Salvador

 

Salvador (1986)

Dir. Oliver Stone

Written by Oliver Stone, Richard Boyle

Starring James Woods, Jim Belushi, Michael Murphy, John Savage, Elpidia Carillo

 

Holy moly, how in the fuck did Oliver Stone make this and PLATOON in the same fucking year? If there was ever enough cocaine in the world, there certainly isn't anymore.

Even more astonishingly, how did he make PLATOON after SALVADOR? Because even though we started our little retrospective with PLATOON, SALVADOR was finished first and beat it to theaters by a whole nine months. And SALVADOR is not just some kind of gentle warm-up that one might use as a step towards something more ambitious. It’s a war movie, a buddy comedy, an adventure film, a biography of a living person – co-screenwriter Richard Boyle, in fact—and a searing indictment of US  cold war meddling in Latin American governance, clocking in at a meaty and dense 123 minutes, and was nominated for two Academy Awards. Just watching it is an exhausting experience – imagine making it! Supposedly, James Woods was offered a role in PLATOON too, but turned it down because he "couldn't face going into another jungle with [Oliver Stone]." The fact that Stone himself had the stamina to pack up his camera and move on to the next project after something so massive is hard to wrap one’s head around. 

Anyway, there’s a reason to start with PLATOON: SALVADOR is unmistakably the weaker of the two films. But it packs quite a punch on its own. It documents the exploits of one Richard Boyle (James Woods, COP), a real-life veteran photojournalist (who also co-wrote the script with Stone) with a penchant for gravitating to the world’s most dangerous conflicts – Vietnam during the war, Cambodia during the revolution, “The Troubles” in Ireland—and a personal life so chaotic and irresponsible that his wife has just left him and taken their baby with her. Broke, drunk, and without any immediate prospects, he recruits his ne’er-do-well buddy Doctor Rock –his real legal name, as far as I can tell-- (Jim Belushi, acting somewhat conspicuously as the Dr. Gonzo to Boyle’s Hunter Thompson) and simply drives South, hypothesizing that he can scrounge up some freelance work in Latin America. When he reaches El Salvador, however, it quickly becomes clear that the country is reaching the boiling point, and that the US is secretly propping up ultra-right-wing nationalists who are on the precipice of a violent purge. Which is bad news for them, but great news for the masochistic Boyle, who quickly falls back in with his other wife and child –not the one who just left him, his alternate backup family back in El Salvador who he did not come here specifically to see but is happy enough to hang out with since he’s in town—and the equally insane but somewhat more functional war photographer John Cassady (John Savage, THE DEER HUNTER). At first, this is sort of a freewheeling ugly American travelogue, but gradually things take a darker turn as Boyle starts to get a little more personally invested in the situation and begins to realize just how dark things are about to get. And they do get quite dark. Especially as the stakes ratchet up and chaos descends in the second half of the picture, there's no mistaking the brain-melting intensity which Stone also captures so well in PLATOON and will only build on for next decade or so.

The difference comes down to focus; while PLATOON quickly finds its natural rhythm as a kind of heightened, operatic slice-of-life, SALVADOR is a little more all over the place, fiddling about for a while with some lead-footed buddy comedy thing that Stone has no aptitude for, sluggishly postponing any decision as to where its dramatic focus lies for far too long, and saddled with a much greater need for exposition as it shoots to define the entire local and geopolitical situation in El Salvador in 1979. Credit where it's due, the last of these three is pulled off with more deftness than you'd have any right to expect, as Stone communicates a great deal about the situation and how it got this way without a lot of clunky didacticism, but it still requires quite a bit of effort and screen time (SALVADOR is only three minutes longer than PLATOON, but it feels like a full mini-series worth of material has been covered).

And in the middle of it all, you've got James Woods doing perhaps his James-Woodsiest performance ever, which is, on one hand, a lot of sleazy, weasely, dirty fun to watch, but on the other hand, a lot to add on top of a movie which is already somewhat uncomfortably overstuffed. Thank God Jim Belushi is playing it pretty low-key (and disappears for long enough stretches to make one wonder why he's here at all). 

In an Oliver Stone movie, the way-too-muchness is usually more of a feature than a bug, but between the loud performances, larger-than-life central character, meandering narrative, large cast and angry politics, SALVADOR find his tendency towards overkill at its most ungainly. But ungainly is not the same as ineffective; inefficient, perhaps, but it packs enough raw power that a lack of focus doesn't doom it. It's the kind of film which is incapable of not having a ridiculously unnecessary three codas... but also the kind of film where they're all really great, even if it makes the pacing a little herky-jerky. And the fact that this huge, operatic, overstuffed epic was somehow produced on a dinky four million dollar budget is absolutely fucking mindblowing. Even if it has been Stone's only movie in 1986, it would still have been an obvious announcement of a real powerhouse auteur in the making.

