The 25: Part 7: JFK

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)



Finally.

Believe it or not I wanted to do this Cinematic Autobiography more or less continuously. But life does have a nasty habit of getting in the way. The reason its taking me so long, is that, I really am making an effort to revisit these films before writing them up. Especially the ones like today’s title which I haven’t seen in awhile. But that’s just the thing, have you ever tried to just “pencil in” a screening of JFK? Try fitting it into your morning before work some time, its only a three and a half hour paranoid rant, it should fly by.

It might seem an odd choice, but I’m writing up JFK because it is the first, consciously “adult” film I can remember seeing. This holds a certain irony as Stone is regarded today as a profoundly adolescent filmmaker. In the sixth grade I took a powerful interest in the Kennedy Assassination (You try being Irish Catholic in America and not) and a teacher, secure enough in his tenure to lend a twelve year old boy at a Catholic School, a film which prominently featured a Gay Orgy (The teacher is still teaching so I believe I will omit their name, and say merely, “Thanks”). It wasn’t just the “mature content” that made the film different, it was that the film was “serious”. Up to that time film was still just entertainment, but here’s one that burned with something to prove. I never knew film could be used that way.

Oliver Stone is a filmmaker so powerfully out of vogue now that its almost hard to remember that there was a time when he was considered one of the most important filmmakers in the world. I’ve spoken about my feelings of Stone before. But to briefly rehash, the run of films from Salvador to Nixon is pretty much perfect in my mind. And while he has spent a lot of that good will in unworthy places in the past decade or so, people seem to have been far to willing to through out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to Stone. His modern films may be embarrassing, and Platoon might be a little long in tooth, but he’s still a vibrant vital filmmaker who has made America confront some harsh truths about itself. And JFK might be his masterpiece

Those who harp on the films factual inaccuracies and lurid sensationalist tone miss the point entirely. Like its protagonist, the film claws at the fragments left in the aftermath, knowing that it connects somehow but missing those last little pieces that would make it hold together. Its not that the film reveals the truth, but the fact that it, Like Ellroy’s excellent American Trilogy articulates the feeling that SOMETHING happened damn it. The idea that it has to add up somehow. The idea lodged in the American conscience that The Kennedy assassination was nothing less then a coup. And that since then America has been changed in a fundamental way. It may not tell us what really happen, but it convincingly shreds the case that the government’s story is a true one, showing it to be nothing but a collection of lies and misinformation. As Roger Ebert put it, it’s a film that screams “Murder” at the top of its lungs.

In a lot of ways JFK is a different film now then it was in 1991. The JFK conspiracy is in its own way as much of the Clinton era as Grunge Rock, Friends and well Oliver Stone himself. One only needs to watch the films of Richard Linklater or listen to Bill Hicks to know what a pervasive chunk of the American psyche it took up. But Conspiracy theories themselves, have morphed (I recently rewatched the first X Files Movie and was greatly amused to see that a big part of the plot hinges on the fact that FEMA will take over the country). They’re no long a bastion of leftists and libertarians worried about what happened at Waco. Now they are more the hallmark of the increasingly paranoid Loose Changers and the raving delusions of the Tea Partiers.


Stone’s bracing often parodied style, of mixing film stocks and formats, has never been better employed then here. Thanks in large part to Stone’s not so secret weapon of Robert Richardson, who seems to be finally getting his dues as perhaps the best working cinematographer today. Those who dismiss the style as a tic, or “acid flashback light” miss the point. The style is disconcerting, it does draw attention to itself, thowing different stocks and styles as quickly as the characters throw out facts, coincidences and connections and it leaves us, like the characters with no place to stand. It’s the world viewed through a kaleidoscope.

And standing at the center is Costner. This is Costner at the heart of his greatness, before Waterworld, The Postman, and even to a certain extent Prince Of Thieves, took the glow off his golden boy image. When he seemed not a vain, pretentious, jackass with a CGI hairline, but the reincarnation of Gary Cooper. A Boy scout straight symbol of Americana at its best. Using that symbolism against the government was a powerful statement. He makes Jim Garrison a figure of quiet decency, as American as Jimmy Stewart eating a slice of apple pie.

Stone was smart to cast him in the part. Stone’s eye for casting has long been one of his most unappreciated gifts, and perhaps its never been better then here. The film is loaded with stars, but it never feels like an overstuffed star vehicle ala Stanley Kramer. Instead everyone; Gary Oldman’s ghostly Oswald, Michael Rooker as Costner’s shady number two man, Tommy Lee Jones’ sinister aristocratic Clay Shaw, Kevin Bacon’s facist, gay, Nixon loving hustler (a phrase I bet you didn’t think you’d read today), Joe Pesci’s paranoid commando, hell even John Candy gives a great performance as a corrupt hipster New Orleans Lawyer. Even seemingly superfluous cameos by the likes of Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon prove invaluable, in giving the movie credibility. Want to sell the idea that American Government is guilty of regicide? Put it in the mouths of Hollywood icons.

