THE FASCINATING PROPAGANDA OF OLIVER STONE

I was in the tenth grade when the World Trade Center fell. I remember being in Mr. Kuhrt’s World History class. Someone rushed in and told him to turn on the television. The first tower had been hit, but no one knew what was going on, the gravity of the situation that would forever change things for us. We knew that the building was on fire, on one of the higher stories. We didn’t know that someone had flown an airplane into it, or that a second airplane was minutes away from colliding into the other tower.

Every September 11^th I dig up the footage from Youtube and show it to my students. For them, the event is on its way to being as distant as the Kennedy assassination is from me. Not quite yet, but soon, it will be long enough ago in history that children will cease to be emotionally affected by it in the same way that we who saw it unfold were so affected. Most of my middle school students weren’t even born yet. Students who graduated from high school in 2015 were about four or five when it happened. Being aware of it was terrifying, not knowing what was going to happen was terrifying. That day is a reminder that history was once real time, the present, unfolding before us, and the “we” of that former present did not, in the moment, have the benefit of recollection. Staring down at historical events, relegated to the page, gives us a false sense of superiority over them, as though we somehow authored them. We know the ending. In a sense, we don’t experience them as real events. It seems so simple, yet it’s so easy to forget that an historical event was once a real moment in time, all possibilities, pulsating and vibrant and brutal yet somehow naïve, each one graduated second being converted into the past.

The assassination of President Kennedy was the 9/11 of its generation. Or rather, the reverse of that. My generation’s experience of 9/11 happening in real time is comparable to what it must have been like to be alive on November 22, 1963, watching the motorcade make its way through downtown Dallas. When I see the President slump over after being hit, and I see Jackie Kennedy, frantically climbing onto the back of the open car in absolute terror, I’m brought to a stony silence. What must it have been like?

Oliver Stone’s JFK reminds us that movies are a vital, urgent, necessary art form. Those of us who are too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy are met with the tragic reality of it only through such compelling re-enactments as this film, which puts the actual footage to effective use. Movies can awaken history to us even though most of them are historically inaccurate, and whether or not Oliver Stone’s depiction of the conspiracy theories behind the assassination of JFK are totally bonkers or totally onto something, this film captures the absolute chaos into which we were thrown on that horrible day in Dallas. Stone’s film pulsates with the blood and the synapses of real time, turning “dead historical fact” into an urgent, provocative, spine-tingling, terrifying mystery. At the very least, JFK reminds us that the government’s reaction to Kennedy’s death was wholly inadequate, allowing for the perpetual development of numerous conspiracy theories.

Once you get past Kevin Costner’s bad Louisiana accent (he plays New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison), it’s hard not to be affected by the sincerity of his performance, especially during the compelling courtroom speech he makes at the end. Atticus Finch has become some kind of Messiah in the pop culture for his conscientious liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird. But the Garrison character as depicted in JFK reaches further, challenging our complacency about government, awakening a deeper obligation to pay attention, to question, to use our own minds rather than accept with docile, childish ignorance, the happy lie that government is always honest, always seeking justice, always promoting truth. That’s our job just as much as it is theirs, and when we turn away from our own duties, we do so at our own peril.

I suppose this is less a movie review than a preachy treatise on the effects of a Hollywood movie. Or maybe, to put it in a better light, it’s an honest outpouring of the impression Stone’s film left on me. JFK is a magnificently entertaining, incredibly well-put-together piece of film. Stone’s ability to weave together archive footage with re-enactments makes him probably one of our greatest propagandists, and even if Stone’s theories about the assassination are false, his style is something to study. He knows how to make an arresting, spine-tingling, deliciously paranoid political thriller. And moreover, his quest for truth doesn’t ring false. The speech made by Garrison in the film’s denouement is as much a direct line of communication from Oliver Stone as anything.

The movie met with considerable criticism upon its release in 1991, and yet it was at least partly responsible for a new policy of transparency regarding official government documents about the Kennedy assassination. Stone’s film gives credence to the dubiousness of certain elements of the esteemed Warren Commission, namely the so-called “magic bullet,” which traveled with more finesse and effect than one of those talking cartoon bullets in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The only bad scene occurs after Garrison learns of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. When he wakes up his wife (played by Sissy Spacek) to tell her the news, she’s confronted with the reality that her husband, plagued for years with public skepticism that has affected her own feelings about his work, was right after all. Their feels of validation turn into passionate kissing, and it is more than a little off-putting to think that an assassination serves them as an aphrodisiac. (Spacek, I should note, offers a stunning performance in an ultimately thankless role as the classic worrying wife, one of Hollywood’s favorite stock roles.)

Stone has gathered an impressive array of actors to fill his cast of strange, fascinating characters: Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemon, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kirkland, John Candy, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, and Brian Doyle Murray.