Appendix A: Oliver Stone Studies
+PLATOON (1986)
+SALVADOR (1986)
+8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)
+WALL STREET (1987)
+TALK RADIO (1988)
+BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY(1989)
+THE DOORS(1991)
+JFK (1991)
+ HEAVEN & EARTH (1993)

Platoon

 

Platoon (1986)

Dir. Oliver Stone

Written by Oliver Stone

Starring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe

 

This year, for no reason at all, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the filmography of Oliver Stone, a –shall we say controversial?—artist who throughout a lengthy and extremely productive career (he averaged two films a year for almost a decade in the late 80’s and early 90s! Albert Pyun could barely keep up with him!) has been alternately (and sometimes  simultaneously) glorified and reviled, hailed as the savior of cinema and the destroyer of it, called a shameless liar and a bold truth-teller, achieved spectacular commercial success and resounding box-office failure, been a humorless didact, a shameless provocateur, and a feckless showman, tackled subjects which range from ripped-from-the-headlines topicalism to classical antiquity to, um, football. And, most importantly, cast John C. McGinley is a whole shitload of movies. In recent decades he seems to have drifted into the wilderness a little, making a series of films which didn’t really seem to connect with audiences, becoming something of a dubious pro-Kremlin propagandist, and obsessively re-editing and re-releasing his 2004 epic ALEXANDER. But man, for a full decade between 1986 and 1996, the guy was absolutely untouchable, cranking out cinema which, whatever else you can say about it, is as fiery and passionate and ambitious as any mainstream filmmaker has ever attempted.

 

I reviewed his 2012 film SAVAGES when it came out, and took a look at his first studio film, THE HAND the next year (his directorial debut was 1981’s SEIZURE; after that he spent several years as a screenwriter, notching MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, CONAN THE BARBAIRAN, SCARFACE, and YEAR OF THE DRAGON before SALVADOR hit the screen in March 1986). But even though it marked his fourth film as a director and ninth film as a writer, I think it would be folly to begin anywhere but with his second movie which came out in 1986 (actually his third as a writer, since he’s credited as a co-writer on EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE). While SALVADOR beat it to theaters, it was PLATOON that shot to the top of the box office (its $136 million domestic gross made it the third-biggest film that year, trailing TOP GUN and, um, CROCODILE DUNDEE, and all that on a miniscule $6 million budget) and made Oliver Stone not just a household name, but a inarguable American auteur.

 

PLATOON was an incomparably perfect vehicle for Stone's strengths primarily because of its simplicity; unlike SALVADOR, which gets bogged down a bit in explaining the shifty mechanics of Latin American politics and US intelligence, PLATOON correctly assumes we already have all the context we need to understand the Vietnam war and be against it, and consequently focuses all its attention on communicating the subjective experience of being there, in it. Since Stone was “in it,” (just like the film’s protagonist, he dropped out of an ivy-league college in 1967 and enlisted in the US Army, specifically requesting combat duty in Vietnam, where he was wounded in action twice) he is enormously effective at cultivating a mountain of tiny details that feel authentic and meaningful and help make for an immersive, textured film about an experience which feels deeply truthful even when it's absolutely wild and histrionic a lot of the time.*

 

He is helped enormously by his cast, a veritable who's-who list of guys** who would become beloved character actors (Forrest Whitaker, Keith David, John C. McGinley, Tony Todd, Johnny Depp) and especially by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger, both of whom bring a tremendous amount of specificity and personality to their two opposing characters who on the page probably read more like symbols (and opposing father-figures) than humans; Dafoe brings a touch of sardonic, mischievous danger to a character who might otherwise seem like a bland white knight, and Berenger brings a hint of existential pain to his sadistic villain, as though he genuinely regrets that the world has made him what he is. This allows us to believe and invest in the characters enough to make even the most outlandish, operatic drama hit hard rather than feel overblown and silly like it maybe ought to (see: the film's poster).

 

The movie also benefits in a way it would be difficult to overstate from the superb editing by Claire Simpson (who rightly won the Oscar for it) which is so astoundingly ahead-of-its time that the movie feels startlingly modern even in 2021. Well, except that today's version of this type of chaotic editing would miss entirely the storytelling precision Simpson displays here, and would be shot like shaky dogshit as opposed to the careful, unshowy mastery we get from Robert Richardson (he didn't get his Oscar for this one, but would end up snagging it for JFK, which is even more honorable). Simpson (who, like Richardson, had already worked with Stone on SALVADOR***) would go on to only one more film with Stone (the next year’s WALL STREET), but she would mentor her replacements (Pietro Scalia, David Brenner, Joe Hutshing and Julie Monroe, all of whom would enjoy multi-film tenures as editors on Stone’s films) and contribute immeasurably to the aggressive, borderline avant-garde editing style which would later come to define Stone’s work. But Richardson would stick with Stone for more than a decade, becoming the cinematographer on every one of his films up to 1997’s U-TURN. Between the three of them, Vietnam turns into something overstimulating and overwhelming, perfectly capturing the characters’ subjective reality through their simultaneously exhaustion-stunted and adrenaline-amped consciousness. And the genius is, this is all done without the movie feeling it necessary to make explicit that this is subjective on some meta-level: it just presents this as reality, because the movie is how we enter the world of these characters, so of course it's subjective. Proof that right from the start, Stone and his collaborators understood that in art, emotional truth is the only kind of reality that matters.

