If there ever was a story tailor made for Oliver Stone’s sensibilities, “Snowden” is it. Polarizing in the extreme, Ed Snowden, an American computer wiz who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian, was called a traitor by Donald Trump and a hero by the New Yorker. Two hours into this biopic it’s not hard to see which side of the fence Stone falls on.
It’s 2003 when we first meet future whistleblower Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) he’s a grunt in the US Army struggling through basic training. The deeply patriotic high-school dropout wants to serve his country but his body doesn’t cooperate. Honourably discharged for medical reasons he turns to the CIA, hoping to find meaningful work as a computer specialist and because, “it sounds really cool to have a top security clearance.”
Hired on, he learns the tools of today’s warfare. “The modern battlefield is everywhere,” he’s told while designing and building computer systems he believes will keep his country safe. Meanwhile the secretive nature of his work is slowly driving a wedge between he and girlfriend Lindsay (Shailene Woodley), a liberal leaning photographer who doesn’t always support Ed’s views but always supports him.
Over the next decade his efforts to prevent terrorists and cyber attacks leads him down a rabbit hole of intrigue and double-dealings. Partially responsible for running a dragnet on the whole world he helps gather information—using cell phone and computer cameras—on regular everyday citizens as well as the baddies and begins to question his mandate. The NSA, he says is tracking the cell phones of everyone. “Not just terrorists or countries,” he says, “but us.”
In June 2013 he decides to go public by leaking classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian. “I just want to get the data to the media so people can decide whether I’m wrong,” he says, “or if the government is wrong.”
A title card at the beginning of “Snowden” reads, “The following is a dramatization of events that occurred between 2004 and 2013.” That gives director Stone ample leeway to tell the story his way. In other words, this ain’t a documentary. It is clear he is on Snowden’s side, that he doesn’t see him as a traitor or snitch but a hero. His thesis seems to be that you don’t have to agree with your politicians to be a patriot. Stone supports his view visually—Snowden literally comes out of the darkness and into the light when he leaves the NSA building for the last time—and through the actions and words of several of his characters. Rhys Ifans plays a CIA trainer/master manipulator who feeds Snowden’s naïve patriotism with defence mantras. “Most Americans don’t want freedom,” he preaches, “they want security.” Later Snowden’s NSA supervisor Trevor (Scott Eastwood) argues that a job like the one Snowden is doing, can’t be criminal “if you’re working for the government.”
But hey, this isn’t CNN or Fox News, it’s a big screen entertainment and on that score it works. Gordon-Levitt transforms into a monotone über nerd, equal parts sweetness and paranoia. What he lacks in warmth Woodley more than makes up for, handing in a performance that is all emotion and concern.
When Ifans leaves a video conference call with the sign off, “I’ll see you soon,” those simple words take on a sinister feel when it is clear that he really can see you, whether you know it or not. Stone may not be able to shape the way you feel about Ed Snowden, but if nothing else he’ll make you want to cover the camera on your computer.
Richard hosted the press conference for the TIFF 2016 film “Snowden.” From left to right, Richard, Melissa Leo, Shailene Woodley, Oliver Stone, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zachary Quinto.
Oliver Stone: “This is really a secret underworld and no one in the NSA has come forward in its 70-year history,” Stone said.
“We only saw a sliver until Ed Snowden. No one saw into that thing, so it’s really an undercover detective story. And for me it’s exciting because it’s like JFK, it goes into something that we don’t know. Americans don’t know anything about it and they still don’t because it’s tricky.
“The government lies about it all the time and what they’re doing is illegal and they keep doing it. And it gets better and better, what they do, so this a very upsetting story.”
Tracking shots. Split screens. Eighteen-minute Steadicam sequences. Visually spectacular set pieces. All are part of the Brian De Palma canon, but absent from a new, comprehensive look at his career. “De Palma,” a love letter to the director from filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, makes up for its lack of visual pyrotechnics with De Palma’s storytelling prowess.
“Many of movies were considered great disasters at the time,” says the director of “Phantom of the Paradise,” “Dressed to Kill” and “Body Double.” Now, decades after his commercial peak, many of De Palma’s films are considered classics. This new talking head documentary chronicles them all, warts and all.
From his early days as an indie filmmaker, working in the shadow of better known friends like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, to his critically reviled (“You are always being criticized against the fashion of the day,” he says.) but commercially successful period to a brief era when reviews and audiences lined up in tandem, he holds nothing back.
