Puppetmaster: Oliver Stone's THE PUTIN INTERVIEWS

The skeleton key moment that unlocks what’s startlingly effective and unshakably troubling about Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews comes at the top of its fourth hour. The latest in the director’s side project making documentaries which chronicle his conversations with controversial foreign leaders–  Israelis and Palestinians in Persona Non Grata, Fidel Castro in Comandante and Looking for Fidel and a number of South American leaders including Hugo Chavez in South of the Border – takes him to Russian president Vladimir Putin. After what we’ve seen as three hours of discussion, but which obviously translate to many more hours of raw footage, Stone cheerfully asks Putin to indulge him in setting up a shot. Go down the hall and then walk in and greet me, Stone directs, jocularly playing for the camera his control over the situation. He calls action. Putin does not enter. Stone cuts to show us the interviewee in the other room, smirking and winking at the camera as he ignores the repeated cues. He enters when he’s ready, speaking a charming line he’s clearly prepared. Stone seems to view the whole encounter innocently, otherwise he wouldn’t have included it so lightly in the film. Here we are, it seems to say, enjoying one another’s company. How relaxed we are. Indeed, this moment, and the film, reveal a personable Putin, who has complexity and humanity beyond the headlines. However, the scene shows more than Stone seems aware. He thinks Putin’s playing along, but really it is the Russian president demonstrating his control. Who is a pawn in whose game here? The answer seems clearer to the audience than to its director. 

Over the course of many hours we hear about the Russian president’s life, ambitions, world view, and goals. He is subtitled, and Stone lets his translator drift into the margins of the sound design from time to time, making a pleasing multilayered multilingual experience. What we learn little about are the variety of abuses in and allegations about Putin’s conduct, Stone allowing a chummy, discursive approach that enables Putin to steer the conversation, especially since the American interlocutor never directly challenges the former KGB agent on the nastier and more frightening tendencies widely reported – crackdowns of free speech and treatment of dissent treated gingerly, if at all. In Putin’s telling, he cares only about making Russia a strong, independent country with a firm grip on “family values.” (That this is expressed in heteronormative assumptions and terse homophobia should surprise no one familiar with the hypocritical and oxymoronic religious right in our country.) The documentary does an effective and interesting job examining the Putin philosophy. He bristles when discussing NATO and outlines a perspective on the geopolitical history of the last 100 years as one where any Russian aggression is simply tit-for-tat reactions to other’s countries’ slights, attacks, threats, and encroachments -- cause and effect stretching back decades. He continually disdainfully speaks of the West in general, and the United States in particular, as seeking not allies but “vassals,” a curiously medieval turn of phrase that’s nonetheless remarkably candid in explicating his viewpoint. 

Where the movie fails is in Stone’s oddly submissive approach. It’s baffling to consider the filmmaker who is so singularly skeptical about the narratives of powerful people – it’s all over his fiction filmmaking, the sort of nervy, edgy, intensely sympathetic, bracingly intelligent, conspiratorial frenzy that gives his work its heady, entertaining charge in exploring leaders and institutions of all shapes and sizes, from presidents to bankers to entertainers – going so cognitively limp. He presents his multiple interview sessions as warm and likable chat sessions, mixed with interesting tours of presidential offices and even an impromptu screening of Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. (That’s by far the film’s best scene, with Stone grinning that relatable grin of a cinephile eager to see how his viewing partner is reacting, and Putin returning a stoic, unsmiling “very interesting” as the credits roll.) The four-hour-film is ultimately an American auteur crafting a moderately educational Russian episode of MTV’s Cribs. He does such a good job presenting Putin’s point of view it’s an example of Stone’s skeptical contrarianism taking him all the way around the bend. He can’t see his way clear to tough questions because he’s too busy using his interview subject to question American hegemonic thinking (he throws in references to our “neocons” and, cringingly, includes clips of his own films) to challenge Russian talking points, too.

