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.

Movie Review: Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro.
Written by: Guillermo del Toro & Matthew Robbins.
Starring: Mia Wasikowska (Edith Cushing), Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas Sharpe), Charlie Hunnam (Dr. Alan McMichael), Jim Beaver (Carter Cushing), Burn Gorman (Holly), Leslie Hope (Mrs. McMichael), Doug Jones (Edith's Mother, Lady Sharpe), Jonathan Hyde (Ogilvie), Bruce Gray (Ferguson).

Guillermo del Toro may well have been born into the wrong time. No matter if his films are large budget blockbusters (Blade, two Hellboy film, Pacific Rim), or Spanish language horror films (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth), del Toro doesn’t do things small – his films are filled with stunning visuals and larger than life emotions. He would have made a great director of silent films in the 1920s. His latest films, Crimson Peak, could have been a silent – but it also would have fit in nicely in the 1940s or early 1950s – its clear influences including a pair of Hitchcock films, Rebecca (1940) and Notorious (1946), as well as novels like Jane Eyre, which was also adapted in the 1940s, and audiences knew what to do with them. Crimson Peak is an odd film in part because it doesn’t really fit in with what anyone else is doing right now. The studio is marketing it as a horror film – playing up the ghosts and all the blood in the previews and releasing it just in time for Halloween, and there is certainly an element of that here. But it’s not strictly a horror film – it’s more of gothic romance, albeit, one with a lot more blood than normal. I can pretty much guarantee that the film – whose critical and commercial reaction so far has been mixed – will end up being beloved by a small, but passionate group of people. They just need to find it.

The film opens in America, in the 1800s, and focuses on Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), whose mother died when she was young – but did come to her as a ghost, complete with very long fingers - reminiscent of everything Nosferatu or The Babadook – to warn her about Crimson Peak. Her father (Jim Beaver) is rich and influential, and doesn’t mind the fact that his bookish daughter shuns the parties everyone else seems to adore, and wants to be writer. She even has an admirer in Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), and the two are doing the kind of shy dance of flirtation typical in these types of romances. But into town arrives Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a Brit with the title of Baronet (which no one understands, but it sounds fancy), but no money hoping to find some financial backing for his latest scheme. He doesn’t get that, but he pursues Edith hard, and the naïve girl is immediately swept off her feet – even if she, and everyone else, isn’t quite sure what to make of Thomas’ dour sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), who is always around and always watching. Things happen, and Edith ends up marrying Thomas, and returning to his dilapidated estate in England – full of weird noises, and secrets.

Allerdale Hall is the name of the estate – and it is masterpiece of production design. The estate is built on red clay – which was responsible for the family fortune, and which Thomas is still trying to find ways to mine to restore it. But the house has fallen into such deep disrepair, that parts of the roof are missing, and leaves, and eventually snow, sprinkle down throughout the house, as the blood red clay seeps in through the floorboards. When you run a bath, you have to let it go for minute – because at first, the water looks like blood because of the clay. Allerdale Hall is, like Manderlay in Rebecca or Thorndale Hall in Jane Eyre, is a large place, with rooms that Edith is not supposed go into, and lots of strange noises. Thomas is clearly hiding something – and seems a little bit more standoffish than before – they haven’t even consummated their marriage yet. And Lucille is always watching – like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca or Claude Rains’ mother in Notorious – but Edith cannot quite pin down what it is that bothers her so much about her.

The actors in the film are mainly used as props by del Toro – he cast them because they look the part, and they do that wonderfully. Wasikowska, quietly building up one of the most impressive resumes of any actress of her generation, looks wonderful as the naïve woman, stalking through the dark house with a candelabra. Huddleston has the right roguish charm to play Thomas – and the right notes of cowardice later on. Chastain is made to look harsh and severe as Lucille – you know eventually whatever secrets are going to spill out, are going to come from her. Del Toro makes the most of these actors – favoring close-ups often. The trio is so good – with an assist from Charlie Hunnam – that for most of the runtime you forget just how one dimensional all the characters are – we know who they are from the beginning, and we’re right. When the third act starts monologuing, it hurts the film a little, although these types of films always include a healthy dose of monologuing.

Crimson Peak is a probably a little long for its own good. I loved the look of the film from the start, and I found the film a refreshing change for the standard horror movie that I had been expecting. Still, once del Toro establishes his story, he ends up taking it precisely where you think he will, and he takes a little too long to get there. Some critics have complained that the film is not scary – and that’s true, it’s not. But it does so much else, does it have to be scary too? The film will take it’s time finding its audience – it’s a film that I almost want to recommend to my mother – who counts Jane Eyre as one of her favorite books – but I worry she’ll be turned off by all the blood. Those who like the blood may well be turned off by the fact that it’s basically a love story. Del Toro has made this film for a very specific audience – it may be small, but I think they’ll love it more than I did when they find it.

