Beasts and (Savages (2012))

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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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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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