We learn how the director kicked “Scarface” screenwriter Oliver Stone off the set for talking to the actors, that in “The Untouchables” Robert De Niro wore the same kind of silk underwear Al Capone wore (“You never saw it but it was there,” says De Palma.) and how the studio loved the controversial “Body Double” “until they saw it.”
There’s more, told in De Palma’s bemused, colourful way—“I love photographing women,” he admits. “I’m fascinated by the way them move.”—but the real meat of the doc comes when he auteur talks about being a square peg trying to fit into Hollywood’s round hole. “The values of the system are the opposite of what goes into making good original movies,” he says.
“De Palma” is a simple film about a complex subject. “The thing about making movies is every mistake is right up there on the screen,” he says. “Everything you didn’t solve. Every shortcut you made. You will look at it for the rest of your life. It’s like a record of the things you didn’t finish.” It’s a master’s class not just in De Palma’s life and career, but also in how movies were made in the latter half of the twentieth century.
I knew “Savages” was going to be an over-the-top Oliver Stone movie from the opening minutes. A “wargasm” reference was my first clue and by the time Benicio Del Toro literally twirled his moustache like a pantomime baddie I knew this wasn’t the same restrained director who gave us “W” and “World Trade Center,” this was Stone in unhinged “Natural Born Killers” mode. It’s a wild ride, but I found it more flamboyant than fun.
Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch are Ben and Chon, entrepreneurs, drug dealers and two thirds of a love triangle with California cutie Ophelia (Blake Lively). They sell a potent strain of legal medical grade marijuana but also siphon off some for illicit practice and profit, which earns the attention of a Mexican Baja drug Cartel run by Elena (Salma Hayek). She’ll do anything to create a “joint” venture, including kidnapping their shared paramour Ophelia. Revenge turns bloody when Elena’s enforcer, Lado (Benicio Del Toro), gets involved and complicated when a dirty DEA agent (John Travolta) double-crosses everyone.
“Savages” is definitely a good-looking movie from the stars to the scenery, but I thought the cast was really interesting as well as pretty. Johnson and Kitsch are good and evil, flip sides of the same coin, Lively isn’t as sprightly as her name might suggest, but she does do damaged quite well. I also enjoyed Travolta, Hayek and Del Toro chewing the scenery but I felt it hard to care about any of them. They’re all rather despicable, and I found myself hoping they’d all end up in a Mexican standoff, firing until no one was left standing.
But stand they do, so for a little over two hours we’re taken to their world of double-crosses, beheadings, threesomes and seemingly pointless close-ups of beaches, crabs and Buddha statues. Stone is a sensualist, allowing his camera to caress Lively’s face and fill the screen with beautiful images. Even Del Toro’s torture scenes have a certain glamorous élan to them, but as entertaining to the eye as it all is, it’s a rather empty experience.
The plotting goes crazy near the middle, and any comment on the morality of the drug trade, one way or another, is sidestepped in favor of an ending—and this is no spoiler—that seems to want to play both sides of the intellectual fence.
Perhaps I expected too much. “Savages” is at its black-hearted best a preposterous popcorn movie that strives to be something more, but the film’s message apparently went, like the product that makes all the characters do such horrible things, up in smoke.
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” the long awaited sequel to Oliver Stone’s 1987 Oscar winning film Wall Street, is bogged down by financial claptrap. The explanation of how Wall Street ended up in Bailout City is almost endless. Money terms like short selling, moral hazard and derivative are tossed around like coins down a wishing well. Luckily a lot of the dialogue is delivered by good actors like Frank Langella and Michael Douglas, but ultimately the whole experience is kind of like watching an episode of Mad Money with better looking people.
Shia LaBeouf, continuing his resurrection of 1980s film franchises, plays Jacob Moore, a Wall Street trader with a conscious—a mix of greed and green. He’s ploughing millions of dollars into sustainable energy, but just as a major project is on the brink of a breakthrough the bottom falls out, his firm goes bankrupt and his mentor (Frank Langella) commits suicide. At home things are better. His girlfriend Winnie is devoted to him. She’s also the estranged daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) the disgraced inside trader recently released from prison. Jacob and Gekko make a deal—a non financial one. Jacob will facilitate a reconciliation between father and daughter and Gekko will help find out who was responsible for the rumors that led to death of Jacob’s mentor. The question is, can Gekko, who once famously said, “Greed is good,” be trusted?