Movie Review: Experimenter

Experimenter
Directed by:  Michael Almereyda.
Written by: Michael Almereyda.
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard (Stanley Milgram), Winona Ryder (Sasha Menkin Milgram), John Palladino (John Williams), Jim Gaffigan (James McDonough), Anthony Edwards (Miller),Taryn Manning (Mrs. Lowe), Lori Singer (Florence Asch), Anton Yelchin (Rensaleer), John Leguizamo (Taylor), Kellan Lutz (William Shatner), Dennis Haysbert (Ossie Davis), Emily Tremaine (Shelia Jarcho), Josh Hamilton (Tom Shannon), Vondie Curtis-Hall (Curtis), Edoardo Ballerini (Paul Hollander), Tom Bateman (Cavett), Ned Eisenberg (Solomon Asch).

Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter is one of the strangest biopics I have ever seen – mainly because of how it askews the format of the biopic altogether. Its subject is Stanley Milgram, the famed social scientist who in the early 1960s conducted experiments that remain infamous. Descended from European Jews, Milgram wanted to test people’s conformity and how they cede power to authority. To do so, he brought in two “random” people – one of whom becomes the teacher, the other the learner. They sit in separate rooms next to each other, and are told that they can leave at any time. Then the learner has to memorize word pairs – and every time they get one wrong, they are given an electric shock – one that increases with each wrong answer. The learner isn’t real of course – he’s an actor hired by Milgram, and he has pre-recorded his pained reactions to being repeatedly shocked, and his pleas to stop the test. There is another man in the room with the learner – the supposed scientist conducting the experiment, who tells the teacher to keep going – even after no noise at all is coming from the next room. When the teacher complains, the scientist simply tells him that the experiment requires him to keep going. No one thought that the teacher would – but as Milgram’s experiment proved (and various others in the years since confirmed) 65% of people will keep pushing to the end – giving shocks that would kill, simply because a man in a white coat told them to.

The movie opens with one of these sessions – and is perfectly cast, having Anthony Edwards, the most normal of normal guys, play the “teacher”, and comedian Jim Gaffigan, as the learner. Almereyda doesn’t try to fool the audience with this first test – as soon as Edwards leaves the room Gaffigan is in, we see him pull out his equipment that has his pre-recorded reactions on them. Edwards is visibly shaken through the test, but he keeps going. The movie is filled with some fairly big actors in one scene roles as Milgram’s test subjects – John Leguizamo chain-smoking and sweating, but still pushing on, Anton Yelchin as a Dutch man who actually does stop, Taryn Manning as one of the first woman tested, etc. These are small, but crucial roles, and casting recognizable actors doesn’t become a distraction – but helps to get the precise reactions needed.

Milgram himself is played by Peter Sarsgaard, in a wonderfully deadpan performance as strange as the movie itself. The film is about Milgram’s experiments – of course, and their disturbing, and still relevant, data – but it’s also more than that – in many ways it is about movies themselves, with Sarsgaard’s Milgram as the director – sitting back, behind one-way mirrors, and watching the little plays he has set-up play out in front of him. Milgram often directly addresses the audience itself – walking down hallways at the various universities he worked at (twice, with an elephant walking behind him). He breaks into song at one point while talking about turning his work into a Broadway musical (it was turned into TV movie, starring William Shatner and Ossie Davis, memorably played by Kellan Lutz and Dennis Haysbert). Sarsgaard remains rather cool as Milgram – many of Milgram’s critics accused him of being cruel, and his experiment of being unethical, and he can give off that impression – even though the movie makes clear he does believe in the work. There are some scenes about Milgram’s life outside of his work – his wife is memorably played by Winona Ryder (who along with her work in the great HBO Miniseries Show Me a Hero, is finally getting good roles again) – but they basically confirm what a normal, somewhat boring guy Milgram was at home. Almereyda plays with these scenes as well, doing some interesting stylistic tricks – like a memorable car ride, with rear projection, that evokes the unease on many similar scenes in Hitchcock films.

Experimenter is an odd film – it doesn’t surprise me that the distributor is putting out on VOD at the same time it’s being released into theaters – how the hell you would market this thing is beyond me. It is disturbing, and yet humorous (but not laugh out loud funny) at the same time. Watching it, you feel like you are the subject of a Milgram experiment yourself, not quite knowing how to react. Why is the elephant there behind Milgram for example? Is it a simple metaphor about the elephant in the room that we’re not talking about – about how Milgram’s experiment basically concludes that the majority of us are capable of committing atrocities? Or has Almereyda simply put an elephant in the background as a test – will an audience accept something so bizarre and out of place as an elephant walking down the hallways of an American university simply because a filmmaker put it there? You tell me.