 

Still, there are perceptible traces of a filmmaker still finding his feet. Despite across-the-board excellent performances from the rest of the cast, Charlie Sheen (MAJOR LEAGUE) is fine as a blank audience surrogate, but brings very little to the role in a movie which is otherwise packed to the brim with personality. You could argue that it's important for this particular film to have a steadier performance holding the center while the craziness revolves around it, but you can be steady without being bland, and Sheen definitely tends towards the latter rather than the former. He also really struggles with the admittedly ludicrously overwritten voice-over narration, which is the one element of the film which is overblown in a way which feels cheesy, rather than heightened. Stone’s strength as a conjuror of intense subjective experience (and his dream-team of cinematic collaborators) is already present and accounted for here – unmissable, even. But perhaps he didn’t quite have the confidence yet to simply show, rather than tell, and his inability to get more out of Sheen (and his -perhaps consequent-- reliance on voice-over narration) are the one obvious sign that he still had room to grow.

 

Even so, the overall film is so focused and potent that few other war movies have ever been able to touch it. If the world had missed SALVADOR, they couldn’t ignore this kind of powerhouse. This was indisputably the work of a genuine capital-v Voice. You can quibble about the corny narration or its somewhat myopic foregrounding of Stone’s own perspective, but you can’t argue about its raw potency. It's a masterpiece by one of cinema's most ferocious auteurs, and whatever little caveats I have about this or that pale in the face of its righteous fury.

 

* Near the end, there's literally a shot where Tom Berenger has devil eyes, similar to the amazing deleted scene from NIXON which I just watched again to be sure and holy goddam, if that scene had played in theaters I am convinced it would have caused the movie DEMONS to happen for real. That shit melts steel beams.

** And it's all guys; I don't think there's a single English-language speaking part for a woman, which is just as well considering female characterization is not generally Stone's strong suit.

*** Which was only her second theatrical film after her debut as editor in… holy cow, C.H.U.D.!

Appendix A: Oliver Stone Studies
+PLATOON (1986)
+SALVADOR (1986)
+8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986)
+WALL STREET (1987)
+TALK RADIO (1988)
+BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY(1989)
+THE DOORS(1991)
+JFK (1991)
+ HEAVEN & EARTH (1993)

Overlord

Overlord (2018)

Dir. by Julius Avery

Written by Billy Ray, Mark L. Smith

Starring Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Pilou Asbæk

I have a special fascination with genre hybrids, and, of course, particularly with horror genre hybrids. And there is no shortage of these; horror is an almost endless malleable genre, able to absorb other tones, styles, iconography, and structure, which makes almost unlimited mash-ups possible. I’ve seen horror/comedy, art-horror, action-horror, horror-westerns, horror/romances, horror/crime, sci-fi/horror, superhero horror, even horror documentary, just to name a few. These genre-straddling exercises can be fun because they shake up the usual formula and expectations we have for stock fiction structure, but they’re even more interesting to me as experiments with the very medium of genre. Smashing different tropes together and seeing what survives can be revealing about the nature of the genres themselves: why they work, what they mean, what elements are essential to the mechanism, and what elements turn out to be surprisingly replaceable. Consequently a WWII-men-on-mission movie crossed with a zombie/mad science flick sounded right up my ally. Not, of course, that it would be the first war/horror hybrid I’d ever seen, nor even the first Nazi zombie flick I’d ever seen (they go back to fucking 1941’s KING OF THE ZOMBIES and its first sequel, and run comfortably through 1966’s THE FROZEN DEAD and 1977’s SHOCK WAVES to 1981’s ZOMBIE LAKE to modern schlock like 2009’s DEAD SNOW). Still, the men-on-a-mission element (a venerable subgenre in its own right) struck me as a good angle, as did the historical setting. If OVERLORD could hardly boast at being the first to get here, I still thought there was a solid chance it could generate something interesting from its motley collection of genre elements.

