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| From http://www.cinematoria.com/images/films/savages_2012/wallpapers/savages_2012-en-1-1920x850.jpg |
Dir. Oliver Stone
USA
A new review and something more
recent. In the last week especially, in just two days of viewing films released
last year, I’ve become more enamoured and optimistic about the quality of
cinema still in just three films. And, gasp, they were mainstream films like Skyfall (2012)! Even Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is more a mainstream work
because it’ll be more available than an obscure documentary about textiles from
Uzbekistan or something that actually exists to my knowledge. It shows my concerned
issues from before, that dangerously put me close to a snob, will always be about
the film culture surrounding the movies instead. That and the large percentage of
overrated films and those I should have avoided the moment I felt trepidation
that I viewed. I realise that, as this thought grows, that the concept I had
before becomes stronger as well. Do I qualify as a contrarian to the eyes of
the likes of Rolling Stone magazine
and The Guardian newspaper, or are
there issues to be brought up of the damning of Oliver Stone’s new film that’s taken place? Before I get into the
meat of the review, it becomes clearer that the need for self consciousness in
one’s self is required. A film critic is supposed to teach the reader as well
as recommend things to them, but as anyone who has gone through education should
realise, as I did at university but could be learnt as far back as a child in
primary school, it’s that for an education to work the student (the hobbyist,
the fan, the scholar etc.) must be taught (and teach themselves) to think for
themselves even if it means questioning the Master, to borrow the symbology
from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, to
get there. To think for oneself allows skills to increase, and knowledge to
have a use, while allowing you to separate yourself from herd thinking. Looking
at Savages, and thinking about it,
one wonders if it’s as much a cheap shot at Taylor
Kitsch again (after John Carter [Of
Mars] (2012) and Battleship (2012)),
and the sense that Oliver Stone is no
longer the ‘cool’ director loved in the eyes of popular film fads, that has
coloured the apparent negative reviews of the film.
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| From http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/30400000/Savages-2012-upcoming-movies-30420931-725-463.jpg |
Oliver Stone can be divisive for me. Some of his films I’ve seen
are failures, but he made Platoon (1986)
which is a great work. Savages is an
interesting borderline between his political and sociological dissections, of
the process of negotiations and methodical pacing, and the more erratic, and
contextually and visually more confrontational works like Natural Born Killers (1994) and U-Turn (1997). The two sides create a perfect bed for the content,
easy to dismiss as a generic thriller with a winking tone, but far more of a
complicated animal I will praise Stone,
co-script writer Shane Salerno, and
author of the original novel it is based on Don
Winslow for. When they reject the partnership with a Mexican cartel, the
incredibly successful duo of pot merchants Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor
Kitsch) find that their shared love of their life O (Blake Lively) has been kidnapped by the group as a ransom and fight
fire with fire in return. What could have been a generic, one note story of
good and handsome heroes rescuing a damsel in distress from evil Mexican drug
dealers is a far more layered, dense work. What I have had to learn as well is
that, as much as I champion innovatively made films when I feel they deserve it,
I have learnt how exhilarating it is to see well worn tropes, in plot, structure
and tone, given freshness and richness through craftsmanship and a distinctiveness
as seen in this film. It started with weariness for me at first with Lively’s constant narration over the
first few scenes, fearing it would be an incredibly empty, ‘hip’ crime story,
but it sinks in early on how no one in this film is clean-cut and morally
black-and-white. Many films are like this, but Savages actually enforces this idea fully, staring back at you
about this issue sternly as you follow its intentionally lurid, rush of
theatrics it is playing out in its hands. Even if Lado (Benicio del Toro) the cartel’s heavy is a monster who assaults his
wife and does sadistic things, the fact that early on we see him at a son’s
baseball game as a dysfunctional father does not let the viewer get away scot-free
from being on equal grounds with all the characters. As Chon keeps telling his
friend Ben repeatedly, they will always have to resort to violence eventually
and the world ‘changes you’, and Stone
emphasises this. The well worn clichés and expected beats, because of the
methodical tone of the film, are scrutinised – the corrupt FBI agent (John Travolta) is a family man with a
dying wife and some semblance of consciousness still in him, the psychopathic
Lado and all the Mexican cartel are human beings with families, and the loss of
innocence for Ben and Chon, from the director of Platoon, and their transformation to mirror reflections of the
other side is more apparent, as “Savages.”
is used by both sides at the other at least once each. Ben’s Buddhist
influenced desire to help the world is sincere and praisable, but that his best
friend Chon, a former soldier in Afghanistan, has to be an enforcer to collect
money from people who didn’t pay up shows that, long before the violence that
takes place, he was already exhibiting the crippling flaw of hypocrisy that he
doesn’t even recognise in himself.
