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Armond White: An Oliver Stone Retrospective in Savages

Armond White — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 20:31:16 +0000

Oliver Stone’s cinematic command turns Savages, his 19th film, into a reconsideration of his entire previous oeurve. Its story of three white California-carefree progeny whose post-hippie, post-yuppie initiative into the drug trade conflicts with a Mexican cartel recalls Stone’s past hits: the martyred youth Vietnam saga Platoon, the hyperbolic satire Natural Born Killers, the noir-sinister U-Turn and the drug dramas he wrote but did not direct Midnight Express, 8 Million Ways to Die and the epochal 1983 Scarface.

Stone is as much an aesthete as Terrence Malick, deliberately manipulating fancy cinematic grammar to stimulate viewers’ awareness. But he’s also politically attuned, a different motivation than mere “social-consciousness” which suggests a concern for contemporary issues of community interaction and public welfare. Stone, a political gadfly, likes to examine wayward social behavior, especially implicating his protagonists: The high-living menage a trois in Savages waste their privileges like trophy chick Ophelia (Blake Lively), their intelligence like Ben (Aaron Johnson) who devises high THC-level weed then barters it hypocritically, ignoring the mercilessness learned from warped military experience by his Afghanistan-vet partner Chon (Taylor Kitsch).

These spoiled products of their generation are contrasted with Mexican drug lords Lado (Benecio del Toro) and Elena (Selma Hayek) who also pursue privilege but with a ruthless, self-conscious sense of power; they’re hungry for what the Cali kids take for granted. It’s hard to think of another American movie that so sharply conveys the difference between the haves and have-nots. Stone doesn’t go for naïve Occupy petulance. In Savages, Stone depicts the cultural fallout of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the recent history of international disparity. He breezily, boldly outlines race, class differences but also the U.S. and third-world’s common ruthlessness. The sequence of Ophelia shopping at the Sun Coast Galleria unaware of the indulgent cartel princess–Magda (Sandra Echeverria)–alongside her is as brilliant as the earrings montage in Stone’s underrated Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Both American and Mexican characters refer to each other as “savages,” uninterested in the corrupted mores they share. Stone dares to illustrate this cutthroat comedy with a prodigious cinematic wit, though toned down from his usual extravagance–leaving the avant-garde extreme to Neveldine-Taylor. Having already shot-the-moon in Natural Born Killers, he goes for a more mature, post-9/11 sense of horror–yet this is where Stone’s own aesthetic irony gets confused with his characters’ moral chaos, a genre glitch. (His double ending is less effective than the ironic endings of Death Race and Chronicle).

To read the full article at City Arts click here.

Oliver Stone’s New Media Experiment: Savages

City Arts — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:02:15 +0000

By John Demetry for City Arts

First Penn Jillette’s passionate and principled radio attack on the racism and classism of Obama’s War on Drugs went viral, bringing politics to YouTube. Now, Oliver Stone uses the internet platform to bring art to advertising for Savages, his new dramatic film about marijuana trafficking opening July 6. Art is the necessary extension of Jillette’s persuasive reasoning. In Week 1 of Savages – Interrogation Series, Stone (who wrote Brian De Palma’s 1983 Scarface) suggests the human cost of the criminal world wrought by prohibition.

In these short clips–a web exclusive–an authority figure (voiced off-screen by Stone) interrogates the film’s cast, who respond in character. The technique plays like a method-acting improv exercise, but it builds intrigue–and social vision–because the actors are playing people whose participation in the criminal underworld forces them to be liars (to improvise). Selma Hayek’s Elena conveys an imperial will behind maternal justifications, Aaron Johnson’s Ben employs a network of deflective tics, Taylor Kitsch’s Chon seduces, and Blake Lively’s Ophelia chooses to be cutely vague (“He works with plants”). Benicio Del Toro’s Lado–an assassin wearing a death mask–mocks their collective spiritual alienation: “I wish I was a lizard.”

Stone uses fragments from Savages to contextualize or contradict the actor’s responses in rear-projection (a technique begun in Natural Born Killers (1994)). This dialectic of perspectives–disingenuous character and cinematic p.o.v.–analyzes the personal and ideological economy of the black market: drugs, money, violence, opulence (like the view of Ben’s ocean-side condo he attributes to an inheritance). The classism of Obama’s hypocritical flippancy actually reflects the same value system (materialism, ambition, power) that compels the drug trade–and that drives consumers to the numbing salve of its product (“You don’t sell marijuana?” / “No, but I smoke quite a bit of it”).

To read the full article at City Arts click here.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

admin — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 17:17:14 +0000

By Armond White

Not a zeitgeist filmmaker, Oliver Stone is, rather, our swiftest, most politically responsive filmmaker, and those attributes make Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps dazzling. It’s less a sequel to the 1987 stock-trading drama Wall Street (where Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko articulated the 1980s mantra “Greed is Good”) than it is a lightening-quick assessment of our current economic disaster. Rather than celebrating our confusion, Stone resurrects Gekko—here released from more than a decade in prison—and through him examines the still ruthless and corrupt financial system.

Rich people don’t ride the subway. Losers.

Nothing changes in the corridors of power, but since Wall Street, Stone has become a masterly filmmaker. No one edits plot, behavior and atmosphere more splendidly. In Money Never Sleeps, he links middle-aged Gekko’s comeback with hot-shot upstart Jake Moore (Shia LaBoeuf), who schemes to combat the double-crossing tycoon Bretton James (Josh Brolin) while proposing marriage to Gekko’s daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), a crusading blogger. All the while Stone depicts Moral Hazard, the affluent, unquestioned license of our technocratic, celebritocracy. This is the glamorous, seething world that Steven Soderbergh couldn’t quite grasp in the hastily improvised yet shallow The Girlfriend Experience.

Stone has refined his creative energy and focuses on being a mythmaker of giants as in Alexander and his series of presidential epics JFK, Nixon and W. Few filmmakers have such a magisterial filmography or an impulse to understand contemporary American experience through its leaders. Not even Jonathan Franzen’s highly-lauded zeitgeist novel Freedom boasts more resonant cultural details than Stone. From the ironies of black and Latino ex-cons who have moved up on their terms to astonishing surveys of the post-9/11 New York skyline, Rodrigo Prieto’s camera virtually strokes the gleaming, phallic skyscrapers. In an instant-classic Museum of Natural History fundraiser sequence, Stone crafts a montage of assorted rich womens’ ostentatious earrings. This film pinpoints greed and luxe as no other movie ever has: America shimmers on the edge of apocalypse—like a bubble about to burst.

Each major character is defined in personal terms, yet it’s Money Never Sleeps’ sociological microscope that is most impressive. The details in Stone’s script (co-written with Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) are rich until it succumbs to less fascinating, individual foibles. Replaying the mentor/protégé tension of Wall Street (probably for commercial safety) traps Stone into the LaBeouf-Mulligan subplot. He’s an aggressive twerp and she’s weepy; still, it makes no sense that Gekko’s daughter lacks all cunning. Instead, this should have simply been a battle of giants—those Wall Street bulls and bears who hold the government hostage in shadowy Federal Reserve meetings out of The Godfather. Frank Langella as Jake’s mourned father figure and Brolin’s elegantly venal Bretton James give compelling strength to these devious titans. Prieto’s camera looks into these men’s pores. The film peaks when Brolin’s Bretton says he simply aims for “More.” It’s a superb moment; you could linger in its precise perception of Moral Hazard. Money Never Sleeps isn’t an epic masterpiece like Stone’s World Trade Center, but it’s often amazingly vivid.

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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Directed by Oliver Stone
Runtime: 136 min