Or at least, I did until I saw it was a JJ Abrams production. OK, he didn’t direct it (that would be Julius Avery, his sophomore film after the go-nowhere crime thriller SON OF A GUN) or write it (that would be Billy Ray, of a very weird career that begins with THE COLOR OF NIGHT and runs from the laughably inept VOLCANO and SUSPECT ZERO to the rather classy STATE OF PLAY and Oscar-nominated CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, and Mark L. Smith, who has a much more consistent resume of middlebrow horror trash except that he co-wrote the fucking REVENANT!). But even from the trailer, I could see that this would be a strictly Abrams affair. By which I mean, slick, flashy production and a relentlessly overthought structure hiding the fact that there isn't any real content at the center of it all. That Abrams touch.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens here. Despite OVERLORD's near-constant attempts to twist itself into shapes convoluted enough that they might elicit a flicker of mild surprise, the only actual unexpected thing about the movie is how long it takes for the genre-hybrid element to enter the picture. It’s a men-on-a-mission WWII story for much longer than it’s a horror movie, and it’s surprisingly committed to that war movie angle --at least financially, which is the only meaningful measure of intent here—obviously spending a good portion of its ample budget on rather extravagant battle scenes, as well as a Bokeem Woodbine (WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES) cameo. Some of it is rather nicely appointed; the aerial battle that opens the film is efficient enough to be exciting in a empty sort of way, and the cinematography by Laurie Rose (every Ben Wheatley film) and Fabian Wagner (JUSTICE LEAGUE) is perfectly handsome, if a bit bland. But of course the movie-killing problem here is that this is not a men-on-a-mission film; we know from the damn poster that this is all just a feint, that their war movie chicanery is a prelude to an abrupt swerve towards an altogether different kind of movie (the kind with Nazi zombies, AKA the kind of movie that you’d actually be interested in watching). Consequently, any real investment we might have in the first half of the movie is stillborn. The cast is adequate, but nowhere near committed enough to instill their one-note characters* with anything that would independently be worth our time, and so a huge portion of the film just becomes a tedious waiting game while they coyly tease that we’re eventually gonna get to the good stuff.

And then, finally, we get there, and… the movie suddenly ends! After more than an hour of teasing us with some good old fashioned Nazi zombie fun, we officially learn about the existence of experimental Nazi super-zombies and then easily dispatch them (as well as a couple hundred of their living colleagues) in what feels like 20 minutes of a overlong 110. It feels unbalanced, like the movie is missing an act or something. They finally get to the zombies, and then jump right into the big climactic fight scene (which isn’t really any great shakes itself, though there’s a gruesome CGI-assisted facial wound which is pretty cool) without any warm-up.

That leaves us with a movie which pretty much spends its whole runtime threatening to happen without ever getting there. A movie which has a lot of stuff in it, but never commits to any one thing enough to make an impact. A movie which is all conspicuously moving parts hiding an empty center. A mystery box with no mystery. You know, a JJ Abrams production. I’d still be interested someday in seeing a men-on-a-mission/horror hybrid,** but this isn’t really a hybrid at all. You’d have to be two things to be a hybrid, and this isn’t enough of anything to make for an interesting experiment.

*Or less; the movie can’t seem to make up its mind about what Wyatt Russell’s single note is even supposed to be, and he vacillates wildly from badass cynic to straight-up villain with no real logic or benefit to the story.

** There are, of course, already a couple; DOG SOLIDERS, for example, or DEAD BIRDS, THE SUPERNATURALS, THE BUNKER, THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (2007). But not too many prominent examples.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	IMDB says Stop The Unstoppable, but I didn’t notice that on any of the posters.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s supposed to take place during operation Overlord but other than that there’s not a lot of reason for that to be the title, especially in light of the existence of the 1975 British docu-drama OVERLORD, which is actually about the real Operation Overlord and uses real war footage, and also happens to be one of the greatest war movies ever made.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombie, Nazi-Zombie, mad science
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Bokeem Woodbine?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah the lead Nazi gets really gross and rapey with a captive French resistance member. Did they really not think we had enough reason to hate this character?
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombies, although of a mad-science sort
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes
VOYEURISM?	Our boys spend much time –like, too much time, in fact-- hidden in an attic watching Nazi soldiers stand around and act like assholes to the homeowner downstairs.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Now more than ever we need to take the time to appreciate how baller FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY was.

Son of Saul

Son Of Saul (2015)

Dir. László Nemes

Written by László Nemes, Clara Royer

Starring Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Todd Charmont, Urs Rechn

“And I don't think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It's like, how many have there been? You know, we get it - it was grim, move on. [But]... I've noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust - guaranteed Oscar,” says Kate Winslet in her 2005 episode of Extras. She subsequently went on to win a Best Actress Oscar three years later… for a film about the Holocaust. Incidentally, this one also won. Ain’t life too funny? But yuks aside, she’s not wrong, Holocaust films are only slightly less ubiquitous than Dracula adaptations these days. And yes, we get it - it was grim, and --if movies are to be believed-- usually also it inspired heartwarming acts of compassion. Is there really a lot more to say about this? SON OF SAUL answers Kate directly: yes, there is. At least a little bit more, and especially if said with this degree of stylistic verve and audacity.