Then there are the
non-conventional aspects of the film. The pan sexuality of Ben and Chon, that O
shares them as lovers and that, beneath it all, they love each other just as
much, or more so, plays a fascinating (and applaudable) card of knocking over
gender and sexual stereotypes from the creators of the film while emphasising
the bond of the protagonists and adding to the script’s complexities. That this
aspect isn’t made an upfront part of the narrative in a patronising,
half-hearted liberal way shows a skill and greater subversiveness from everyone
involved including Kitsch and Johnson in the roles. Also significant
is that the leader of the Mexican cartel, the lord who presides over the riches
with a bloody fist, is a woman, a mother in fact. Playing Elena, Salma Hayek is beautiful, even more so
now as an older woman, but that also brilliantly by her in her performance and Stone’s part adds to the character. The expected
gender roles of a woman to be followed in a patriarchal society – the doting
mother who looks after the home, the paradox of the beautiful, sensual siren
hybrided with the faithful widow who never remarries and has flings – are melded
with statuses usually assigned to male archetypes. Elena is also the sole home
figure (and breadwinner) in a family where most of the men were killed, the
businessman, the leader, the boss, the bloodthirsty, the ends-justify-the-means
brutalist who, to survive the precipice her group is near, deems it needed to
behead opponents with chainsaws through the likes of Lado and has the footage
sent to white, pot selling, naive surfer-types to frighten them into becoming
business partners for her and her extended family to last. The mother estranged
from her daughter emphasises a far deeper use of stock characters by her
position within the characterisation. It is fitting, learning of this in
university classes, looking back at this film through the knowledge that, at
least in Britain before the twentieth century, there were housewives who, far
from flimsy submissive creatures, had control of everything in the house (especially
finances and what was done inside the home) and likely had far more control of
the family than the husband. Elena is the mother who, having taken the cartel
over after her husband’s death, proceeds to manage it as carefully and fully as
she can, regardless of the carnage and its dwindling future. That this is furthered
in making her captive O a quasi-daughter to her more sympathetic and thoughtful
to her than her real one is to her shows a compelling dramatic licence that is
sadly absent from films which were praised to the heavens, unlike this, but
even to my virginal twenty three year old mind, were the creations of cynical
hollowism, crass one-dimensional characters and unbearable whinging to the
material.
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The only potential issue I had
with Savages is its ending which
pulls the rug from under the viewer. It is wonderfully abrasive, but my issue
with it at first, rather than being angry with it being a cop-out, was that not
so long before it a gruesome plot point is introduced between O and Lado, who
paws over the captive hostage constantly, that could make the ending queasy in
the wrong way, as if ignoring the weight of what was introduced. Preparing for
this review however, I reread the Sight
& Sound review of the film by Nick
Pinkerton that made me interested in the film (October 2012, Volume 22,
Issue 10 for those interested), and a point he makes is that her narration is “selectively omniscient, occasionally unreliable”
and while I won’t call her a “sybaritic
sun-worshipper with a THC-soaked brain” like he did, she is just as
compliant in the events that take place. A true victim of unjustified
brutality, she nonetheless - emphasised (on purpose?) by Lively’s physical appearance, close to the tween high school girl fetishisation
that, while not her fault at all in any way, is becoming a fad with male
fantasies and Hollywood cinema – is also a blasé rich girl who, for her clear
sincerities, is also ignorant. With a lack of concentration likely caused, as
Elena states, from smoking pot since eighth grade, she fails to realise the
obvious and tragic coincidence, when Ben and Chon resort to more extreme
tactics, and how they mirror her captors’ behaviour. A man as intelligent,
talented and skilled as Stone,
regardless of his failures, would not put a disturbing plot point into a film
and seem to shrug it off afterwards; it becomes obvious that, along with the
carpet pull twist ending, that it, along with the violence beforehand, is supposed
to leave an unclosed, festering wound in the viewer’s mind to stop them from
forgetting the film and remind them of the ideas beneath the gunfire.
Fittingly, after the compelling
but ultimate failing of Natural Born
Killers, Stone melds its
aesthetic with a strong core this time, director of photography Dan Mindel creating retina burning
images and composer Adam Peter
combining spaghetti western guitar riffs to pulsating electronica, a foundation
that proves that great genre and pulp material can convey universal ideas of
humanity more thoroughly than serious dramas. With one side ingeniously using
their image of themselves from America, of gardeners and immigrants, to their
advantage, alongside ruthlessness, against California types with ex-marine
tactics and computer hacking, it allows Stone
to prod American culture thoroughly. But it also allows him, even for a man
like myself who has never held a gun let alone see a person die in front of my
eyes, as someone who lived through the Vietnam War, to show that even if
violence is necessary at times, it still means that your enemy is a human being
who becomes a pile of blood and organs with a pull of a trigger. In hindsight
to the first paragraph, it will be films that can do this that can keep me
optimistic for current cinema rather than pine in a nostalgia I wasn’t born into.
It must however involve questioning the mass consensus through my continuous
education, causing one to view film opinion as idiosyncratic forks of personal
opinion, as well as fact, and taking advantage of that. Hence, I’m going to
have to defend Savages in a
lengthier review like this because it brought these thoughts out from me.
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Another film covered by this duo. I do believe, like a lot of film fans, that they are underrated and far more interesting than many other film makers that work in the same genre in terms of presentation and content of their work. I'll argue Gamer is the most rewarding film they've made for the reasons stated in the review. I only wished that they'll be working on another film again, but after Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012), we may have to wait a while for that sadly.
