Book Review
The Oliver Stone Experience Review
A Life Lived Through Film
Tripwire gave its Senior Editor ANDREW COLMAN the job of reviewing the new book about Hollywood modern maverick director Oliver Stone, The Oliver Stone Experience…
The Oliver Stone Experience
Writer: Matt Zoller Seitz
Abrams
Oliver Stone’s career has been highly unusual in as much as it succeeded in intersecting with Hollywood as much as it did – a polemicist who was desperately keen to reduce complicated scenarios and events that were key to America’s psyche for populism’s sake, and a conspiracy theorist who managed to escape major controversy or opprobrium, despite sometimes playing fast and loose if it fit the narrative. Even at his best, in films like the emotionally honest Platoon and the work he did for De Palma’s Scarface, there were elements of pulpiness, his obsession with male honour (not that dissimilar to Sam Peckinpah) an overriding concern of his, even when the movie (Platoon, Born On The 4th Of July, Heaven And Earth) was about his need to lacerate his own country for its misdeeds.
Nevertheless Stone’s trajectory can be easily paralleled with that of America itself – there is no question that he lived those times, and experienced everything first hand. Regardless of his cinematic shortcomings, his lack of humour and sledgehammer, in-your-face storytelling, most of his work has either achieved cult status, event movie pre-eminence or been deemed Oscar-worthy (Midnight Express being an example of all three). Without intending to, Stone, over time, has become a pivotal figure who is in danger of being left behind in the pop culture slipstream (and the political landscape), despite still producing the occasional feature (Snowden, a film about a computer hacker who leaks files to the Guardian, is currently in cinemas). The Oliver Stone Experience, a timely reminder of his canon, is a worthwhile corrective to this.
Matt Zoller Seitz’s heavyweight tome, replete as it is with superb graphics and reproduction of scripts, posters, stills and other memorabilia, is a chronology of Stone’s life and career interspersed with interviews by the author with its subject. Although the book does veer rather often into hagiography at times with its valedictory tone (this is not a coruscating or academic critique of the writer / director’s work!) Stone is a great interviewee, such is his candour and ardent need to bear testimony. His reminiscences about (for example) his time working on Scarface, the drudgery of dealing with the jungle (and the cast) in Platoon, and the political and social undertow of the time when the films were shot means at least you’re getting context, not to mention learning about what was going on in Stone’s head at the time. It does pay to read between the lines in some interviews, such is his obsession with some of his subjects – with The Doors, he constantly repeats how much fun it was to make the movie, clearly having fallen heavily for the Jim Morrison mythos and the counterculture abandon that he oddly gets to re-enact, basically as a means of experiencing what he had missed, or rather what he thought he had missed – a Fellini movie with a cast of hundreds. It is here that he admits how much pleasure and gratification he has had on certain projects, happy to be immersive and muck in rather than be the aloof, serious auteur.
But it is Vietnam that remains the focal point of his career, with three films of increasing melodrama culminating in the abysmal indulgence of Heaven And Earth (Born On The 4th Of July was a flawed but decent bit of work). The war that reshaped America also reshaped Mr. Stone himself, who throughout all the interviews is honest enough to admit that he was as confused as anyone directly connected to events. However he was almost unique as a filmmaker in that he got to remake his and America’s past by beginning with such outings as Conan The Barbarian and The Hand. A compulsive book about a flawed director who deserves re-evaluation, and who definitely brought out the best in his actors.
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