U Turn
Sometimes even the greatest of directors can be known to stretch their wings and attempt to fly in a new direction. Even when said director is one whose work has already been considered on a regular basis to be the best of his generation. Such a director is Oliver Stone, whose output throughout much of the 80s and 90s was that of a relevatory look at certain issues and events such as Vietnam (Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July, Heaven And Earth), The Kennedy Assassination (JFK), and media corruption (Natural Born Killers). Even his movie about The Doors was innovative and inspired enough to ensure that the band’s music and legacy would live on with future generations to come while many of their contemporaries have since been relegated to the oldies pile. Stone’s artistic specialty in most if not all of these works was his hyperkinetic, almost fever dream style, punctuated by fantastic editing, cinematography, and a willingness to get the viewer lost in a sort of hallucinogenic pseudo reality even while in the process of portraying real life events. In 1997, with his reputation firmly entrenched in Hollywood, Stone decided to return to his roots, that of a lower budgeted horror / exploitation filmmaker and make something that on the surface seemed hopelessly sleazy, but is really just an overblown, perhaps purposely falsely realized look at small town America and the broken, psychotic psyches underneath the surface that nonetheless still comes across as being merely a chance for him to make something that would have seemed right at home on a drive in double bill a long time ago. To that end, he managed to attract a top flight, A list cast (most of whom surely signed up based solely on the prospect of working with Oliver Stone himself) and set to work on something that combined elements of film noir, black comedy, and straight up exploitation, but at times Stone also seems to be summoning the spirit of another innovative filmmaker in one David Lynch, assembling an oddball cast of characters and using quick cuts of flashbacks at various times to show the battering ram effect of what is going on in these various people’s minds. The film stars Sean Penn (a guy who is barely passable when playing a character who is SUPPOSED to be likable, so in that regard he was well cast here) as Bobby Cooper, a former tennis pro turned instructor who unfortunately has just had two of his fingers forcibly removed by The Russian Mafia over unpaid gambling debts. Playing what is in essence a sniveling little weasel who will do anything to get by and just happens to be having a bad day here, Penn is ideal in this role, as those who already despise him for his politics or for his siding with despicable people in real life can find themselves disliking him here all they want and yet still enjoying the movie, with his character spending much of the running time sustaining usually very minor injuries which serve as being more of a nuisance rather than anything that actually lays him out. Driving through the Arizona desert with a bag full of money on him while heading to Vegas in order to pay off the mobsters, Penn has the misfortune of having his radiator blow out on him, forcing him to tool the car to the nearest small town he could find and leaving his car in the care of a redneck mechanic played by Billy Bob Thornton for whom the words “nightmare caricature” would surely be an understatement. In fact, despite his sporadic appearances throughout the film where he makes it a habit of constantly “renegotiating” his prices, it is Thornton who actually best captures the spirit of the whole film itself, with his bad teeth, pronounced gut, and eternally dirty face, constantly spouting moronic bon mots of philosophy and aggressively standing his ground against the ever more frustrated and hot tempered Penn, Thornton easily makes the biggest impression here playing a character who could very well have had his own horror franchise / spinoff as a kind of demonic mechanic type who knows full well his legal rights as an (unethical) small business owner and who always seems to send his unlucky customers on to an even worse fate than having to deal with him. Once Penn fully wanders into the little town itself, both he (and us) are rather awestruck at both the deadbeat, desolate nature of the place and also at the rather odd and untrustworthy denizens who live within, starting with the requisite local homeless man (an almost unrecognizable Jon Voight) who serves as sort of a prophet of doom for Penn upon encountering him but who would also appear to be a bit of a con artist himself. Soon Penn talks his way into the jeep and home of a beautiful young lady (Jennifer Lopez) who then plays with both his mind and his lust in unimaginable ways before encountering her pissed off husband (Nick Nolte) who is old enough to be her dad (and may very well be). Ironically, Nolte offers him a ride back to town, confiding in Penn that he’s sick of her games and suddenly making him an outright offer to kill her, even as it turns out that Nolte has had an obsession with killing her for years without ever actually doing it in order to flush both her and the memories of her equally crazy mother out of his own psyche forever, while she harbors the exact same fantasies about him because of the ogre like level of control that he holds over her, with Penn finding himself caught right in the middle, even as he loses his bag of money in a robbery and then finds out that the mobsters in Vegas are sending in a collection man to deal with him in that small town, thus making the idea of murder for money suddenly start sounding almost appealing. And as Stone continues to spin this web of intrigue whilst drawing us into it, the only thing that hampers it is the nearly inconsequential subplot of Penn’s involvement with two other locals, that being an obvious trailer park girl (Claire Danes) who takes a liking to him and her hot tempered idiot of a boyfriend (Joaquin Phoenix) who constantly and openly challenges Penn to fight him simply because Danes has pretended to fall in love with the newcomer solely to piss her boyfriend off, with the whole thing coming across as being grade school comic relief hour that is completely out of sync with the considerably more mature main plot of the film. There is also Powers Boothe as the tough talking Sheriff of the town with a secret of his own, former Airplane! lead actress Julie Hagerty as the broken down older waitress at the local diner (named Flo), a frightened cameo by Laurie Metcalf, and even a literal walk on role out of nowhere for Liv Tyler. At the center of it all is a seemingly surreal notation of a world filled with people who wear their worse qualities on their sleeves, with the strange, drug induced flashes of inner thoughts and dark overtones to what it would seem to be purely normal on the surface signaling the nods to Lynch (both this and Blue Velvet could easily be chalked up to having existed in the same universe) with the finale taking us to a nightmarish pit of Hell in the middle of the desert (complete with vultures). Are any of these people likable? Well, no, but sometimes a peek into the souls of the worse among us can help us to appreciate what’s good around us as well, with Penn’s whiny, weaselly, desperate man constantly looking to escape this purgatory and Lopez’s truly twisted nature (when fully exposed) coming to epitomize the justification of many females who commit evil acts as being reason enough to offer the world (and even innocent folks) their retribution for a lifetime of suffering (especially when it’s revealed that her actual specific words about wanting to be free which helps to make Penn fall for her have actually been used on other men as well). That along with Nolte’s dirty old man lusting, Voight’s pontifications about nothing in this world actually being what it seems, Phoenix and Danes’ clownish form of drama, and Thornton’s scene stealing, take no prisoners, upright redneck who delights in purposely giving Penn fits usually by pretending to have an actual conscience all combine to give us a rather disconcertingly entertaining mix, a b movie from Hell made by a world class, world renowned filmmaker who literally by his own admission really only made this particularly black sheep film in his catalog simply because of the fact that it was the type of film that he would have liked to have seen and enjoyed as a teenager himself…
9/10