Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
Our James Woods marathon is in full swing. We started with his one-scene early career role as “Bank Officer” in the James Caan flick THE GAMBLER, then was second only to Robert De Niro in yesterday’s amazing ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA and now we get to James Woods in the lead role in Oliver Stone’s SALVADOR.
One could make a rather strong case that this was the world’s first real introduction to Oliver Stone as he would come to known. Sure, he had worked before. In fact I quite like the bizarre internal horror film he did with Michael Caine, THE HAND, but 1986 marked the release of this film, in April and then PLATOON in December.
In fact, both films were nominated for Oscars that year, with PLATOON ultimately taking best picture. They fought for best writing (alongside CROCODILE DUNDEE! No shit!) losing to Woody Allen’s HANNAH AND HER SISTERS.
When we first meet James Woods and his partner in crime, Doctor Rock (James Belushi), we’re led to believe they are losers. Not likable, crazy fun losers, but really worthless people. They reminded me a little bit of Dr. Gonzo and Raul Duke, actually.
Woods plays Richard Boyle, a war photographer and journalist, living in San Francisco. His wife takes his kid and leaves, he is evicted from his apartment and is stopped for speeding while racing towards his one hope at a job. Turns out the dude has a few outstanding speeding tickets, over 40 parking tickets and a revoked license.
He’s arrested and bailed out by Belushi, who is creepily channeling his brother here. I never saw much of John in James before, and I grew up loving shit like MR. DESTINY, so I saw a lot of his work, but here it’s kind of creepy how much slips through.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s playing a character John would have been at home playing. He’s a chubby, drug-addicted comic relief character for the first bit of the film. Belushi is just as much a loser as Woods, so these two head south and Woods ends up going much further than he told Belushi and they end up in El Salvador where Woods does whatever he can to cover the brewing revolution taking place.
About halfway through the movie I thought that Woods and Belushi weren’t such bad guys… then by the end I was totally on their side, but I realized something… they didn’t really change. Sure, Belushi learns to cope with his situation without freaking out every 5 seconds and Woods re-assesses his priorities, but they’re pretty much the same people we met in San Francisco, but a simple change in location and circumstances makes all the difference.
Especially with Woods’ character. He’s at home in El Salvidor, as dangerous as it is. He has friends and even another family there, consisting of a girlfriend and her two children. The girlfriend, Maria, is played by Elpidia Carrillo who a couple years later would go on to star alongside Schwarzenegger in PREDATOR.
Woods juggles his relationships with the US embassy people and the military (as it straddles the fence, trying to decide if they’re going to support the crooked regime in place or let revolution happen) and the revolutionaries as well as those already in charge. You never really know who Wood’s batting for, if anybody.
John Savage plays a fellow photobug who meets up with Woods and I think Savage goes a long way to humanizing Woods’ character. Woods clearly respects him and maybe even idol worships him a little bit. Woods doesn’t grovel at the dude’s feet, but he definitely treats him differently than anybody else in the movie with the possible exception being his girlfriend and her young brother, who doesn’t make it.
Basically the film is all about complexity. The good guys are fighting the bad guys. Easy enough right? The bad guys are the ones sending out death squads, killing anyone who doesn’t have the right paperwork or who might look at them funny. They’re certainly bad. The revolutionaries must then be the good guys. Woods believes that and we believe that, but when they do rise up we see them using the same ruthless tactics as those in power.
Woods’ character is likewise complex. He starts out a loser and like I said above he doesn’t really change, but what’s asked of him does. In many ways he’s a hero, in many ways he’s a fool, in many ways he’s a fucking prick, but no matter what he is you’re on his side by the time the credits roll. That might be because he seems to be dealt bad hand after bad hand and you have to sympathize with someone trying to hard to work towards their happiness and just having it all pulled away every time they get near.
The final scene in the movie is not nearly as harsh as individual scenes that came before it… the cute peace corp girl and the nuns who get sexually assaulted and murdered, the pit of death that Woods photographs… both those scenes are in your face and rough, much more so than what happens at the end of the movie, but for some reason the ending is worse than any of that. Without spoiling it, I think the reason that ending is such a gut-punch is precisely because of what came before.
And that peace corp girl, Cathy, was someone I recognized right off the bat but I couldn’t place her. The actress’ name is Cynthia Gibb and when I looked her up on IMDB, I got it. She was Fisher Stevens’ love interest in SHORT CIRCUIT 2. That’s what it was. “Help me, Rhonda… Help, help me Rhonda…”
All the acting is great, but this James Woods’ movie, a real chance to explore a character of depth and challengingly unlikable for the first part of the movie. If Woods hadn’t pulled it off, I wouldn’t have given a shit about this guy and would have disconnected from the movie. Luckily, I was in good hands as a viewer.
Stone’s direction is raw and had a purpose. I don’t think he does much subtle work visually, but that’s fine. The character are subtle enough, all he has to do is shoot it and he does that well. It’s a much bigger film than I expected, some really huge production design moments, like the aforementioned death pit. You can definitely see PLATOON when watching this movie. The main difference, actually, is that the iconography in PLATOON is much, much stronger. He has those iconic moments (reading to the heavens) that really stick with the viewer. In SALVADOR the moments that stick with us are the character moments.
Final Thoughts: SALVADOR is a powerful, well-made early effort by Stone that really marks his first step to becoming the kind of filmmaker he became famous for. Woods proves he earned that Best Actor nomination and makes me sad as shit that he’s not in more things these days… and it also makes me wish I could play a game of poker with him and hear his stories about working with Stone and Leone… It’s been a good run of AMAD here. I very highly recommend this one as well.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Tuesday, November 18th: BEST SELLER (1987)
Wednesday, November 19th: THE HOLCROT COVENANT (1985)
Thursday, November 20th: BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (1962)
Friday, November 21st: WHITE HEAT (1949)
Saturday, November 22nd: MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES (1957)
Sunday, November 23rd: EACH DAWN I DIE (1938)
Monday, November 24th: THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. (1941)
Lots and lots of Cagney coming up. Can’t wait! I’ve loved the Cagney we’ve covered so far in this column and it’s about goddamn time I finally saw WHITE HEAT from start to finish. See you folks tomorrow for another instalment of our James Woods mini-marathon: BEST SELLER!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