This --holy cow-- debut feature of Hungarian director László Nemes somehow finds an intriguing new angle on abject human suffering, depicting Saul, a Jewish-Hungarian prisoner in Auschwitz. Saul has been commandeered into a job as a Sonderkommando, a forced laborer whose job primarily consists of helping the Nazis recover valuables from, and dispose the bodies of, gas chamber victims. This work has clearly taken a significant toll on his mental health, and the brilliant 35mm camerawork by Mátyás Erdély (THE QUIET ONES, JAMES WHITE) emphasizes his self-protective myopia by maintaining a tight shallow focus on Saul and leaving everything outside a few feet from his head a hazy blur. I should say, maintaining a radical tight focus; virtually the entire movie follows Saul and his perspective --and frequently just the back of his head-- as he wanders through a mercifully blurry hellscape which had become horrifyingly routine to him. But Saul’s numb withdrawl is broken when he finds a corpse of a young boy who he insists (despite some evidence to the contrary) is is son, and he becomes singlemindedly fixated on finding a rabbi to give the boy a proper burial. This task --difficult enough in a death camp-- is further complicated by a burgeoning prisoner revolt which requires Saul’s increasingly unstable help, substantial language barriers, and the ever-present danger of getting shot or thrown into the gas chamber with everyone else. Against all odds, then, SON OF SAUL is actually more thriller than weepy-eyed melodrama, a harrowing race-against-the-clock by a man who literally has nothing to lose, and will risk his own life and anyone else’s in this final, clumsy, fanatical gesture towards not entirely losing his soul.  

As Saul, Hungarian-born Bronx-based poet Géza Röhrig (who had acted only twice before, in two late 80’s TV productions) brings a stubborn, stoic intensity to a complicated and not always entirely sympathetic role. Saul is so single-minded in his pursuit of dignity for the dead that he frequently abandons the living, giving us something maybe genuine new in a Holocaust film -- some deliberate moral ambiguity. He’s had to endure unimaginable horrors, but he’s also not a passive victim or a saintly martyr, he’s a flawed but fierce man dealing with being pushed to the outermost extremes of the human condition the only way he’s able. It ensures the film is about more than a simple revolt against the forces of inhumanity, and it makes Saul’s redemption arc all the more uncertain.

These nuances are good, because as upsetting as it is, Nemes crafts such kinetic, intense scenes with his showy, relentless handheld-camera takes that the movie actually threatens to be exciting. Fortunately it’s about stuff too, so we’re not put in the uncomfortable position of recommending an art film set in Auschwitz simply because it’s inarguably an edge-of-your-seat white-knuckled thrill ride. Please don’t credit me on the poster with that quote, thanks guys. But seriously, there are sequences in here so wildly immersive that you’ll forget you’re supposed to be all reverent about this and simply get lost in the wild abandon of the filmmaking. At its best, though, it does both -- a sequence where Saul accosts a group of new arrivals marching to their deaths in a corpse-strewn firepit is as nightmarish and gut-wrenching as anything which has ever been put to celluloid, but also packed with both powerful human moments and a terrifying, desperate urgency which can’t help but be thrilling even as it is utterly repulsive. Cinema doesn’t get much more powerful than that. It’s a sequence which I expect to remember very vividly many years from now.

But there are quieter moments, too, which are no less powerful. Saul can be a difficult character to entirely understand or identify with, but there’s no missing that there’s a lot going on behind his eyes. In fact, just before the scene I just described, there is another, almost equally intense scene, on a much more intimate scale. Saul is tasked with picking up a crucial item from a fellow conspirator named Ella, who he says he doesn’t know. But when he sees her, it becomes obvious they do know each other. Who she is, exactly, and how they know each other --let alone why he would lie about it-- we are never told. But they have a fraught, emotionally painful conversation with just their eyes, in total silence. Much of the movie evokes the searing, virtuosic depictions of chaos and horror in things like COME AND SEE and CHILDREN OF MEN.* But it’s impressive that Nemes can find such rich and mysterious feeling in smaller moments, too. It’s this sort of brilliant evocation of both the subtle and the grandiose that helps SON OF SAUL transcend pigeonhole labeling. We may not need any more film about the Holocaust, but this is simply a great film -- and we need all of those that we can get.

*And I don’t mean it’s derivative; comparing anything to COME AND SEE is among the highest compliments one can pay.

You loved the movie? Buy the merchandise! Collect all four limited-edition slurpee cups!

