Oliver Stone’s film career throws up immense paradoxes. He approaches
big issues as a pulp-fiction guy, brings a kinetic sense of visuals to documentary
style material and follows the rules of melodrama even as he
inserts pulp metaphysics into his stories. His films mix a fiercely moral
overview with indulgence, excess and sleaze. As a result, few directors are
simultaneously so idolised and reviled.
His admirers see him as a crusading voice of courage almost uniquely
committed to a cinema engaged with political issues. He is admired as a daring
craftsman whose visuals entice and whose experiments with editing and
formats break new ground and allow him to make entertainment out of
ideas.
He is also seen as a crackpot polemicist, an exploiter of sleaze, a maleoriented
director unable to avoid objectifying women even in films about
them. He is criticised as ham-fisted, loading pretentious visuals with obvious
correlatives to the story and playing tricks with editing and technology
simply to stay ahead of the cutting edge of pop videos. He is known for creating
tension and conflict on his sets, yet he has also elicited some of the
great performances of the past two decades, as well as surprising turns from
character actors and a number of fine early performances from people who
went on to greater things. Anthony Hopkins called him “the best director I
ever worked with…he’s a loose cannon like Orson Welles—he’s daring.”
Stone’s image in the popular imagination as a controversial conspiracy
nut has become so automatic a response that he even played himself in the
Presidential comedy Dave, appearing on CNN as the only person in America
who believed (correctly, of course) that Kevin Kline was actually an
impostor. American network news regularly uses his name to deride any
suggestion of conspiracy or double-dealing by the political establishment.
But the man who courts controversy has also been at the forefront of
Hollywood’s conscience. Stone harks back to an earlier era when Hollywood
was enraptured by what David Thomson described as its belief “it can
turn complex ideas and problems into crowd-pleasing movies.” Films today
have abdicated much of that function, leaving it to made-for-TV movies, but
Stone has kept it alive. His films are ‘big’ in the sense that they attack
issues—and Stone is adept at catching the crest of an issue’s wave.
Salvador anticipated America’s awareness of the depth and viciousness
of Reaganite unlawfulness in Central America; Wall Street’s release
appeared to be synchronised to the market’s crash; the shock jocks of Talk
Radio now hold court on American network news programmes; even Natu8
ral Born Killers could not have imagined tabloid TV bottom-feeder Geraldo
Rivera grabbing a pistol and heading off to Afghanistan to personally kick
some Talibutt.
The phrase “Oliver Stone’s America” has been used frequently by critics
analysing Stone’s work but the equation might better be inverted, to see
Stone as very much a quintessentially American artist, America’s Oliver
Stone. He is a cinematic version of the young Thomas Wolfe, a comparison
intensified by the 1997 publication of his early novel A Child’s Night
Dream. His early scripts grew out of his ambitions as a young novelist, full
of the sort of bubbling energy and intellectual Manifest Destiny which
assumes the world is out there to be analysed, understood and conquered,
and the defining sense that once you’ve been to Vietnam you can never go
home again.
Stone is a child of the privileged 1950s America. But,...