Natural Born Killers (1994)

If there is one element of the film that could be called genius, then it would have to be Oliver Stone’s ability to make it appear to be so much more lurid, so much more audaciously XXX-hardcore than it really is. The film is actually quite funny and the violence is not unusually explicit. But back in 1994, when I was considerably younger, I distinctly remember browsing in Blockbuster with my Dad; I was always told to remain in the family films and kids’ section due to the horrible possibility of seeing a groped Shannon Tweed in the throes of ecstasy or the freakishly scarred face of Freddie Krueger scowling next to a close-up of shining razor blades. As I often did, I found myself losing my way in the video store and accidentally wandering into the drama section. It was just a black-and-white image of a man with a shaved head wearing those cool retro hippie/Lennon sunglasses. What is it about that image combined with the title that screamed “Violation! Obscenity!” I don’t know what it was exactly, but the film seemed oozing with unspeakable offenses against wholesomeness and decency. Of course, I was a kid, but even looking at stills from the film today, it strikes me at how much sleazier and transgressive it seems compared to how it really is when you watch it and realize it’s just a bunch of silliness.

Flash forward a decade or so, and I’d now seen 3 or 4 of Mr. Stone’s films. I was not predisposed to like Natural Born Killers because he was a director I’d never been much fond of, and my suspicions were verified when I watched it, and found it loud, shrill, and messy. I hated it. That was a few years ago. I watched it again recently, and came away much more tolerant. Assuming one’s hatred for Stone’s film does not spring from fear that its irony will be misinterpreted by criminally-inclined youths, a, admittedly, valid source of worry, I believe hatred for Stone’s movie is too serious an emotion to harbor for a movie that never really takes itself seriously in the first place.

A year before NBK, Juliette Lewis played the girlfriend of Brad Pitt's cross-country mass murderer in Kalifornia. In that film she was only along for the ride, essentially a sweet innocent duped into being the traveling companion of a hillbilly psycho. Mallory Knox is also the girlfriend (and later, wife) of a cross-country mass murderer, Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson, as game as they come), but this time, she gleefully participates in the string of murders, with relish. Stone, himself, also seems to relish the narrative anarchy as an opportunity to indulge in aesthetic anarchy. He switches between color and monochrome, seemingly indiscriminately; frightening, sometimes out of place images are projected obnoxiously onto the back wall of a motel room where Mickey and Mallory stay; the film changes tones so often and sometimes so discordantly that it appears to be suffering from schizophrenia; news reels, animation, movie clips, interviews, extreme angles, Coca-Cola commercials (y’remember – the ones with the polar bears) are all incorporated at varying intervals. But it is not as arbitrarily berserk as it seems. Upon more careful viewing (some would argue NBK merits none), one might see that the film is not completely running away with itself - there is some semblance of control over the proceedings, though it is arguable.

The film is divided into two acts: 1. On the Road, and 2. Superbowl Sunday. Even back when I despised this film, I still begrudgingly admired the second act: several tension-building moments confined to the Batongaville Maximum Security Penitentiary that feature placid inmates and a TV interview with the notorious mass murderer, a fiendish Woody Harrelson.

Everything is unfolding with relative calm, until things erupt, with a vengeance, into a prison riot of unparalleled madness.


Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Downey, Jr. both chomp down hard on the scenery, Robert Downey Jr. satirizing morbidly overzealous News Reporters as Wayne Gale (a spoof of Geraldo), and Tommy Lee Jones satirizing I don’t know what (evil prison wardens with pencil mustaches?). Jones gesticulates and spasms while Downey’s face constricts purple and his eyes bulge out of his skull, and I'm picturing Oliver Stone’s madly grinning face hanging over this heaping tray of ripe ham he has offered forth.

There is a moment where Downey and Jones get into a dispute: Downey lunges into Jones’s face commanding him to let him continue his televised prison interview with Mickey, and Jones screams right back, their faces almost touching, spittle flying, forehead veins bursting, as the two shout each other down. It was all very amusing to me. Not subtle, but Stone wasn’t aiming for subtle. In fact, he seems to have painted a target big enough to cover the broad side of a barn and then stood back to blast it with a shotgun. He’s angry at the media, television, consumer culture, American culture in general, but instead of neatly arranging a coherent outline and sifting through all the disparate items, he just throws all of it at the wall, hoping 75% of it will stick.

NBK is sort of like shotgun art on a piece of plywood: broad, scattershot, unfocused; but a fair portion of the canvas has some fantastic multi-colored splatters.


There’s a neon green snowflake shape (Drug Zone) that streaks down into a vomited configuration of hot pink, a tantalizing orange blot speckled with black drips (the I ♥ Mallory show) from a burst of paint that partially slammed into the corner. The oppressive green lighting in the Drug Zone sequence, one of my favorite in the film, carries a psychedelic nastiness that’s like a bad acid trip, the perfect feeling for a scene where two killers hopped up on murder and mayhem are finally forced to suffer the consequences of their addiction.