Risky Flicks: American Sniper

American Sniper (2014):

Dir. Clint Eastwood

Written by Jason Hall

Starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller

The Challenge: 

It’s an annoyance that I even have to talk about this one at all, but I guess since this is apparently some huge earth-shattering fucking deal that the whole culture lost its goddam mind over and it made piles of cash and was nominated for a raft of awards (it won only one, best sound editing) and made everyone on the internet go all gamergate all over each other, I’ve gotta step in and set you people right. So let’s get to it.

What’s the risk?

• Conservatives loved it, and they let their love be known in the most unappealing way possible: subliterate bloodthirsty tweets, a phrase so profoundly unpleasant that just by forcing me to write it, the movie has one strike against it.
• It has American in the title, the preferred go-to hustle of dull, pretentious people trying to distract from their moronic pablum by insinuating their drivel is really about something. (exceptions: AMERICAN MOVIE and AMERICAN SPLENDOR, both of which preceded the trend)
• Disease-of-the-week melodrama about PTSD and patriotism? What is this, the Lifetime network?

Possible Mitigating Factors:

• Clint? His classical, reserved and actor-focused directorial style can be dynamite when he’s working with a good script. Which is, you know, a good 30-40% of the time.
• Hello? Best sound design?

The Case:

So, the liberals called this bloodthirsty, xenophobic, dishonest, flag-waving war-justifying unapologetic Bush-era propaganda. The conservatives agreed, but said that was a good thing. To some extent it may be those things, but mostly its ambitions are more modest. It wants to be a good war movie (it mostly is) and also seems to feel obligated to be a persuasive melodrama (it mostly isn’t). Unfortunately it had the misfortune --or bad judgement-- of undertaking those goals with a story about a war which is still painfully present in people’s lives, and believing there was be no need to actually make a clear statement about that war. And that’s where the trouble started.

See, the movie is about a bull-riding, God-and-country lovin’, modern country-music listening, polo-shirt-tucked-into-jeans wearing, red blooded simple kind of man honest American American Sniper type guy, Chris Kyle, who, depending on who you ask, is either everything that is good and upright about America or a sociopathic racist murderer. Actually if you ask him, by way of his autobiography, he makes it pretty clear that he at least aspires to be the latter, with his open xenophobia (he calls the Iraqis “Savages”) and claims to shooting looters during Katrina -- but even so, screenwriter Jason Hall (minor recurring character “Devon MacLeish” in seasons 2-4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) disagrees, saying that he spent time with Kyle and felt his autobiography misrepresented him. An odd claim, I know, but if there’s one thing not in dispute by anyone, it’s that Kyle’s four tours in Iraq and his 255 claimed kills (160 officially confirmed) kinda messed the dude up a little. It’s not entirely inconceivable to me that, as Hall claims, the book was a bit of self-mythologizing by a bitter, unstable guy who had just returned home from a decade at war and was putting up an angry tough guy facade.  

So what’s the real truth here? The movie’s big problem --and its most interesting quirk-- is that it either doesn’t know or isn’t saying. Just like his autobiography, the movie lets Kyle tell us what he thinks --he’s in Iraq to kill the bad guys, he isn’t bothered by all the killing, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a coward or a traitor--, and then lets us judge for ourselves how much he really believes his own story and how much is just a cover for the immense psychological damage this war has done to him. Kyle gets plenty of time to offer his opinions about what he’s doing and how it’s affecting him, and the movie mostly never contradicts him. In fact, it sometimes even twists the facts a little to better fit his right-wing point-of-view, most notably when the movie cuts from Kyle’s horror over 9/11 to his serving in Iraq, as though the two were related. That obviously raised a lot of hackles among the lefties, and maybe rightly so. But of course, the movie is from Kyle’s perspective, and it’s not surprising that the connection made perfect sense to him and a lot of other people at the time. Besides, if people don’t get that those two things were not connected by now, we can hardly blame the movie for not enlightening them, that one’s on us.

Freedom, justice, the American way.

So we know what Kyle thinks, and we also know that what he thinks isn’t going to sit real well with a lot of people, myself included. The question is, what does the movie think about all this? To both its credit and its detriment, it simply refuses to say conclusively. Of course, there’s not much in the film’s style to suggest that Kyle’s somewhat warped perspective is merely the subjective interpretation of one man. The film is shot with a clear eye towards realism, not subjectivity, and moreover the movie tends to set things up to prove him right when the chips are down. Still, while there are many things here which present Kyle in a positive light, there are also some pretty noticeable details (mostly in Bradley Cooper’s macho but sad-eyed performance) that suggest that maybe there’s more going on here than Kyle is either willing or able to admit. There’s a provocative opaqueness to his character and a general layer of ambiguity about the whole enterprise; Eastwood seems to have been bound and determined to make a movie which could be seen either as a love letter to wartime jingoism gilded in passion play martyrdom, or a searing indictment of an ethos which takes people with good intentions and turns them into emotionally ruined, ideologically rigid killers. By never directly challenging Kyle’s conflation of militarism with patriotism and warfare with morality, it dares us to either accept it as correct (as, it turns out, a lot of people did) or to critique it by way of its obvious destructiveness on Kyle’s psyche. On balance, it probably leans more towards the former (little wonder, since Hall would hardly have been able to pitch a script criticizing the guy after spending so much time with him and his family and then having him, spoiler, die) but there’s just barely enough room in Cooper’s portrayal of him to allow for some doubt.

