and fall that we have become so familiar with. And yet, it is in the details that Stone does his best work. A scene where Nixon confronts a group of protestors at the Lincoln Memorial, where everyone walks away realizing the reality of the situation a little bit more than they did before, a scene where Nixon discussing the escalation of the war walks away from his bloody steak, as the blood slowly seeps out around the plate, a late scene where Nixon in a paranoid, fever pitch starts striking out passages in the infamous White House tapes transcipts. The movie is full of these smaller moments that help paint the larger portrait.

The movie opens with what shouldn’t really be necessary – a disclosure that the film is based on the life of Richard Nixon, but not wholly accurate to it – that some scenes are imagined or condensed, etc. – which anyone walking into a biopic of other “historical fiction” – which this is – should already know. Just like the Shakespeare plays about real people, Nixon is hardly fully accurate – nor could it ever hope to be. But also like those Shakespeare plays, what the movie is, is an epic tragedy – the story of a man who had greatness within his grasp, who succumbs to his own flaws which will be what eventually destroys him. Hopkins had initially turned the role down – like many others before him, saying that he thought it should go to an American actor. But casting someone as well versed in Shakespeare ended up being the right call. This Richard Nixon is every bit as tragic as Macbeth or Richard III.

The Films of Oliver Stone: Natural Born Killers (1994)

Natural Born Killers (1994)
Directed by: Oliver Stone.
Written by: David Veloz & Richard Rutowski & Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino.
Starring: Woody Harrelson (Mickey Knox), Juliette Lewis (Mallory Knox), Robert Downey Jr. (Wayne Gale), Tom Sizemore (Det. Jack Scagnetti), Tommy Lee Jones (Warden Dwight McClusky), Rodney Dangerfield (Ed Wilson, Mallory's Dad), Edie McClurg (Mallory's Mom), Everett Quinton (Deputy Warden Wurlitzer), Pruitt Taylor Vince (Deputy Warden Kavanaugh), Russell Means (Old Indian).

Natural Born Killers is the ultimate Oliver Stone movie. Perhaps it’s not the best movie he has ever made, but it’s a movie that encompasses all of his obsessions in one ultra-violent, two hour package. The film, like Stone’s Wall Street (1987), seems very much of its time and place – and yet it has a wider scope that prevents it from aging as poorly as Wall Street has in many respects. It’s a film that looks backwards in time for part of its inspiration, and yet was also predictive of the future. It is a bizarre, surreal masterpiece – a film that in many ways haunted me throughout my teenage years, which is why I may have seen this film more than any other film ever made. Revisiting again for the first time in about 10 years (for the record, I didn’t grow tired of it – but like other films I watched on repeat throughout my teen years – Fargo, Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, The Usual Suspects, Seven and GoodFellas among them, I felt I needed a good long break from it to hopefully seeing it more clearly when I did finally revisit it), I was my how I still remember every single beat of the film – and yet I’m still discovering new things about it – and am further amazed by just how great it is. It is Stone at his most ambitious – and as a result, is a film I don’t think would have a chance in hell of being made today, even if it is still as relevant as ever.

Stone deliberately makes Natural Born Killers feel like channel surfing – hoping from one bizarre television program to the next, sometimes even giving the audience snippets of commercials. There is a bizarre sitcom “I Love Mallory”, which depicts the sexual abuse suffered by Mallory (Juliette Lewis) at the hands of her father (Rodney Dangerfield), in the style of a classic family sitcom, complete with a laugh track. Because Dangerfield is such a gifted comedic actor – not to mention Edie McClurg, who is mercilessly on point as the nagging TV wife – this segment hits all the beats like of a sitcom, except all the laugh lines are about horrific childhood abuse. In this brief sequence, Stone lays waste to the classic depiction of the nuclear family on television sitcoms – where they are presented as the idealized version of home life, instead showing the precise opposite. He’ll do this throughout the film – with its depiction of a True Crime show hosted by Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), complete with re-enactments of murder, making it clear they are exploiting violence for real life ratings, essentially cheering the murderers on because it makes great television, and later in an interview between Gale and Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson), which was heavily influenced by Geraldo Rivera’s interview with Charles Manson, where on the air Gale acts horrified by Mickey’s answers, and when they’re off air, he’s cheering and even hugging Mickey. Gale doesn’t give a shit about the people Mickey and Mallory have murdered – he just cares how it will play on TV. Downey’s performance as Gale is probably the best he has ever given – an over-the-top, depraved takedown of Geraldo (who apparently met with Stone, and thought he may get to the play the role himself) and others like him. His accent is deliberately bizarre and unplaceable, and his performance begins as unhinged and keeps getting stranger. Watching this film makes me despair that apparently all Downey wants to do now is play Iron Man – we’ve truly lost a talented actor completely if that’s all he does from now on.