Secrets and Lies: SNOWDEN

Edward Snowden makes perfect sense as an Oliver Stone protagonist. Like JFK’s dogged district attorney Jim Garrison or Born on the Fourth of July’s veteran turned war protestor Ron Kovic, Snowden is a man whose pursuit of what he sees as unambiguous and truthful duty to country causes him to endure outer skepticism and scorn, and inner destabilizing life changes. Like Savages, The Doors, Platoon, and two Wall Streets, it’s about a young person drawn into a career with exciting upsides, but with downsides readily apparent as well. Like Nixon and W. and World Trade Center and Alexander it’s about a man driven by and ultimately fated to be crushed under the weight of history and expectation. But unlike those previous movies, Snowden finds Stone at his most restrained. He views the proceedings from a remove, not digging into the psychology as deeply, or using filmmaking flash as ostentatiously. It’s a movie that sees the spreading web of surveillance with a mournful paranoia. Look at what our government can do and has done, it says, lauding its hero while wondering if what he did will actually matter in the long run.

To best make the case for their protagonist as a misunderstood hero, Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman) begin by showing us Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the point of his earliest civic duty. In 2004 he’s discharged from boot camp after a painful leg injury, after which his drive to serve his country leads him to transfer to the C.I.A. He’s a smart, unassumingly confident computer nerd who defends George W. Bush, gently teases his liberal girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) about her beliefs, and admits to a fondness for Ayn Rand. (It’s not hard to read this material as Stone inviting conservatives into the story with a “See? He’s one of you?”) The movie then follows Snowden’s gradual disillusionment with the intelligence community as he moves from one contract job to the next, finding increasingly shadier tactics used in gathering and deploying data scooped up from a global dragnet. Each new revelation gives him waves of anxiety that seem to pass, but slowly and steadily accrues in the back of his mind until he has to act.

The movie becomes a portrait of a man whose work anxiety grows so potent his only recourse is to exorcise it by releasing it into the world. There’s something of the terror I remember feeling then to this telling now. (If his revelations about the wide-ranging surveillance tactics at the fingertips of our country (and others) didn’t have you slap a piece of tape over your webcam, I don’t know what would.) Because we know what Snowden did – and what we don’t know remains Top Secret and therefore a ripe target for Stone’s mythologizing speculation – there’s little surprise to the film. It’s even structured as flashbacks around scenes of documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) filming Snowden’s secret whistleblower interview with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), footage which would become the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour. This creates a strangely sedate sense of dutiful reenactment, making the characters mere pawns in historical inevitability. Gone is the volatile conspiratorial frenzy of Stone’s heated political films or the schlocky gusto of his genre fare. Here there’s an almost serene sense of data flowing, history written in bits and clicks, coded to produce this outcome.

This calm befits what is Stone’s fastest turnaround for contemplation on a flashpoint in modern American history, beating WTC (another of his eerie calm films) by two years. Anthony Dod Mantle (frequent Danny Boyle collaborator) makes images of clean simplicity, cut with occasional smeary doubling or reflections through layers of screens and glass. Snowden is trapped in a digital world made tangible, with information glowing and streaming, collected and collated. His personal dramas – simple fights with his girlfriend, a late-breaking health issue – are halfhearted, well-acted but beside the point. The most vivid crisis points are when his work life intrudes with unwelcome force on his home life. He can’t take his medication to prevent seizures because it slows his response time. A woozy snap zoom interrupts a heated love scene as he catches the unblinking cam eye of an open laptop, the extreme close up of the tiny black circle showing their nakedness reflected in it. There are standard thriller elements of people avoiding surveillance, befitting a news story that’s already informed dozens of action movies from Jason Bourne to Captain America 2 and Furious 7. Its tension remains at a constant low-boil, mystery dulled by unavoidable outcomes.

It all adds up to a movie that’s vital and turgid, obvious but with flickers of surprise and life. The known facts of the story are bulked up with lesser-known or fictionalized incidents, inconvenient truths and convenient fictions pumped through with enjoyable personalities. Around even corner is a likable recognizable face bringing fine energy opposite their scene partners. Part of the fun is wondering who’ll show up next: Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Olyphant, Scott Eastwood, Keith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Schnetzer. Each is used by Stone to keep interest and curiosity flowing, never quite sure whether each new co-worker is a sympathetic ear or a reason to raise Snowden’s disillusionment. They create a pattern to the movie’s pulsing compelling/dull, scary/stale info-dumps (the best of which is an abstract swirling animation of social media chatter and secret metadata flowing into a black hole that slowly forms an eye, the sort of image so hypnotizing it doesn’t matter how blatant the symbolism), playing key roles in the process and personifications of various view points.