In theory, that sounds like kind of an interesting idea, but unfortunately it’s severely undermined by two important factors. The first is that it’s probably a terrible idea to try and make an ambiguous film about an issue that it’s pretty much impossible for people to not have a strong opinion about from the start. I know every single fucking asshole with some jackass opinion these days feels like what the world needs is “starting conversations,” (translation: “I’d like an opportunity to lecture you about why you’re wrong”) but honestly this is not a very good conversation starter. There’s not really much conversation to be had which hasn’t already been run into the ground over America’s painful decade and more at war, and even if there was, this movie probably doesn’t have much to contribute to it. Especially since they have sanded a lot of Kyle’s more unpleasant tendencies off in order to make it “fair and balanced” to both sides, just like reality is. I know Hall thinks he was a nicer guy than his autobiography made him out to be, but come on man, he said that stuff. Even if you don’t believe it, you gotta try and explain the character well enough that we could understand why he would make it up. I mean, I don’t think Charlie Kaufman believes that Chuck Barris was actually a superspy, but by the end of CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND we understand him well enough to get why he’d lie about a thing like that. Not so here. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine Cooper’s humble, stoic movie Kyle saying the things that real-life Kyle said in his book, regardless of the circumstances. So not only does the movie not have a lot of real insight into the war, it also doesn’t really offer much insight into this real historical person, does it?

I mean, if we’re not going to be honest about who this guy was and his own claims about what he did… what are we even talking about here? Do we really feel like we can have a meaningful conversation about this topic by sanitizing this guy’s own autobiography so he seems nicer and more reasonable? I don’t think it needs to judge him or present him as a villain, but if there really is something to be learned about this man, I don’t think we can really learn it by turning him into a sanitized, fictionalized Hollywood version. You gotta either tell it like it actually was, or you gotta just change the name and admit that you’re making up a new character to tell the story you’d rather tell. Nothing wrong with that either; I imagine the fictionalized movie Kyle probably resonates with a lot of real soldiers who really did feel more conflicted than he (claims he) did. But you can’t have both — you can’t do a character study about a real person and then change the stuff you find unappealing about them. It’s no longer an actual character study then, more like wish fulfillment.

If this view makes you feel a little uncomfortable, don't worry, this is mostly done by robots now. Whew!

And that leads us to the second problem, and one which is probably much worse for the movie itself: even if we generously assume the most interesting possible interpretation (Chris Kyle is the product of a brittle, spirit-crushing way of thinking that he’s impossibly ill-equipped to overcome, and he’s gradually crushed by it)... he’s still not a very interesting character. He’s just kind of dull and pedantic in the most broad possible way (actually, it’s frankly a little surprising that conservatives weren’t more offended by how completely the character plays into every possible stereotype about them). There may be something kind of tragic about how his iron-clad ethos prevents him from effectively dealing with the messy, complicated real world, but even at that we spend entirely too much time with him for this to be consistently engrossing. If there’s anything interesting here, it’s what he’s not saying, which is a pretty thin thread to hang an entire movie on, and never explicitly drawn out enough to be a genuine conflict.

The real Kyle seemed full of contradictions -- in reality, he praised the anti-war letter written by his colleague Mark Lee that he fumes about in the movie, even as he seems strongly in favor of the conflict; he repeatedly uses the word “savage” to describe the Iraqis in his book, but seemed to take his responsibility to protect their civilians seriously, even categorically refusing to kill children (a stance the film version of him doesn't share). Watching his interview on Conan O'Brien's show, he seems a little squirrely, even goofy, talking his way through his work with a professional’s ease, but with a little kid’s equal parts enthusiasm and embarrassment at being the center of attention. It’s a weird, somewhat awkward conversation -- Conan is trying to make light TV out of the experience of a guy who is famous for killing more people than any other sniper in history-- but it’s also sort of impossible to not find Kyle likable. He has a winning, self-effacing sort of smile, a wide, open face which veers between unselfconscious earnestness and sheepish bemusement. Even on an O’Reilly Factor clip unencouragingly titled “Navy SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle Enemy are Savages/ www.RightFace.us,“ he comes across as sincere and nuanced, which is especially interesting since the story he’s telling --punching out Jesse Ventura in a bar-- seems likely to be total fiction, and, in fact, Ventura sued him for slander and won. It’s hard to know what to make of this Kyle, but I have to say, even in these pandering talking-head TV interviews, he seems vivid and alive in a way which sad-eyed, glowering Cooper’s movie version of him never does. The real Kyle was, as we all are, a messy, tangled web of contradictions and conflicting impulses, but the movie turns him into something much more dull: a symbol, a symptom.

