Oliver Stone (1997)

We turned off before the end but Wikipedia’s account of the plot suggests that we missed no great surprises.  (We’d have turned off sooner but for a misunderstanding.  When I asked Sally if she’d had enough, she said she didn’t mind seeing what happened.  It turned out she said this only because she assumed I was keen to carry on – in fact, I’d given up on the film after half an hour.)

The fact that all three of the main characters end up dead is an indication of the jocose heartlessness of U-Turn, which Oliver Stone adapted from a novel (Stray Dogs) with its author John Ridley.   Sally said at one point that this was Oliver Stone trying to make a David Lynch film.  The stupefied but sinister, middle-of-nowhere setting – the small town of Superior, Arizona, where the protagonist Bobby Cooper finds himself trapped after his car breaks down – and its population of variously discomfiting oddballs sound like Lynch; but Stone’s signature crudeness turns anything he tries his hand at into what can only be an Oliver Stone picture.  He’s an auteur, no denying it.  U-Turn is frequently violent and the violence is oppressively stupid but Stone’s lack of artistry makes it quickly forgettable too.    Whereas David Lynch might have made the town’s malignity insinuating and polymorphous, Stone establishes it obviously, without resonance or implication.   Just in the course of the opening titles, with Cooper driving along the freeway, there’s a cut to vultures picking at the corpse of what looks like a coyote; another snarling animal rears up in front of Cooper’s car and he runs it over.  In this part of the world, all the wild life has baleful potential – even the victims – and the human beings are part of the wild life.  Later on, there are shots of rattlesnakes and of stuffed animal heads mounted on walls.  They’re not integrated with the action, never things you happen to glimpse momentarily or unsettlingly:  alive or dead, they’re all on display.  They might as well be still photographs (although Robert Richardson’s camerawork can be hyperactive too), each one labelled ‘Symbolic specimen of menacing local fauna’.

The film could work only as a triumph of style and Oliver Stone has no style.   I don’t like his more ambitious pictures but that ambition seems cherishable while you’re watching U-Turn:  when Stone applies his undeniable brutal energy to material as thin as this, the results are cloddishly grotesque (and dull).  His infection of the more talented people involved in the film is evident in the jaunty nihilism of Ennio Morricone’s score and the self-indulgent, overemphatic caricatures supplied by Billy Bob Thornton (as a leering, malignant garage mechanic), Jon Voight (a relentlessly philosophical blind man) and Claire Danes (an all-stops-out airhead, who can’t understand why Patsy Cline stopped making records).  In spite of the way she does the part (or the way she’s been encouraged to do it), Danes has a lovely vivacity that makes the character she’s playing less intolerable than she ought to be.  As her pathologically possessive boyfriend Tony N Tucker (TNT), Joaquin Phoenix’s looks make him almost comically distinguished in this setting.  Phoenix is pretty average when he’s playing angry here but he’s funny in the moments when TNT crumbles into cravenness.  Nick Nolte has dynamic wit to spare as the psychotic Jake, who asks Cooper to kill his wife, but Nolte is particularly disadvantaged by Stone’s literal-minded approach:  this actor is menacing enough without Stone’s shooting him in bellowing, glaring close-up to establish menace.  As the wife, Jennifer Lopez has more presence than I expected.

The script’s few attempts at verbal humour are hopeless. Billy Cooper arrives on the scene with a bandaged left hand and everyone he meets asks what happened to it.  He says, ‘I had an accident’, and they reply, ‘You wanna be more careful’.   This running joke isn’t much good on the first repetition (because it’s played purely as a gag – without threat) and it’s desperate the fourth or fifth time.  Unless I was paying even less attention than I realised, Stone and Ridley reach the same conclusion and drop it eventually.

Most of the interest in U-Turn comes from Sean Penn as Billy Cooper.  Early on, his transitions from cocky to vulnerable, from sullen to soulful, are impressively effortless and get you wondering about the character and his past.   Unfortunately, Stone inserts splinters of flashback into Cooper’s mind – to the physically gruelling experiences that have sent him on his interrupted journey to California – so often that it soon becomes clear that Penn will never get through a scene without these interruptions and you start to lose interest.  Penn has a tendency to overdo anguished aggression if the director isn’t careful (as in Mystic River); Oliver Stone, of course, can’t get enough of this.  There are moments when Cooper’s cursing reaction to yet one more thing going wrong for him in this hellhole are amusing; but there are times too when Sean Penn seems to going through the motions.   Yet in one sequence Cooper’s desperate need to escape the place and Penn’s explosive, yelling frustration are fused and transmitted – in a way that’s shocking and which registers more strongly than any of the actual physical violence – to a woman in the ticket office of the local bus station, well played by Laurie Metcalf.  It’s the best scene in (what I saw of) the picture.  It would be better still if Stone hadn’t shot and scored it in a style that underlines, quite unnecessarily, what the actors are already, fully communicating.

23 July 2009