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)