Lacking an ability to probe Kyle’s inner conflict, a huge chunk of this story is just the normal subplot from an action movie where a tearful wife (Sienna Miller, “the military science fiction action film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” as her wikipedia page eloquently puts it) wants her husband to stop being so awesome and badass and stay home with her in placid domesticity, but he’s restless because he’s a man of action and knows that evil will prevail unless he personally stops it. This conflict is in every action movie ever made, so it’s no surprise it’s in here too. Except that instead of wasting 5 minutes of our time like a normal action movie, AMERICAN SNIPER makes it arguably the central conflict, without really adding any depth to this rather banal disagreement. Seriously, probably half the movie is two kind of shallow, uninterested characters played by terrific actors arguing about why he’s never around and it’s hard to raise kids as a single mom and it’s scary to never know if he’s gonna live or die etc etc. While obviously this is a real hardship for families of people serving abroad, the movie version of this conversation finds nothing interesting to explore that couldn’t have been covered in an obligatory 20-second montage. It just goes on an on, around and around again, without revealing anything new about the characters or resolving in any way.

Oh yeah, I should mention that the plastic babies they use in this are a little stiff and apparently it's some kind of big deal for the internet. I can't say I noticed it while watching, but yeah, looking at this image, that is one plastic baby, all right.

Fortunately, the movie isn’t a total loss because the scenes that aren’t about that are pretty good. Not in an interesting, thought provoking way, but definitely in a gripping war movie kind of way. They’re generally pretty kinetic and exciting, especially for Eastwood (who doesn’t usually go in for fancy editing and big setpieces). The military parts combine a sense of lived-in-realism (particularly the very convincing cast) with some legitimately harrowing gunfights and a healthy dose of entertaining Hollywood bullshit, right down to the black-hatted enemy sniper who provides some narrative structure as a main villain. Unlike most of the movie, these scenes seem to find the right tone -- respectful enough of reality to want to get the details right, but clearly designed to be exciting. And they are exciting; there are at least three fairly elaborate street-battle sequences, including an adrenaline-soaked sandstorm escape during the finale. Again, maybe you don’t like the idea of such a recent national tragedy being milked for entertainment, but you gotta admit that as pure cinema, these sequences work well.

In fact, if the ratio of battle scenes --or even military scenes in Iraq-- to domestic ones had been even a little higher, this one might have actually managed to overcome the obstacles stacked against it and won me over. Sadly, it was not to be. The military scenes are clearly where the film’s strengths lie, but it is stubbornly committed to its idea of itself as a weepy, repressed melodrama, and that’s where it ends up again and again, every time without any real idea of what to do with it. It's so relentless and repetitive that I'd almost be convinced that in itself is the point, if I were even a little more confident the movie has any clear point at all.

That weird sense of a film lacking in any kind of concrete conception of why it exists is heightened immeasurably by the epilogue, which features a happy ending for Kyle so exuberantly overblown and unearned that it borders on parody, and then immediately fades out to text stating that he got murdered by a disturbed ex-vet later that day, and then rolls credits! It's so stunningly poorly thought-out that it borders on the amateurish. Some other movie might find this turn of events ironic, or tragic, or infuriating -- or, it might simply find it unimportant to Kyle’s journey and not worth including. AMERICAN SNIPER, however, seems to feel it’s important enough to warrant mentioning, but not important enough to make any kind of comment about or to connect to the narrative, as apt an example as any of the film’s clunky narrative ambiguity and undercooked perspective.

The Verdict:

Well, I ended up being right that I wouldn’t much like this one, but not necessarily for the reasons I thought. I wasn’t much offended by it. I think lovers on the right and critics on the left both saw what they wanted to see; the movie might have a slight ideological bent --depending on how you want to interpret its view of the intentionally ambiguous central character-- but even if it does, there’s really not much there. And that’s the big problem: it’s a movie about a real person which doesn’t have much to say about that person, and it’s a movie about a real war which doesn’t have much to say about that war. It’s got some fiercely intense battle scenes and a clear-eyed realism about military life, but frankly it’s a little light on actual content for a 132-minute movie about a hugely controversial topic. If we weren’t living in such a toxic swamp of bitter culture-war nonsense, I can’t imagine anyone would have gotten too excited over this glum and unfocused wartime melodrama one way or another. Oh well, hopefully it’ll inspire Clint to make a better sequel focusing on the other side of the conflict like he did with FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS / LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. I’m sure Twitter will like that a lot better.

Demolition Derpy.