film

Rip It Up, Issue 165, 1 April 1991, Page 30

film

THE DOORS Director: Oliver Stone

The man who gave us Platoon, Salvador and Wall Street has come up with a whirlwind of a movie that will have many survivors of the 60s fishing out their mouldering Doors albums to see what all the fuss was about. This is no objective biography: from an early scene when the camera is panning reverently from the Artaud, Mailer and McLuhan volumes on Morrison’s desk to the tombs of Proust, Rossini, Wilde and Morrison at Pere Lachaise, this is a two-and-a-half hour letter from an inveterate fan.

Jim Morrison, with his phallic obsession and almost Wagnerian

love/death fixation was one of the fruitier phenomena of the late sixties, and The Doors is a paean to those heady times. Underneath the 90s sheen, this is as much a biopic as the standard Hollywood fare of the forties and fifties — the composing of ‘Light My Fire’ is as corny as anything from Song To Remember and some of the diologue is priceless: “We've got to fuck death away”, Val Kilmer to Meg Ryan. Ryan’s character, who had

earlier on admitted to seeing God on LSD, is a receptive audience for such invitations.

Here was a subject that demanded some irony, some distancing from its subject, but Stone does not give it that. At its best, Stone’s reverence works in the impressive recreation of historic Doors concerts — which could have had more space than they did in the movie — at its worst, in the MTV flights of fancy, such as that involving the acid trip in the desert. More humour, along the lines of the scene of the Doors’

debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, would also have been welcome.

Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison is very much the focal point of the film, and besides Kilmer, the other members

come across as rather pallid. Meg Ryan playing Pamela Morrison is

wide-eyed, and there’s fun to be had in coming across various celebrities of the time from Jac Holzman and Nico to Andy Warhol (a particularly adept turn from Crispin Glover).

William Blake ventured that one reaches the palace of wisdom through the roads of excess, a statement which seems to provide the underlying philosophy for both Jim Morrison and Oliver Stones film. Blake perhaps has alot to answer for. WILLIAM DART

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS Director: Jonathan Demme

Demme’s new film starts promisingly, with Jodie Foster as a young FBI

trainee being asked to help catch a serial killer, who has earned the nickname of Buffalo Bill, because of his

propensity for skinning his victims. In order to do this she has to enlist the help of another serial killer, a psychopath known as Hannibal the Cannibal, for self-explanatory reasons. All this is crisply set up. Demme catches the small-town paranoia well, with most of the film set in Kentucky and Tennessee. Foster projects a character who is vulnerable (some flash-back scenes are beautifully handled) but resilient, contrasting

sharply with the clipped voice and sinister elegance of Anthony Hopkins'’ Hannibal. Roger Corman and Chris Isaak make brief appearances, as

does Diane Baker, Lil from Hitchcock’s 1964 Marnie, in two brief but touching scenes. :

Lambs becomes less and less convincing as it progresses. A moral dimension so carefully set up becomes clouded. We find ourselves viewing a sparring game between Foster and Hopkins, reaching a climax in Foster’s final confrontation with Ted Levine's transvestite murderer. As a thriller, it mistakes revenge for a sense of justice and I'm sure I'm not the only suspicious soul to imagine that Hannibal, left at the end prowling after his next victim, could well inspire a series of sequels. WILLIAM DART

DANCES WITH WOLVES Director: Kevin Costner : Kevin Costner first directorial effort has — with shrewd studio publicity — caught the imagination of audiences in

the States, and it's not hard to see why. Dances With Wolves is very much the thinking person’s western for the 90s, with themes designed to concur with the spirit of our times, such as its

humane and realistic treatment of the Native American characters and its broad underlying message of environmental concern.

The single most effective thing here is the treatment of the Sioux Indians, talking for the most part in subtitled dialogue. Perhaps it's the unforced nobility of the performances from Graham Greene, Rodney Grant and Floyd Red Crow Westerman that makes their scenes work so well, .

avoiding the sentimentality that often clogs the film elsewhere. Two things jarred with me. One was the mannered performance of Mary McDonnell as Stand with a Fist, the European woman brought up by the Sioux yet managing a coiffure straight out of the latest yuppie mini series. The other constant irritation was John

Barry’s three-notes-at-a-time score, underlining every scene with crunching significance. Although I'm not questioning the sincerity of the project, there is an uncomfortable feeling that opportunities were lost. Somewhere in the middle of all these luscious images and Dolby sound is the small, intimate film that Dances with Welves should have been. : WILLIAM DART-