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” shows how Wall Street fell due to crashing markets and clashing egos. Stone wants us to understand how it all fell apart, but unfortunately the inner workings of banks and big financial deals, at least the way they are presented here, aren’t that dramatic. Real people losing their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts, that’s dramatic, but a bunch of bankers sitting around talking about money is less so. Stone fails to listen to his own creation, Gekko, when he says, “it’s not about the money, it about the game.” Unfortunately the game is a little dull.
The cautionary message about greed and its effects is good and timely—“Bulls make money. Bears make money,” says Gekko, “Pigs get slaughtered.”—but it is wrapped up in a movie that is too earnest and a little odd tone wise. A meeting between Gekko and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), the man responsible for sending him to jail in the first movie, is played for laughs which seems out of place, and frankly, kind of unlikely. Stone tries to cram too much story into the film—the father-daughter story, the meltdown angle, the revenge plot, the Gekko comeback—and with each of those plot shards comes a different tone.
Like the people who caused the financial meltdown that inspired this “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” director Stone seems to have lost perspective. He draws good performances from the cast—Douglas could be nominated for a second time for playing Gekko, and LaBeouf is very good—but allows the rest of the movie to get as bloated as Lehman Brothers on a spending spree.
W. isn’t the first warts and all presidential biography to hit ever the big screen. In fact, it isn’t even the first Oliver Stone directed warts and all White House portrait to enter theatres. Nor is it the first time George W. Bush has been given the Hollywood treatment—among others Timothy Bottoms played him on the sit-com That’s My Bush and in 2006 British director Gabriel Range stirred things up with Death of a President about the fictional assassination of Bush—but it is the first time Stone has immortalized a sitting president.
Josh Brolin plays Bush from his frat days at Yale through to his time as a mostly unemployed good old boy, through to becoming the born-again governor of Texas to answering a call from God to run for President. Along the way the character is arrested and bailed out by his powerful Dad, signs up for AA, gets married, starts wars and uses lots of Bushisms like “misunderestimate.”
It’s a jam packed life, ripe for a full-on biographical treatment, but it is also a well documented one. As audiences we all know the story. We’ve seen it on television, read about it in the dozens of books written about the man and his presidency, so Stone’s job was to come up with new material, or at least a new spin on old material to keep the story compelling. Unfortunately as far as bios go it is same-old. Stone doesn’t dredge up much new material, and save for a few scenes deep inside the White House’s war rooms, there isn’t much here that will come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Bush and his troubled presidency.
Luckily for Stone he has a top flight cast of actors breathing life into characters that are most frequently seen standing behind a White House podium giving carefully prepared answers to a scrum of reporters. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, General Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all make appearances. Richard Dreyfuss nails the commonly held idea of Cheney as puppet master, the White House master of Doublethink and Newspeak. Toby Jones, a British actor best known for voicing Dobby, the house-elf, in the Harry Potter films plays power architect, or “Bush’s Brain,” as he’s sometimes called, Karl Rove as a ruthless political animal, convinced of both his moral superiority and his king-making ability. Thandie Newton, using a nasal, flat voice brings out the humor of the toadying Condoleeza Rice while Jeffrey Wright and Scott Glenn seem to be channeling Powel and Rumsfeld respectively.
Leading the cast is Brolin who, despite a career downturn that spanned most of the 1990s, has been moving from strength to strength of late starring in movies like No Country for Old Men and upcoming Milk with Sean Penn. Here as Bush he nails the president’s beady-eyed squint, the malapropisms—he’s the decider!—and the over confidence. It’s a remarkable performance that goes well beyond mimicry; at once filled with swagger but plagued by self-doubt. In Brolin’s hands George “don’t call me Jr.” Bush is portrayed as a simple man so determined to prove his mettle—to his father as much as the country—that he makes some dubious decisions in an attempt to appear decisive and powerful.
It’s a showy performance, but one that doesn’t stoop to parody. Bush is a larger than life character and Brolin’s take on him is big and brassy. It’s also almost guaranteed to be nominated for Best Actor come awards time.
So Stone has delivered an unexpectedly even handed portrait of one of the most polarizing figures of recent history. I’m pleased was able to put aside partisan politics but my major complaint of the film, aside from some obvious omissions—there isn’t a hanging chad in sight—is that it isn’t tough enough. Stone, in an attempt to be empathetic has played it too safe with the story of America’s worst president ever. Perhaps it would have been a different movie had he waited ten or fifteen years to make it, but as it is W. feels overly restrained and straightforward.