As satire, it could never be considered particularly incisive as the target has been punctured here and there, but certainly not with any real accuracy or precision. Basically, as satire, the film is a failure, but as a phantasmagoric cry of bewilderment and outrage, it has a forcefulness that is hard to match and a garish sense of humor that I found alternatively pleasurable and crass.

I’d be tempted to compare it to Bonnie & Clyde: Mickey and Mallory Knox are a Clinton-era Bonnie and Clyde on PCP.

But Bonnie & Clyde told a straightforward tragedy elegantly and with wit, whereas NBK is always in character, a grotesque stream-of-consciousness huffing and puffing (ironically) around a color wheel.


Grade: B-

In the Valley of Elah (2007)

Yes, I remember strongly disliking Crash the one and only time I saw it in the theater back in the summer of ’05. I still expected good things from this, because from what I had gathered, Tommy Lee Jones took up about 95% of the screen time.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield (this name fits perfectly for some reason I can’t explain), a man with the austerity of a monk. He is also severely patriotic: upon seeing the American flag inexplicably hanging upside-down when driving past an elementary school, he stops his truck. Cut to: Hank watching a Hispanic custodian bringing the flag down to right it and when part of the flag briefly rests on the concrete, Hank says, “Never let it touch the ground.” Whoa. He explains to the custodian what an upside-down flag means, and goes on his way.

Hank is an ex-Sergeant himself, both of his sons are in the military as well (we find out that the older boy was killed when his helicopter was shot down) and he has just received a phone call informing him that his last surviving son, Mike, has gone missing from his base shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. He packs a suitcase and drives to his son’s base, and asks to see his quarters, where he meets some of his son’s bunkmates and fellow soldiers. Haggis is able to convey a sense of military omertà among these young men deftly - Hank is not going to find much here, except dubious condolences, and before long, he gets a knock on his motel room door from a marine in a beret. Hank tells him to wait a moment while he uses the bathroom. When Hank steps out, he is greeted by an eerie, striking image: the soldier in the beret is standing at attention, saluting, in the doorway, with the door still wide open, the daylight flooding into the room, shadowing the soldier so that he appears to be a saluting spectre. Hank pauses to process the oddness of what he is seeing, and then returns the salute, at which point, he is informed that his son, Mike, has been found.

This film is inspired by the real story of Richard Davis, a soldier who disappeared in the summer of 2003 after returning from a tour in Iraq. The young man’s father, Lanny Davis, a retired veteran, began his own investigation, and it was later revealed that Davis was murdered by four other soldiers who served with him in his tour of duty, his brothers-in-arms, his comrades. Reading about the night of Davis’s murder offers as little motivation for the killing (he was stabbed 33 times) as the film does, other than explaining that his buddies were drunk, pissed off at him, and were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The film keeps all these details, but increases the number of stab wounds to 42. Needless to say, I was almost as upset to hear that number as Hank was, when sparing himself no mercy he demands to hear every detail from the medical examiner.

Tommy Lee Jones is fascinating to watch in this, and his performance really deserves to be in a great movie. It is obvious from the film’s somberness and overbearing dirge-choir that Haggis thinks his film is Important, and though I admire much of it, it basically becomes a pretty standard Murder Investigation in the Military Film. This might be a legitimate sub-genre of the Police Procedural, but Haggis’s film hasn’t transcended its peers, A Few Good Men and Courage Under Fire, though it labors under the delusion that it has because it covers a current topic. Is it relevant? Yes. Is it a film worth watching? Yes. It has some fine moments, such as when a Detective (Charlize Theron) invites Hank over for dinner in order to share some information about the case with him. Theron’s character is a single-mother of a 9 or 10 year old boy, who likes to have his bedroom door left ajar after lights out.

Hank is asked to read him a bedtime story, but because he can’t make sense of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Hank tells the boy a story from the Old Testament: David and Goliath. This Bible story is where the film’s title comes from.

After telling the boy the story and a comically terse “goodnight,” he closes the boy’s bedroom door, leaving him in the pitch darkness. I was waiting for Theron’s son to cry out “Door!” like he did earlier when she did the same thing, but he doesn’t. Hank walks past Theron who tells him that her son likes the door ajar, and Hank informs her, “He’ll be okay.” Seconds later, the boy cries out “Door!” and Theron opens it a bit, and the boy tells her to close it more than usual, but still leaving it a bit open. We see the vertical rectangle of light on the boy narrow until just some of his face is lit. This is a perfect and not openly acknowledged symbol of Hank’s, and to a larger extent, the Military's, deluded attitude about thrusting young men into war: sure, they are men and men are tough, so they’ll be okay, right? No, no they won’t.


Grade: B-