W. and Appaloosa (2008)

For a major presence in American movies, Oliver Stone has startling limitations, and they surface most obviously in his overrated 1980s melodramas, such as Platoon, Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July. As a writer, Stone thinks in rudimentary terms - his characters are defined by too-studied platitudes, and actual life rarely intrudes or surprises. To call Stone one note is to understate it - you’re lucky if a 1980s Stone picture approaches one note - they’re lurid, off Frank Capra pictures with guilty freshman student faux-poetry, and their moralistic theses can be suffocating - the moralizing springing, like Scorsese, from a place of torment and contradiction, a thirst for atonement. In the 1990s, Stone came down with a case of pure filmmaking fever that lanced his schematic clichés – he developed one of the more sophisticated and exhilarating eyes in all American movies. The choked feelings that tried to emerge in the 1980s films found a voice – the writing had barely changed, but the visual tone, the mood and the tempo - exploding from just about every exploitation and violation of film grammar imaginable - touched on what was eluding the page. Stone’s best pictures - JFK, the first half of Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn - approximate how id affects memory, and these pictures play in a way that audiences, and even Stone probably, can’t quite put their finger on. Stone bravely embraced his instincts, more than justifying the shortcomings of the earlier pictures. The 1990s Stone pictures still pounded notes over and over - but the sledgehammer now had an unchecked, raw quality. Stone made the inner that was limiting him as a filmmaker the outer - a major achievement. People who fact-check JFK or Nixon miss the point - these pictures have a mystery, and a pain, that’s more authentic than matching the dates with the years. Stone, unfettered by the need to recreate history, recreated history - how it chokes and winds us up.

It takes Oliver Stone’s lack of restraint to take on George W. Bush right here and now, but that lack of restraint blocks him in a way that closer resembles his 1980s pictures. The ever shifting stock-color-jump-cut-footage-speed tapestry has been discarded, and that’s appropriate - Stone is after the present, not the past; but a self-consciously state-of-things time capsule can hand-cuff the greatest of filmmakers, and it swings the emphasis back to Stone’s naiveté, his conviction that we’re each defined by one convenient-solvable skeleton in the closet. The American President has a more mature grasp of political and emotional currents and how they define and pervert one another. The personalities of George W. and his network of family and advisors (the same thing) have been boiled down to “personalities” in a fascinating yet dreadful stew of parody and empathy. Stone latches onto Bush’s perceived daddy issues and tediously refuses to shake it loose. Reveling in his empathy, Stone reaches too far and too shallow in the opposite direction. W. is the making of a monster movie, or, better yet, Wall Street (they share the same writer) with Bush cast as both the Michael Douglas and the Charlie Sheen characters. W. is a stilted, choppy, walled-off picture; an attempt to make sense of a string of government catastrophes and uncertainty that goes both too far and not far enough tonally. The picture only bites when Stone the hyperbolist occasionally, jarringly, surfaces: moments of George W. mowing through a burger like a shark - chewing, chewing, chewing; or with a priest, played by Stacy Keach no less, who would be more at home in an occult thriller.

Three types of filmgoers may go for W.: the indiscriminate, the Bush supporters clamoring for sympathy at the expense of drama, and the auteur theorists who enjoy phrases such as “flawed masterpiece” and do back-flips turning every movie by a name into a hidden classic. The intentional and the unintentional are difficult to sort out here, that’s a challenge with most any Stone film, and there is, admittedly, a subtext of super-star strangulation that gives this picture a chilling-funny under-layer. Incorporating a traditional assortment of old and new big names, Stone treats us to an uncomfortable sight - of magnetic actors squeezing and sweating to suppress their natural energy and light to fit convincingly into the political mannequin roles that we’ve grown too accustomed to seeing and hearing outside of the cinema. These actors’ contortions have an unsettling, dehumanizing effect – they (accidentally, I think) deconstruct the radiation given off by the political machine. W. is a bad movie, but its badness is harder to shake than most, more conventionally competent, films. Brolin? He reminded more of his father than of Bush, but his W. is the strongest part of W., a feat considering the likelihood of embarrassment involved in Stone’s conceit of the role. Josh Brolin is undoubtedly a major star now; he survived his first post-coming out movie intact, and found a charisma, conviction, and somehow authentically inauthentic heartache amongst the wreckage.

Genre pictures can be more honest than the A-list movies we pretend to like each year, because they have to appeal to our true wants and needs – the durability of their clichés testifies to what our true preoccupations are. Appaloosa is a one of the most purely enjoyable films I’ve seen this year, because it, without making a show of it, happily discards all the revisionist-apologetic bullshit that’s been plaguing the Western lately. The picture, directed by star Ed Harris, also, in its own way, reflects what W. fails to – our broken, violent frustration with a broken, violent thing. The first two acts are the usual (scary, well-staged, funny) genre huffing and puffing, but the third act, when the bad guy is caught only to buy his way out of it, hints at the political paranoia and resignation that haunts our television sets. Harris resolves his picture the genre way, but the finale is unexpectedly touching - the bad guy in question, played by a typically-wonderfully debauched, self-pleased Jeremy Irons, may be down, but a friendship has been destroyed; and that registers more than usual because Harris, in one of his best performances in years, has such a fine, unexpectedly warm, back-and-forth with an equally vivid Viggo Mortensen. This picture has a poignant, more modern than usual (again without applauding itself for it) attitude toward relationships, including Harris’ eventual romance with “the girl”, here played by Renee Zellweger, who betrays him every chance she gets. Appaloosa, a shoot ‘em up, is more profound than the labored, plastic W., it understands why we check out – we want the comfort we feel our leaders have forgotten we want.

Posted on October 18th, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, Western, 2008 |

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