Oliver Stone’s films often express alternative theories of reality. In JFK he explored the vast conspiracy theory that has sprung up around the assassination of John Kennedy. His takes on Alexander the Great, Jim Morrison and Richard Nixon were all as contentious as the subjects were diverse. Stone almost never plays it safe but in World Trade Center he has put aside the provocative material he is best known for and made his most straightforward film in years. Focusing on the plight of two 9/11 first responders and their families Stone has made a film about a difficult subject that offers hope instead of controversy.
The power of the best Stone films is very much on display here—unforgettable images include the shadow of the plane that crashed into the first tower and the resulting twisted wreckage of the building—without the self-indulgent tendencies that mar his less interesting work.
Stone hones the story down to two men, Sergeant John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority workers who were trapped under tons of rubble when the second World Trade Center tower collapsed on them as they prepared to evacuate people from the devastation. He focuses on their struggle to stay alive and their hope that they will be rescued. Above ground Stone cuts to the families of McLoughlin and Jimeno and their search to uncover information about their loved ones.
It’s a very effective way of dramatizing the events of 9/11. By narrowing the scope of the story down to two families the viewer gets an up-close and personal look at the tragedy of the day. From afar the story is too large, the kind of evil that caused the destruction too hard to understand but we can understand the tears of a wife who doesn’t know if she is a widow or not or a long hug between two people wracked by grief. Stone handles these moments gently.
Not so gentle is the actual event itself—the felling of the towers. Stone puts us inside a collapsing building and it is harrowing. The mournful wailing of the twisting metal, the giant chunks of cement and the black billowing smoke make it seem like hell on earth. We all saw it on television on the day, now Stone has placed us inside the building and it is harrowing.
The two men trapped men are helpless and must survive on the hope that the ray of light they can see far above them is a lifeline. Otherwise all is lost. Despite acting with only their faces—the rest of their bodies are trapped under rubble for most of the film—Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena hand in multi-layered performances. As they talk to one another, keeping one another company in their underground hell, we learn what makes them tick. What could have been tedious, claustrophobic scenes of the two men pinned by giant slabs of rock become strangely uplifting as they talk about their families and their lives in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Stone, through his actors chooses to celebrate the human spirit and the ties that bind, not the ideology of separation. By excluding any mention of al-Queda Stone shows that his movie has no political agenda. It is simply a movie about people rising above a dreadful situation.
World Trade Center isn’t the final word on 9/11. As the defining event of a generation filmmakers will revisit this story many times, many different ways, and while the film reveals little about the event it portrays, it speaks volumes about the people it affected.
This year may go down in the history books as the year politics became hip again. Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” vigor reignited America’s political passion, helping to break a forty-year-old Election Day turn-out record and actually get people under the age of seventy to tune into Meet the Press.
That excitement has infected Hollywood as well. This year sees three high profile political biographies hit theatres: W., about the life and wild times of George W. Bush; the soon-to-be released Frost/Nixon; and this week’s limited release Milk, starring Sean Penn as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the USA.
Hollywood has often looked to politics for inspiration. Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of rubber-cheeked Tricky Dicky in Nixon was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, as was Raymond Massey’s take on the 16th president in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and James Whitmore as Harry Truman in Give ’em Hell, Harry.
Wild in the Streets, a 1968 counter-culture cult film about Max Frost, a multi-millionaire rock star with plans to take over the government, is one of the wilder political “what-if” films.
Frost’s scheme begins with staged riots on the Sunset Strip. Next he spikes Washington’s drinking water supply with LSD and while D.C.’s powerbrokers are hallucinating he gets them to pass a law lowering the age limit for all elected offices to 14. Soon he wins the Oval Office, immediately imprisoning everyone over 30 in concentration camps where they wear dark robes and are perpetually stoned on LSD.
Max’s plan just might land him in trouble, however, when the next generation adopts the new slogan: “We’re gonna put everybody over 10 out of business.”
Seen through today’s eyes the film is little more than a fun, druggy artifact from the freewheeling sixties, but at the time its message was taken seriously by some in the establishment. At 1968’s Presidential Convention the Mayor of Chicago hired security to protect the city’s water supply from being laced with LSD.
Other unconventional political films include Whoops Apocalypse which sees America’s first female president, played by M*A*S*H’s Loretta Swit, try to avoid World War III and 1964s Kisses for My President which focuses on the tough job of First Husband as he puts a masculine spin on the role of First Lady, hosting women’s groups and garden parties.