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Natural Born Killers
Director: Oliver Stone
Shanghai Star. 2004-04-01
Starring: Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Downey, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee
Jones, Juliette Lewis, Edie McClurg
Oliver Stone is a strong candidate for the world's most controversial director,
and this movie, released in 1994, has an equally strong claim to be his most
controversial film. Stone himself did this darkly comic masterpiece no favours
with his unconvincing (and widely mocked) comments at the time, in which he
attempted to "spin" it as a denunciation of media sensationalism.
In fact cynical sensationalism is the heart and soul of the movie, and Stone
would have been better advised to stand by its reckless decadence and
cinematic panache. "Natural Born Killers" is a celebration of visual
aestheticism radically disconnected from moral purpose, blitzing the viewer
through filters, genres and media formats to tell the deranged love-story of its
all-American sociopathic antiheroes Mickey Knox (Harrelson) and Mallory
Wilson (Lewis) as they cut a swathe of meaningless blood-letting across the
country's highways and TV screens.
After murdering Mallory's abusive parents (Dangerfield and McClurg), Mickey
and Mallory set out on a saga of random slaughter, soaking up adoration
from the nation's serial-killer fans and media moguls. They are eagerly
pursued by TV host Wayne Gale (Downey) who appreciates their audienceboosting power as celebrity criminals, and even after their capture media-
hungry prison chief Dwight McCluskey (Jones) ensures that the televisual
circus continues. A ludicrously violent prison riot, organized by the two
"natural born killers" even ensures that it escalates.
This minimalistic plot, along with the terse screenplay (by Quentin Tarrantino
no less) and determinedly extravagant acting that support it, are mere
pretexts for an orgy of visual delights rarely equalled in the history of film. It is
not on the thin and morally absurd main plotline - over which innumerable
critics have blustered equally absurdly - that the movie works its real magic,
but in scenes such as the one set out in the desert, where the killers are
taken in by a solitary Indian.
After Mickey shoots the hospitable stranger dead over some triviality, Mallory
starts to cry "bad, bad, bad", like the inarticulate child she remains. Mickey
tries to apologize, because he has upset the only person who is real to him.
Then the idiot murderous lovers set out again across the desert, which has
become a sea of rattlesnakes, bathed in unearthly colours and horrors.
Nick Land
Persuasion
Director: Roger Michell
Starring: Amanda Root, Ciaran Hinds, Susan Fleetwood, Corin Redgrave,
Fiona Shaw, John Woodvine, Samuel West, Phoebe Nicholls, Simon Russell
Beale, Sophie Thompson
"Persuasion" was Jane Austen's last novel and this film of the book may be
the best to be made of any of her works. The director Roger Michell and his
screenwriter Nick Dear appear to have thoroughly researched Austen's
writings even to the extent of including in the movie - near the end - a chapter
Austen had deleted from the novel but which was later found among her
papers.
Michell also includes a very un-Austen-like scene in the film - an on-screen
kiss (not in the book) in the streets of Bath between the heroine, Anne Elliot
(Amanda Root) and her true love, Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds).
However, at least Hinds gets to keep his clothes on, unlike Colin Firth who
was given an egregious nude scene in "Pride and Prejudice".
"Pride and Prudence" would have been a good title for "Persuasion" or "Pride
and Reticence". The pride belongs to Captain Wentworth and the prudence
to Anne Elliot. The reticence belongs to them both.
Anne had been persuaded to refuse to marry Wentworth eight years before
the story begins when he was a promising, but penniless, young naval officer
with no high social connections. Eight years later, when they meet again, he
has his own command in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic Wars and wealth
through prizemoney but he has too much pride to renew his courtship of
Anne.
In one of her letters about "Persuasion", Austen tells a friend that "you may
perhaps like the heroine as she is almost too good for me". As played by
Amanda Root, Anne Elliot is almost too good to be true. Anne is 27 years old
when we meet her, on the verge of permanent spinsterhood, and she
presents a face that is at once harried and severe.
In a story of lost love one may expect the heroine to look a little aggrieved
and thin-lipped but Root manages throughout to walk the thin line between
bathos and pathos perfectly and is the very ideal of an Austen heroine. She is
resigned to the "martyrdom of spinsterhood" but avoids any hint of self-pity.
Hinds, last seen as a Dublin crook in "Veronica Guerin", plays Wentworth
adroitly - he is stern but not haughty, reserved but not shy - and is the
embodiment of grace under pressure as the various strands of the plot
unfold.
Although we know it will all turn out all right in the end (being a Jane Austen
story) we are kept worried that something will still go wrong. So many things
seem to stand in the way of a happy resolution for the central couple, not
least because of their mutual reticence to voice their true feelings. Michell
has his two main characters do most of their acting (they hardly speak to one
another) with body language - their eyes, a turn of the shoulders, a frown or a
curl of the lip.
The supporting cast is excellent: Corin Redgrave is Anne's father, Sir Walter
Elliot, a baronet and the biggest snob Austen ever breathed life into; Samuel
West is the evil, cunning cousin, William Eliot; Phoebe Nicholls in Anne's silly
and vain elder sister, Elizabeth; Simon Russell Beale is the family's huntin'
and shootin' neighbour Charles Musgrove; and, Sophie Thompson is the
hypochondriac younger sister, Mary, who is married to Charles.
Special mention should go to Fiona Shaw as Wentworth's sister, Sophy, the
wife of Admiral Croft - who is played with admirable aplomb by John
Woodvine - and to Susan Fleetwood as Lady Russell whose earlier
"persuasion" of Anne not to marry Wentworth is the mainspring of the story.
Barry Porter
Copyright by Shanghai Star.