Born on the Fourth of July

Oliver Stone is a fascinating figure in the film world. He began as a screenwriter in the 70s and 80s and wrote successful scripts for Midnight Express, Scarface, Conan the Barbarian, and The Year of the Dragon. In the mid-eighties, he got his first directing gig with Salvador and then hit a hot streak with Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, and Born on the Fourth of July. In many ways, his films are pure representations of 1980s culture. His preoccupation with the conflicts, music, and intrigue of the 1960s along with his sharp critiques of contemporary 1980s excess and consumerism made his films potent and memorable documents of the decade.

 One film of his I hadn’t seen was 1989s Born on the Fourth of July starring Tom Cruise. It’s based on the autobiography of the same name by former Marine and disabled Viet Nam vet, Ron Kovic. Kovic is a gung-ho, America-love-it-or-leave-it patriot who grows up in working class Long Island. Relentlessly competitive, he volunteers for the Marines as soon as he’s eligible and is sent overseas to fight. During his second tour in Viet Nam, Kovic has a catastrophically bad day. All in one maneuver, he’s party to accidentally killing a small village of old women, children, and babies; killing one of his own men with friendly fire; and getting shot himself and having his spinal cord severed with the bullet, permanently paralyzing him from the chest down.

The second two thirds of the movie revolve around Kovic first fighting his disability, then succumbing to depression and bitterness and alcoholism, and then finding new purpose as an anti-war activist, culminating with the moment when Kovic addresses the 1976 Democratic National Convention following the publication of his book.

Oliver Stone is not a restrained filmmaker. In fact, the first movie review I read that ever really stuck with me as a kid was of Platoon and the reviewer wrote that Stone “directs with all the subtlety of an earthquake.” And it’s true. He’s a maximalist who layers on thick helpings of period music, extreme hair and make-up, and sometimes far too close for comfort camera work. In the case of Born on the Fourth of July, his version of late 1950s Long Island is as ideal and red, white, and blue as you can imagine. His Viet Nam is saturated with sunlight and blood. The underfunded, understaffed VA hospital where Kovic finds himself after his injury is practically a Dantean circle of hell. I’m not saying these aren’t accurate representations of Kovic’s real life experiences. It’s just that Stone’s middle name might as well be “In Your Face.” Sometimes that intensity serves the story and other times, it just makes you a little nauseated.

Born on the Fourth of July was one of Tom Cruise’s first bids to be taken seriously as a “real” actor instead of just a good looking kid with a megawatt smile. He hadn’t yet developed the now tired Cruise-isms that have made so many of his recent performances basically interchangeable, and he gives Kovic a real visceral punch and vulnerability. With the exception of some pretty bad wigs, Cruise’s transformation from 18 year old super jock to a middle aged man in a wheelchair is convincing and his physical commitment to the role is apparent throughout. The commitment paid off as Cruise was nominated for an Oscar and won the Golden Globe that year for Best Actor. The film was nominated for a total of eight Oscars and won two, including Best Director. Stone has produced a lot of provocative, in-your-face films like Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Nixon. He’s still working today, and his most recent film was 2016’s Snowden. However effective his newer films may be, it’s unlikely that Oliver Stone will ever hit another high point like he did with his 80s hot streak that culminated with Born on the Fourth of July.

Isle of Dogs

This week, a movie you might have missed. Wes Anderson is one of those filmmakers whose work you recognize no matter what the genre. If Anderson made a period melodrama set in a 17^th century monastery in Timbuktu, after two minutes you would probably say, “This reminds me a lot of Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Anderson is an auteur who works with largely the same cast and crew every time and has a very distinct set of stylistic and thematic concerns that turn up time and time again. If you like his work, you’re always going to be satisfied to one degree or another by his films. If you don’t, you will never be happy – because his movies are so consistently his. There is always a precocious loner; a distant, unavailable love interest; a complicated father figure; vintage audio recording equipment; British invasion-era music; and perfectly placed slow motion

So it’s no surprise now that Anderson has directed the closest thing he will make to a science fiction movie, 2018’s stop-motion animated fable, Isle of Dogs, that it is still completely and unmistakably his work.

Set in Japan twenty years in the future, Isle of Dogs begins in the fictional city of Megasaki where a strain of dog flu sweeps through the canine population. The city’s crooked mayor Kobayashi whose family harbors an ancient grudge against all dogs decides to ban the animals to a place called Trash Island, starting with Spots, his nephew’s dog.

 Six months after the dogs have all been rounded up, the mayor’s nephew, Atari, hijacks a small plane and flies out to the island to find his dog. He’s adopted by a pack of roving scavengers voiced by Brian Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum. Together, they help him navigate the dangerous, abandoned landscape of the island as they travel to the farthest reaches where they think Spots still might be alive.

Meanwhile, back on the mainland, a scientist works feverishly on finding a cure for dog flu before an extermination order is handed down, and a group of students at a high school newspaper works to expose Kobayashi’s corruption.