The film has been controversial since its release because of its extreme violence – and has even been the subject of a few lawsuits, saying Stone’s film incited real life acts of violence. From a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the film was brought up in the wake of every school shooting – particularly Columbine – as it was cited as the kind of ultra-violent entertainment the shooters enjoyed. If anything, Stone’s film didn’t inspire the killings because of its violence – but it did predict those killings, and what the reaction would become. In the film, as Mickey and Mallory go across the country on their killing spree, they become media superstars – everyone talks about them, debate them – they gather fans, they have people in sympathy with them. Although the internet was barely around in 1994 – and Social Media pretty much non-existent – yet Mickey and Mallory do obsesses about documenting their lives – they always leave one survivor so that they can tell everyone else what happened – because if there’re no record of it happening, it didn’t happen did it? It is true that Mickey and Mallory are painted in a more sympathetic light than anyone else in the movie – Downey’s Gale is a greedy, corporate reporter, Tom Sizemore’s Jack Scagnetti, the cop who chases them down, also wants to make money off of them, and is a murderer and potential rapist himself, Tommy Lee Jones gives a gleefully demented performance as the cruel, corrupt prison warden (for an actor that usually so serious, his performance here at times borders on slapstick). Stone isn’t condoning Mickey and Mallory and their killing spree however – but he is painting it as a product of the larger, corrupt American society that surrounds them. They maybe murderers – but they are also the only ones in the movie with a chance to do something more with their lives. Stone, who has often struggled with romantic relationships in his films, mainly because his female characters are more often than not one dimensional ciphers, has here made his best love story – with moments of genuine romance between Mickey and Mallory amidst all the chaos and violence. Like all the performances in the movie, Harrelson and Lewis are fully committed – willingly going all the way over the top and back with Stone.

The film is also, like JFK, a masterpiece of cinematography and editing. Stone does evoke channel surfing through, but also rapid fire and MTV style editing – proving that, yes, that can work if you know what you’re doing. At times, the film plays like an Avant garde montage of imagery. The prison riot that acts as the films climax is sustained chaos at its finest – maintaining a hectic, breakneck pace throughout. It was apparently this sequence that had the MPAA threaten the film with an NC-17 rating, yet according to Stone, the usually very academic ratings board, which has have strict rules of what you can and cannot do, could not point to anything specific they wanted cut – it was more a feeling of sustained chaos (they eventually compromised, cutting out a few of the more shocking images – a whole in a hand, someone’s head being paraded around on a spike) that have long since been restored for home video. The film is violent from beginning to end – but it establishes the tone of that violence from the first scene – an almost cartoon-like scene in a Diner which Mickey and Mallory lay waste to. Yes, this is violence as entertainment – but it’s satiric in its use of violence, pushing it to its extreme limit to show its utter ridiculousness.

Despite all the violence in Natural Born Killers, that is how I see the film at the end – as a media satire, and one of the best ever made – deserving comparisons to Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957), Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979) and James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News (1987). Like those films, Natural Born Killers is born very much out of the frustrations with the industry at its then present point – but has predicted the future degradation of the media landscape in the years since.

But Natural Born Killers does work on many different levels – the media satire, the love story, the violent entertainment, the stoner movie (if you’re the type of person who likes to get stoned and watch hallucinogenic imagery, I assume this one would work well) and others as well. In Roger Ebert’s review of the film back in 1994 he said “seeing this film once is not enough”. I agree. I’m probably on about my 20^th viewing – and I still keep coming back for more. It is a masterpiece.