Oliver Stone: The Stone Age

Yes, the Oliver Stone Health Advisory reads like this: Type A behavior is going to ruin your marriage, wreck your health, and just generally screw up everything you've worked so hard to achieve. So get your shnozola out of that mountain of coke, shelve that hypodermic and stop swallowing those worms with all that tequila, you big knucklehead. And keep your eyes peeled for guys with chain saws in their suitcases.

Not surprisingly, The Gospel According to Stone even dominates movies that-he did not write or direct, but merely produced. Reversal of Fortune is a film about a woman who hits her head on the bathroom floor because she has too many drugs in her body; the principal character is a lawyer whose obsession with his work has ruined his marriage. Blue Steel is a movie about a young female cop whose obsession with her job ruins her life. (She's dating a guy who's trying to murder her, which is just flat-out dysfunctional behavior.) Iron Maze, the 1991 Bridget Fonda vehicle (as in tricycle) that absolutely no one but I saw (I checked), deals with an overly ambitious Japanese guy who gets so caught up in his work--dismantling a Pennsylvania steel mill and turning it into an amusement park--that he nearly gets himself killed. And how does he nearly get himself killed? By smashing his skull on a gigantic steel pipe. What subtlety. What imagery. What. . . nuance. Incidentally, the alternate title for the story you are reading was Head Shots.

We now come to the third ubiquitous element in Oliver Stone movies: Always set up a moral conflict in which the forces of good are represented by white males--even if they're a bit on the jackassish side--while the forces of evil are represented by ethnics, homosexuals or ethnic homosexuals. In Scarface, the villains are Cubans. In JFK, the villains are Cubans and Bourbon Street gays. In Year of the Dragon, the bad guys are Chinese and Thais. Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July target the Vietcong, though the latter also thoroughly vilifies Mexican whores who specialize in sleeping with paraplegics. Salvador and 8 Million Ways to Die finger Hispanics, while Midnight Express blames it all on those stinking Turk prison guards. Well, what do you expect from a guy who writes a movie (Conan the Austrian) set in some misty, prehistoric era in which the villain (James Earl Jones) just happens to be the only black person in the movie with a speaking part. Let's face it: Ollie boy thinks ethnics are scary.

Do I accuse Oliver Stone of deliberately targeting the ethnic groups America loves to hate as a pandering sop to xenophobic audiences? Hell no, he's just making movies, and in the world of movies, inscrutable ethnics with facial scars who pronounce the word "shit" by saying "chit" fall under the general category of "color."

Stone probably isn't even aware that he's made the same movie 10 times, that he's used coke-sniffing whores and fiendish Orientals and head trauma every chance he's gotten. He's merely dancing with the one who brung him. Who just happens to be a gook slut.

I hope I have not created the impression that I dislike Oliver Stone films. Far from it. To give the Man of Stone his due, his movies zip along at a nifty pace, he is a master at creating a sustained mood of imminent menace, and his screenplays, except for the obligatory harangue in which he feels compelled to actually explain what his transparently obvious films are about, are quite good. He gets terrific performances from people you'd expect it from--James Woods, Kevin Costner, Willem Dafoe, Gary Oldman--but also gets terrific performances from people you wouldn't expect it from--Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas. His movies are always obvious (Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio) and frequently stupid (JFK, The Doors), but I'd take obvious antiwar movies and stupid films that spark national debates rather than Driving Miss Daisy or another goddamn E.M. Forster film any day of the week. All antiwar movies are good movies. All movies that demand an explanation of John Kennedy's death are worth making. Even if they are stupid. Great art and incredible stupidity frequently make comfortable bedfellows. Just look at the Rolling Stones. Or Frank Sinatra. Or Richard Burton.

On the other hand, we're not talking about a John Ford or a Jean Renoir here. We're talking about a Jim Cameron who's read one more book. Great filmmakers look at complicated things--love, politics, crime--and show you that the world is a complicated place where moral decisions are difficult to make. Filmmakers like Oliver Stone look at complicated things and tell you that the world is a simple place, where all you have to do is to be like Oliver Stone. This explains Stone's obsession with JFK, because, like all conspiracy theory devotees, Stone would rather believe that we live in a world where sinister forces pull all the strings than that we live in a world where things just happen. But the truth is: We do live in a world where things just happen. Otherwise, how do you explain Dan Quayle?

When JFK was released just in time to bring us all some yuletide cheer last year, Stone came in for tremendous criticism from all sides. Virtually all of that criticism focused on the story line in JFK, taking Stone to task for hawking the least plausible of the myriad JFK assassination theories, and for deliberately twisting the facts to suit his purposes. But just about none of the criticism was directed at the film qua film.

Here, I would like to put in my two cents on the subject. Personally, I found JFK quite engaging, and was very impressed by the performances of Gary Oldman and Kevin Costner. But the film didn't work for me, because at no point could I even come close to buying Stone's theory about the assassination. Why did I have so much trouble swallowing the theory that the United States government was in on Kennedy's assassination? Basically, because of Joe Pesci's wig.

Joe Pesci is a preposterous-looking guy in the best of times, but that radiant shock of tangerine-hued fabric that was supposed to pass for Pesci's hair looked like something the wardrobe department bought mail order from Vito's Hair Research Center on Channel 67. To my way of thinking, if the creep played by Joe Pesci had anything to do with Kennedy's assassination, the CIA and the mob and the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex and the KGB and Lyndon Baines Johnson and Fidel Castro would have chipped in to give him enough money to buy a better wig. They did not; he wore the ridiculous wig to his interrogation by Kevin Costner; and for me the whole conspiracy theory fell apart right there.

La Coiffe Pesci was not the first time that a movie Oliver Stone had worked on was stopped dead in its tracks by a disruptive hair style. Lamentably, Stone seems to have learned about hair grooming from the same people who taught him editing: Michael Cimino and Brian De Palma. Mickey Rourke's hair in Cimino's Year of the Dragon, dyed white to make him look like a middle-aged asshole instead of a youthful asshole, had the inadvertent effect of making Rourke look like a chemotherapy patient trying to unravel an international heroin conspiracy on an outpatient basis. In De Palma's Scarface, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio looks like she broke into the Pam Grier Memorial Museum and purloined an Afro-American fright wig. Hair also plays a major role in Wall Street, where Gordon Gekko's do very nearly upstages the man sporting it; in Conan the Kennedy, where James Earl Jones looks like a "Dungeons & Dragons" Cher impersonator; and in The Doors, where the actor playing Ed Sullivan appears to have enlisted the styling assistance of Herman Munster.

But if Stone is to be taken to task for Pesci's absurd coiffure in JFK (and don't get me started on Tommy Lee Jones's dapper locks), he must be applauded for the decision to airlift the spectacularly chemotherapeutic Donald Sutherland into the movie two-thirds of the way through the proceedings. A lot of critics have objected to Stone's use of this entirely fictitious Deep Throat, but I think Stone's decision to use Sutherland was brilliant. Sutherland, it must be recalled, can talk faster than anyone in the history of motion pictures, meaning that in one 12-minute set piece, he can advance the plot of a movie by at least two hours. Without the intervention of Donald Sutherland, JFK would have been five-and-a-half hours long. We all owe Donald a debt of gratitude,- his exemplary work in JFK very nearly makes up for such previous crimes against humanity as Wolf at the Door, Revolution and siring Kiefer.

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