JFK is certainly a flawed film, particularly in its director’s cut, which takes a film that wasn’t exactly svelte in the first place and turns it downright flabby. But it remains an arresting one, both in its imagery and ideas. It was a fitting baptism into the ambitious and sometimes unsatisfying world of adult cinema.

U-Turn

I’d never seen U-Turn. I’d always heard it was the film where Stone really went off the rails (Is there a director this side of Argento to suffer a more powerful loss of mojo?) so I never bothered with it.

Much to my surprise I found this not to be the case. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why this movie is to put it politely an acquired taste. Its about as grotesque as films come. But Jesus man, it just moves.

Oliver Stone is now a filmmaker powerfully out of vogue. At least partially by his own fault. Stone’s spent the last ten years making some powerfully bad movies, whether they be the sad self mockery of Any Given Sunday, the muddled mess that was WTC (which to be fair had the misfortune to come right after United 93 made it a dinosaur), and lets not get started on whatever the fuck Alexander was. Even W. The least terrible movie of the past ten years fumbled because it split the difference between a Black Comedy and serious consideration of the Bush years and ended up making an unsatisfying version of both (Not that the Bush administration wasn’t a black comedy).

Still despite all of this I feel he’s undervalued. From Salvador to Nixon, he has an unbroken run of what to my mind at least are some pretty righteous films. Films like Nixon and JFK are overblown but they’re ambitious, and thrum with a real life. Talk Radio and Heaven On Earth are brute compact little punches of films. And even if his would be classics Born On The Fourth Of July, Wall Street and Platoon are both a bit long in tooth, they remain effective if clumsy films. Natural Born Killer’s remains an underrated film. Effective not because of its violence but what it says about or reaction and Appetite for violence. I’ll take it over Funny Games any day of the week.

Well add U-Turn to the list of winners. Like I said, on many levels U-Turn is a horrifying film. Revolting on an almost physical level. Its like the unholy love child between Jim Thompson and Ralph Steadman. Call it Peyote Noir.

The film starts as Penn cruises the American Southwest in a mustang convertible. On his way to give a payoff to the Gangster in Las Vegas who has been chopping off his fingers. His car breaks down and he makes the mistake of taking it to the worlds most repugnant car mechanic in the world, Billy Bob Thorton.

Thorton who you of course know as the world’s most covetous Tom Petty fan, is just jaw dropping ugly. Rotted Teeth, dirty glasses, hairy navel, caked in so much filth its tough to comprehende. And you better get used to it, as everyone in the film looks that way. Thorton next meets John Voight’s Blind Vietnam Vet Indian (thus fulfilling so many Stone fetishes at once, its shocking that the man’s head didn’t explode) and in case you where wondering, yes we do get many lingering, loving slow motion close-ups of his viscous saliva dribbling from his chin.

I never thought I’d write this but its almost a relief when J. Lo shows up, and there’s something on screen that doesn’t hurt to actually look at. She’s surprisingly entertaining making a good femme fatale, especially in the last reels.

But she’s married to Nick Nolte, who brings a new level of fucked up to the movie. Like an alcholic Jaudiced Bear shaking off the DTs, he looks like he’s spent every moment prior to the movie in a living hell. After beating the shit out of Penn he tries to hire him to kill his wife. After Penn loses the money he owes the gangsters in circumstances too good to spoil, the offer seems attractive.

U-Turn has one hell of a cast, not only Sean Penn, coyote lean and desperate, Nick Nolte, Voight (This is back when you said, “Oh Good John Voight is in this, not “Oh Shit John Voight is in this) Thorton. But Powers Boothe as the man whose either Penn’s guardian angel or his final doom, and a maniac Claire Danes and Joaquin Phoenix, who play people who apparently roll around all day playing as a psychotic Lil Abner and Daisy May (A swipe at Tarantino perhaps? Who signaled the end of Stone’s kind of ultra modernist filmmaking even before their epic clashes on NBK). Danes and Phoenix are both people who you don’t exactly think of comic genius (Danes is still very sad that Patsy Cline is dead), but both play their rolls to a hilt, Tex Avery Characters reanimated by Steadman.

U Turn proceeds not so much as a story but as a serious of hideous and unfortunate events. Sean Penn plays the kind of character who can’t even buy a beer without having it bite him right in the ass.

Look Stone haters will hate this film. Virtually everything that annoys people about this director, The Indian fetish, the differing film stock (Shot with a true Gonzo insanity by the great Robert Richardson), guttural sound design, and fierce schiziophenic excess, is not only present, but amplified to a sort of horrific overdrive in a way that not even the bat shit insane Doors and Alexander did.

Still I can’t help but find U-Turn a repellently facisnating. Its like something found under a rock. Maybe you should have better sense then to stare at it, but damn it its really something.