Even though it’s animated and features cute talking animals, Isle of Dogs isn’t exactly a kids’ movie. There’s a fairly graphic kidney transplant operation, talk of dogs mating, and other things that might be difficult to explain to your five year old, so do your research before sitting your kid in front of it.

The animation is simply one more way for Anderson to control every single element of what you see on the screen. Each character’s exact appearance, the color schemes, and the design of everything from Atari’s airplane to Kobayashi’s campaign posters has been art directed within an inch of their lives. Anderson makes films about insular worlds – islands, private schools, exclusive hotels, passenger trains, submarines – and stop motion animation allows him to shape each aspect. 

 The voice work by well-known American actors has an intimate quality, as though they are whispering their lines to you inside your backyard treehouse. Listening to Brian Cranston’s voice flirt with Scarlett Johanson’s voice, for instance, is a rare pleasure. All of the Japanese characters speak their native language with no subtitles, and the film uses the idea of translation throughout for both comedic and dramatic effect while also allowing Anderson to show more of his beloved vintage recording and listening equipment. 

Anderson’s films alternate between sweet sentimentality and a polite but very tangible bitterness. The wistful but ultimately hopeful Rushmore was followed-up by the itchy, uncomfortable Life Aquatic with Steve Ziszou. Right after the completely charming Moonrise Kingdom came the beautiful but surprisingly sour Grand Budapest Hotel. With Isle of Dogs, Anderson has swung back to a hopeful positivity. It is a film about a boy and his dogs, after all.

Isle of Dogs came and went from theaters quickly, but it’s available for home viewing now, and I highly recommend it.   

Marathon Man

As my quest to catch up on movies I should have seen before continues, I move into the 1970s and the era of the paranoid thriller. I was born in the 1970s and so most of my memories involve learning to ride a bike and having a crush on the next door neighbor rather than Watergate hearings or anti-war protests. So it’s fascinating to see the consistent tone and themes that appear in some of the most influential movies of the decade like All the President’s Men, The Conversation, and this week’s movie – John Schlesinger’s 1976 thriller, Marathon Man.

The film centers on two brothers – Babe, played by Dustin Hoffman, who is a PhD student studying history, and Doc, played by Roy Scheider, who pretends to be an oil businessman but is actually a black ops spy. Obviously, the two brothers live in very different worlds but they collide when Doc turns up in New York working on an assignment involving Christian Szell, an escaped Nazi war criminal sometimes called The White Angel who was known in Auschwitz for his sadistic experiments. Szell is played by the great Laurence Olivier.

The film is definitely a product of its era. Its pace initially is almost languid, taking its time exploring Babe’s life in New York and Doc’s adventures in Europe. Szell doesn’t appear in the film until almost 40 minutes in. Rather than rushing to get to the most exciting stuff, Marathon Man takes its time building slow burn suspense. Once it gets to the exciting stuff, it definitely delivers, particularly in the fight between Doc and one of his would be assassins. But the film earns these moments rather than just dumping them on the viewer unannounced. 

One element that ties paranoid thrillers together is, well, the paranoia, the ominous feeling of dread that there are shadowy forces at work in the world around you and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Schlesinger’s camera work combined with the tense, cat-on-the-keyboard music of Michael Small give every element of the movie a sinister touch. A baby carriage left near a car, a soccer ball kicked into the light from a dark street, some billowing curtains in a hotel window – all are menacing suggestions that something bad is just barely out of sight.

Of course, the 1970s were not a happy political time in the United States. Between the misery, violence, and upheaval surrounding the Viet Nam conflict, the unprecedented political intrigue of Watergate, the energy crisis, and a hundred other things, there was a profound distrust of authority. The idea that everyone, even those closest to you, had some kind of self-serving angle influenced dozens of films in that era. Institutions like government and the military especially were not to be trusted. The feeling that everyone is out to get you permeates Marathon Man.

Hoffman, Scheider, Swiss actress Marte Keller as Babe’s love interest, and the always hateable William Devane as Doc’s duplicitous colleague are all excellent. But the real story here is Sir Laurence Olivier as Christian Szell, the terrifying, complicated villain. My first exposure to Olivier was in the 1980 Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. This is essentially like discovering Michael Jordan’s basketball career during his time with the Washington Wizards – it wasn’t exactly a high point. But in Marathon Man, Olivier is remarkable. He doesn’t just play Szell as a relentless force of evil, but also as a scared old man who is terrified of losing what he feels he has rightfully earned. His performance is supple and unpredictable. You wouldn’t think watching a greedy, deadly, hate-filled, sadistic Nazi dentist could be a pleasure, but Olivier manages to make it so. I will warn you, however, if you have even the slightest anxiety about dentists, I suggest you skip this one. For everyone else, if you haven’t seen Marathon Man yet, you should.