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).

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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.