Thelma & Louise

A blockbuster about the friendship between two women is rare. Not because they can’t make money, but because studios think of them as risky. Thelma & Louise (1991) isn’t always successful as a movie, but it is successful as a study of two women who’ve been burned one too many times by the men in their lives and the men who run the world. Thelma and Louise take it on the lam after unexpectedly committing murder (that of a rapist pig) and most of the film dramatizes their trek through the West toward Mexico as the police struggle to keep up with them. 

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are perfectly cast, and it is their performances and the bond that develops between these two characters that breathes a real vitality into what is really a very conventional Hollywood road movie. It’s nowhere near as groundbreaking as Bonnie and Clyde was in terms of violence, and yet, it’s tremendously groundbreaking in the way it portrays women who, once they’ve tasted freedom from the shackles of their former lives, finally start to feel alive. It’s somewhat surprising to see a movie like Thelma & Louise come from a director such as Ridley Scott, even though he did give us such a strong female character in Alien (Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley). But this is a different, deeper approach to exploring the lives of women on the screen, and the film is bolstered by many loose scenes of the two ladies talking, laughing, or in some cases, just looking at each other and communicating whole worlds of expression. That dynamic is what makes Thelma & Louise an important film, even if the parts of the movie are better than the whole. The affection that we as an audience feel for them is also very deep and true, and, like Bonnie and Clyde before it, the film thus succeeds in getting its audience to root for the “bad guys.” 

So much of what happens to Thelma and Louise is filtered through a lens of experience that is all too believable: Women are not just bossed around by men, they’re controlled by them in a much deeper way that creates in some women a need for the prisons that men create. They become victims of Stockholm Syndrome, if you will. We see it in the early scenes of Thelma & Louise, especially with Geena Davis’s character, whose husband neglects her, mocks her, and belittles her, and demands domestic labor of her, all the while carrying on affairs. 

As the movie progresses, the two women transform from their dowdy, frumpishly dressed former-selves, so weary of the world, into more confident, sexually aware (but not self-exploitive) and powerful women. Susan Sarandon never looks more radiant than with her hair framing her face or blowing in the wind as she pounds away at the dusty highways of the American West. And Geena Davis's Thelma, who is so inept at first and so afraid to do anything that might exercise her own agency, becomes incredibly self-assured. These transformations are indeed fascinating, and they make the film’s legendary ending all the more poignant and, strangely, satisfying. 

Thelma & Louise actually has more in common with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is after all a buddy movie that tries very hard to transmute its tragic elements into comedy. (In the case of Thelma & Louise, this works intermittently, more consistently in the last half of the movie.) With Harvey Keitel as an Arkansas cop investigating the murder and subsequent flight of the two suspects; Brad Pitt as a sweet-talking hitchhiker; also Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Timothy Carhart, Jason Beghe, and Marco St. John. Written by Calli Khouri; music by Hans Zimmer; cinematography by Adrian Biddle.   

The People Under the Stairs

The People Under the Stairs (1991) is one strange modern-day fairy tale from writer-director Wes Craven. It's something of an expose of white greed and the plight of the urban black family. The young hero, Brandon Adams, is remarkably plucky, and adept at evading the terrifying husband-wife-brother-sister duo (you read that right) played by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, whose performances are some kind of perverse delight. They're the insane landlords who overcharge on sub-par tenements and then evict residents who can't pay, but they're also the owners of a thoroughly smart house, full of booby traps, hidden compartments, and gadgets that help them control the inhabitants in the cellar--people they've decided to keep as their slaves for some reason. They also have a "daughter" named Alice whom they keep prisoner and abuse, which is generally unpleasant except that we get the guilty pleasure of watching Alice eventually learn how to fight back. The People Under the Stairs is a sickly funny movie that works mainly because of its wackiness: the over-the-top story keeps things interesting even when it feels nasty (which is Craven's trademark). This is a lot more fun than most of his other efforts. With Ving Rhames, A.J. Langer, Bill Cobbs, Kelly Jo Minter, and Sean Whalen. ★★½

Point Break

In Point Break (1991), directed by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), Keanu Reeves, who is incapable of not sounding like a surfer, plays a fresh-faced young FBI agent who's forced to go undercover as a surfer, even though it's like totally out of his comfort zone. That premise is about as believable as his performance. Keanu squares off with Patrick Swayze, the charismatic, Manson-lite leader of a foursome of surfing buddies who spend their free time robbing banks. They're known to the FBI only as the Ex-Presidents, because when they rob banks they wear Halloween masks that bear the resemblances of Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and LBJ.

It is my understanding that Point Break is something of an iconic film for action movie buffs. Who can forget the scene in Hot Fuzz when Nick Frost--imitating Keanu--can't shoot his enemy, and instead points his gun in the air and fires repeatedly while shouting, "NOOOOO!"? And yet, Point Break isn't particularly interesting or thrilling (except for a few scenes, including a misfired shootout at a meth house that is tensely exciting). It manages to be both a gritty cops-and-robbers action flick and a meditation on surfing, trying to capture the philosophical majesty of catching a wave. But it never quite gels.

