Saturday Night at the Movies: “Savages” (dueling reviews — digby vs dennis)

“Just because I’m telling you this story,” cautions the narrator in the opening scene of Oliver Stone’s Savages, “…doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it.” While this may conjure up visions of William Holden floating face down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard, this isn’t Hollywood hack Joe Gillis’ voice we’re listening to; rather it’s a young woman named “O” (Blake Lively). Blonde, Laguna Beach tanned, and, erm, quite “fit”, O could have materialized directly from Brian Wilson’s libido. However, hers is not a happy story of sun and surf…it’s a darker tale about guns and turf.

No stranger to dark tales about guns and turf, Stone takes the ball that novelist Don Winslow tossed him with his 2010 pot trade noir, and not only runs with it, but ratchets it up six ways from any given Sunday; transforming it into Scarface 2.0 for Millennials, with a touch of Jules and Jim. Indeed, it’s only five minutes before he has someone revving up a chainsaw (and not to cut wood). The power tools star in an exclusive (and gruesome) webcast targeting O’s two lovers, Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch). Ben and Chon are 20-something BFFs who run a thriving business selling weed touted “the best cannabis in the world.” It seems a Tijuana drug cartel, led by a ruthless widow (and prolific widow-maker) named Elena (a scenery-chewing Salma Hayek), wants a piece of their action. Her message is very clear: Use your head, or lose your head.

That sounds like a plan to Ben. A Berkeley alum with a business degree, he’s the brains; idealistic, California mellow, never fired a shot in anger, we can work this out, etc. His bud Chon, an ex-Navy SEAL, is the brawn. Fuck these guys, I’ve already got one in the chamber, let’s rock’n’roll, etc. He is also an Afghanistan war vet, with a few issues. As O helpfully clarifies in the voiceover, she “…has orgasms,” (when Chon makes love to her) whilst he “…has wargasms.” (And they said Sniglets were dead). Chon wants to call their bluff. After a meeting with Elena’s negotiator (Demian Bichir) ends in a stalemate, she sends in her enforcer, Lado (Benicio Del Toro) to use more “persuasive” methods. Ben and Chon do some brainstorming and continue to play for time, until Lado and his henchmen take O as a hostage. From that point, our intrepid duo decides that when Kush comes to shove, they will not be intimidated; so they proceed to call in some favors from the likes of a crooked DEA agent (John Travolta) and a few of Chon’s ex-SEAL buddies.

In real life, one suspects that Ben and Chon would end up starring in one of Elena’s snuff videos somewhere around the end of the first act (I’m not even sure they could locate their car after a Phish concert). I know… “It’s only a movie!” But I still advise that you be prepared to suspend disbelief regarding what ensues in this rote (if slickly made and beautifully photographed) Elmore Leonard-esque wannabe of double-crosses, triple-crosses, and ultimately, a lot of white crosses (although to be fair, Stone’s body count in this outing isn’t quite as high as it was in Natural Born Killers). All the Stone trademarks are here, except for the passion (not in the sense that he’s required to provide a political subtext in every movie, but that this is uncharacteristically joyless filmmaking). The cast does its best with woefully underwritten parts, but by the muddled third act, everyone’s acting in a different film. Travolta and Del Toro, who usually liven up things, regardless of script quality (especially when playing heavies) look too bored to even go for camp. None of the characters are particularly likable (even our “heroine” is a whiney ditz). Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the All-Star Dutch Treat quality of Showtime’s Weeds and AMC’s Breaking Bad, but this narrative (independent entrepreneur outwits the big bad cartel) has been done to death…and frankly, with considerably more originality and élan.

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

Savage twins

by digby

Let me say upfront that I’m a fan of Oliver Stone’s ouvre. I consider him to be one of the cinematic giants, so I go to all of his films with a sense of excited anticipation. This one didn’t let me down.

Dennis synopsized the plot in his review so I won’t take you through it again. Suffice to say that what he describes as a bit of plodding, not-even-good-enough-for-cable fluff, was to me a voluptuous, juicy slice of operatic pulp fiction with cinematic allusions galore, gorgeous people, beautiful scenery and a complex subtext about love, family and, of course, Stone’s favorite themes of duality and war.

Indeed, the film is about the drug war being a “real” war, and what that does to the people who are in it, particularly the men who fight it. It’s explicitly about the two sides of man’s nature and the constant battle between the saint and savior in all of us.(“O” even says of the two heroes, “together they are one man”) Revisiting once again the themes that animated his masterpiece Platoon, Stone delves into the perennial question: at what point do you fight? (Being an American liberal, it’s a question I often ask myself.) And once you go down that road, can you ever completely have yourself back?

The two female leads have a different duality, mother-daughter, youthful-aging, light and dark, hot and cool. As the film goes on, the black widow Drug “Queenpin” Hayek subtly becomes vulnerable, even idealistic, as the young beach goddess gets schooled in the ugly side of her idyllic, sun-soaked menage a trois. The two merge together in the desert, much as the two leading men do and become more human, more savage.

Mexican henchman Benicio Del Toro, oozing more than a touch of evil, and DEA agent John Travolta dripping with manipulative corruption are two sides of the same coin as well — mercenaries in the drug war, playing both sides. I thought both performances were as good as I’ve seen either of them play in years. Del Toro sports a magnificent pompadour contrasting (again) with Travolta’s bald pate and the two of them with equally riveting but wholly different eyes, relate to each other as old pals — the corrupt version of our two heroes, after the fall.

And then there’s the marijuana drug war — the most tragic duality of all. A benign herb that grows like a weed, never proven to cause harm, known to help people in pain, as the impetus for a form of bloody medieval violence that reflects, more often than is comfortable, our wars in the middle east. In the movie, the merging of the Iraq and Afghanistan tactics and the drug war in the southwestern desert was actually foreshadowed by the cartel’s beheadings, similar to the lurid Al Qaeda tapes and the killing of Daniel Pearl that horrified us after 9/11. Wars are wars. And the drug war is not a metaphor. It’s a real war, even more unnecessary and stupid than most.

Savages is beautifully filmed as Stone’s movies always are, but the editing was a bit more fluid, more classical than usual, even as the cinematography had the expected, and still exciting, melange of different stock, lighting and mood. It’s Oliver Stone’s signature and I would miss it if it weren’t there. Still, the film has a less frenetic feel than most of his work — a little touch of languid Bertolucci in the saturated, sunny look of the beach scenes and maybe a little homage to Welles in Benicio del Toro’s shadowy close-ups.

And keep in mind that all this is in the package of a beautiful, over-the-top, pulpy film noir in the Elmore Leonard vein — and despite all my film-schooly deconstruction above, this movie is just plain fun, which at this point in my jaded movie going life is a rare thing indeed.

So, here you have another duality. Dennis, with whom I learned to love film many years ago when we saw hundreds of movies together, thinks this one is boring and shallow. I think it’s one of the most entertaining and frankly, artistic, films I’ve seen in a long time. Waddaya gonna do?

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