Movie Review: Beasts of No Nation

Beasts of No Nation
Directed by: Cary Joji Fukunaga.
Written by: Cary Joji Fukunaga based on the novel by Uzodinma Iweala.
Starring: Abraham Attah (Agu), Idris Elba (Commandant), Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye (Strika), Ama K. Abebrese (Mother), Kobina Amissah-Sam (Father), Francis Weddey (Big Brother).

Beasts of No Nation is a harrowing cinematic experience, about how one African child is turned into a murderer with relative ease by a man who shows him just a little bit of fatherly affection. The film takes place in an unnamed African country and is about a conflict between the government and rebels who are fighting about something that is never really defined. This is all done on purpose of course – the film doesn’t want to get bogged down in specifics, to have a debate over who is right and who is wrong, because basically to the film it doesn’t matter. Its vagueness bothered me a little bit – for the most part, art that is universal is grounded in specifics – you first have to believe in those before you can make a larger point, and Beasts of No Nation avoids them entirely. Then again, the main story is so gripping – and does show specifics in other ways – like the way this child is turned into a murderer that perhaps I’m over-reacting.

The film stars Abraham Attah, in a terrific performance, as Agu a boy living in Africa with a teacher for a father, and a strong family unit. The last time there was a conflict, his family was on the winning side – and there are some hurt feelings in some of their neighbors – but mainly his is an idyllic life. This time though, as their village descends into chaos, they will not be so lucky. His mother, and sister, are able to flee – but Agu has to stay behind with his father and brother. Government soldiers show up, and line all the men up – including Agu – and ask an old local woman – one of those bitter at his family – if she knows them, and she says they’re rebels. The soldiers start ruthlessly killing the men – and this is when Agu takes off, on a terrifying run into the jungle. Eventually, he will come across another group – one made up of soldiers his same age and not much older – and led by The Commandant (Idris Elba). The Commandant takes Agu under his wing – gives him a chance to get revenge on those who killed his family. He also seems charming, likable, smart and well-spoken – at first, Agu looks at him as combination father/big brother – two people he just saw slaughtered before his eyes. It does not take too much prodding to turn Agu into a killer – although unlike some of the other child soldiers, he does retain at least some of his morality.

Beasts of No Nation is a violent film – as it pretty much has to be – but perhaps it is a touch too violent. Screenwriter-director Cary Joji Fukunaga is extremely talented – he showed that in his first two films, Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre, as well as in season 1 of True Detective, where his expert direction helped to overcome some of the writings rough patches (the two lead performances helped as well), and he does a magnificent job here as well in many sequences. In terms of the violence, the film is more effective the less it shows – when it does get really violent – like the scene of the first Agu participates in, or in a scene where Agu and some of friends go into a house and the others start to rape a woman (Agu stops that – in the bloodiest way possible) there is a little too much bloodlust for my tastes – the camera lingers for too long, soaking in all the blood, and not in a way calibrated to horrify the audience. It doesn’t help that aside from Agu and The Commandant, none of the other characters are given any sort of depth – so we are basically watching characters we don’t know slaughtering other characters we don’t know.

What the movie gets right – brilliantly so – is in the relationship between Agu and The Commandant. We see The Commandant through Agu’s eyes for the whole movie, and it’s fascinating to watch how Agu’s perception of him changes, and how Elba’s performance takes on more and more depth. At first, it’s hard not to see him as the cool father figure/older brother – he has control over all of these men, he gives them all guns, and they are fearless in battle, killing their enemies. He’s nice to Agu when no one else is, and wins him over. Through the course of the movie however, Agu’s perception of him changes – first in a scene where The Commandant does something to Agu he is not anticipating, after turning on his charm even more (this scene – and it’s immediate aftermath, where Agu is comforted by another of child soldiers, who knows precisely what happened is an example of how Beasts of No Nation is more effective when it shows less) – and finally in the last act of the movie, where the mask of The Commandant’s power slips – and Agu sees how this man he thought was all powerful is anything but – the powerful man revealed as rather pathetic.

I do wish that Beasts of No Nation had something a little larger to show about Africa than the film ultimately does. One of the things that is fascinating is that whenever Americans make a film about Africa is either a colorful travelogue for white people, or about the cruelty of the Africans themselves – sometimes including a white savior, sometimes not – yet when I see African films, they are often more cheerful and alive – showing a broader specter of African culture than American filmmakers seem interested in. Beasts of No Nation is a very good film – it is expertly crafted by Fukunaga (the director more so than the writer) and does feature two excellent performances. I just wish it cast its net a little bit wider than it does.  

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.