The film hinges on Swayze's pitch: he's fighting the system by living life his own way, riding the waves rather than trying to climb a corporate ladder somewhere. I appreciated his disdain for that whole corporate system lifestyle. I'm not a big fan of it either. And I also appreciated that Patrick Swayze doesn't ever "try" too hard. He just does his thing, and his performance feels easy and natural compared to poor Keanu, who, try as he might, can't seem to conjure up any power behind his screams and shouts. He's incredibly lucky that he's good-looking and likable. And, as I wrote about in my Dracula review, he's got enough capable actors around him to pick up the slack.

Gary Busey, playing Keanu's seasoned partner, seems to have played this part before. His role isn't particularly interesting, but he manages to breathe some crusty, tough-as-nails life into it. And Lori Petty, as the love interest, has a certain vulnerability to her. She's been hurt but she's wizened up and she's a fighter. Kathryn Bigelow is a capable director--Point Break is well-made for what it is--but she fails to lift the movie out of its badness. It's a collection of ideas patched together from other action films: a slick, carefully put together piece of product. But she finds little ways to stir up some embers when she can. There's a certain haunting quality to the film that you don't generally get in an action piece, and it reminded me of her vampire movie, Near Dark, which was equally haunting. And there's that lingering theme of obsession which seems to be present in most of her films: Keanu becomes obsessed with tracking his bank-robbing foe, and Swayze is obsessed with catching the perfect wave. (There's even a little something-something going on between them, if you ask me.)

With John C. McGinley, who overacts so we'll hate him and laugh when Busey cold cuts him to the ground; James LeGros, and John Philbin. Written by W. Peter Iliff. 123 min. ★★

Class Action

Legal mishmash in which the attorneys going head-to-head are father and daughter, played by Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. It's sort of a variation on Adam's Rib (1949) (where Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were opposing council who also happened to be husband and wife), minus the comedy.

A courtroom drama without wit or style tends to be forgotten within a decade, and except for the capable performance of Gene Hackman, Class Action fails to stand apart. It's showing its early-90s aesthetics, from the bad synthesizer music to Mastrantonio's hostile wardrobe to the overdone dramatic scenes. (Father and daughter have issues: he's spent his whole life defending the little guy, but at the expense of his family, and she can't forgive him for it. Worse still, he cheated on her mother, and she's still stinging from the offense even though Mom has made peace with it.)

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had a brief moment as one of the big female performers of the late 80s and early 90s, playing the lead in the James Cameron underwater-thriller The Abyss (1989) and giving us a feminist Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). She's also appeared in De Palma's 1983 update of Scarface and Scorcese's sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money (1986), opposite Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. But her career hasn't lasted: she embodied the type of ambitious yuppie feminist character that was fashionable for a brief period of time at the movie, with her pinched face and her strong demeanor and her piercing eyes. But that period came and went, and actresses like her have seen a dearth of big movie roles. This isn't to say that she's a bad actress, or a limited actress, but that she was likely typecast. The thing that saves her in Class Action is an underlying vulnerability: she's still got scruples, even though she dreams of becoming her firm's youngest (and presumably first female) partner. And she's got spunk, reveling at the opportunity to face off with her father.

They have an on-again-off-again relationship, and the director, Michael Apted, and the screenwriters, Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames, and Samantha Shad, use this bit of backstage drama to give their story "dramatic force," if you will. It's full of those dreadfully self-satisfied shouting matches that pander to the Academy Awards voters. In fact, Class Action seems like one long montage of Oscar clips. Only Gene Hackman seems genuine enough not to be bucking for some kind of awards recognition. His performance is the freshest thing in the movie, even though he's older than most of the other big cast members. He's not out to make a career for himself as a performer (he's already done this), and as such he's relaxed, confident, and he makes the whole movie look less stodgy and self-important. One of the benefits of being a pro (and there often aren't many when it comes to getting good parts and being treated with respect by studios and producers).

With Colin Friels as Mastrantonio's lawyer-boyfriend, a colleague and an obviously corrupt yuppie brat who cares about his career more than ethics. (It's easier to hate him when he's so full of himself.) Also with Joanna Merlin as Hackman's wife, who just wants everybody to get along: She's a teacher in the inner-city, and she's the forgiving wife of the adulterer, the professional peacemaker, who must be killed off as soon as possible, to give the father and daughter new pressure to make amends with each other; Donald Moffat as Mastrantonio's boss, Laurence (Larry) Fishburne as Hackman's paralegal, Jonathan Silverman as Mastrantonio's paralegal, and Jan Rubes as a witness who testifies against the automobile corporation that Hackman's trying to fry for negligence. 1991.