In the end it’s another Stone movie of weary patriotism. It’s about the burden of being a good American, about loving the country so much it’s worth wishing it were better. Clinging stubbornly to ideals is difficult, especially when calling into question the ratio of security to liberty from within the government can make you a target for, at best, criticism and stress, and at worst jail or exile. Stone makes Snowden a figure unambiguously good, leaking information as a last-ditch effort to improve what he sees as a slippery slope to tyranny. After the deed is done he literally has Snowden walk out of the dark data center into gleaming white sunlight. And yet the unsettled aftermath – stuck in Russia, communicating in warnings from a robotic screen – creates uncertainty, ending on a slightly more ambiguous note. He receives applause and attention, yes, but isolation and confusion, too. He thought it was important we hear what was happening. Now we know. Now what?

Danger to Themselves and Others: SAVAGES

In case we needed proof that director Oliver Stone has entered a relaxed late period of his filmmaking career, here comes Savages, a leisurely thriller that’s glancingly topical, set amidst recessionary drug-war politics and Mexican cartel violence, and at once complicated and reductive. He’s not stretching to make a pointed political statement or pumping up the style of what is already a fairly lurid, violent plot. Instead, he’s luxuriating in the nastiness and complexities of the script he co-wrote with Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (from Winslow’s novel). He’s taking his time, letting characters simmer until the time is right to spring them into action, allowing the plot to throw unlikely allies together, reveal its secrets, spin its wheels, come to moments of fiery action and then back down, coast along with a mostly talented ensemble cast until falling into a satisfying shoot-‘em-up climax that throws in a last minute surprise as it rewrites itself as it goes along.

The movie, a pulpy series of noirish events unraveling under the hot Laguna Beach sun, concerns two peaceful pot-growing entrepreneurs (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) and the girl (Blake Lively) who loves them both. The steamy opening moments slowly introduce us to this tricky romantic triangle. The arrangement of relationships is open and the three of them are friendly, so it all works out. As the plot kicks into motion, the guys, on the advice of their crooked D.E.A. pal (John Travolta), are considering a substantial offer of money from a lawyer (Demián Bichir) representing a ruthless Mexican cartel that wants to hire them as a north-of-the-border supplier. When the guys make plans to skip town and turn them down, the head of the cartel (Salma Hayek) orders her head henchman (Benicio Del Toro) to kidnap the girl.

What follows is a movie of shifting alliances and jockeying for power on both sides of the border. Everyone involved wants to get out of this nasty entanglement with the best enriching scenario for themselves, but given the violent, ruthless stakes of it all, most of them will be lucky to escape with their lives. In the telling, Stone is much less interested in the specifics of the action – although he stages a thrilling mid-film sequence of literal highway robbery – than in the slow burn of mood and style. This is a thriller that doesn’t feel in a rush to get anywhere in particular. Instead, it serves up long sequences that sit with characters as they try to fight their way through the suffocating moral thicket into which they’ve tumbled headfirst in the pursuit of self-preservation and profit. It’s a movie playing with all sorts of tropes of gangster movies, and neo-noir Westerns, but it’s really all about bloody business negotiations.

The ensemble cast is up to the task with incredible faces on which to watch the negotiations, and all the other scheming and plotting, play out. Kitsch and Johnson are buddies in over their heads with squinty, low-rent Butch and Sundance charm (a duo namedropped in the film itself). Hayek has a calm face of deep anger, sadness and cold calculation, Del Toro, a brutality behind his literal mustache twirling, Travolta, a close-cropped greed that reveals itself in scenes with both sides of this mess. Lively’s character, when she's not reading overwritten narration, is a vexing dilemma, needy and terrified, willful and weak, and hard to read. She’s in a position of very little power in this scenario, but she’s desperate to find a way out nonetheless and works very hard to hide this desperation as she gets close to the one who holds her captive. It’s a tangle of emotional and business connections.

Though Stone spikes the narrative with shots that slowly fade to black and white or flash into various lenses and filters, this isn’t a chaotic stylistic experiment. This is a thriller of straightforward moodiness, a slow-building tension that watches its characters as they twist under pressure, desperate to find simple solutions to their complicated problems. What we have here is the work of a confident director who somehow makes the film feel like a work of mature exploitation. Because it’s a film of characters glowering and calculating, working their way through logic bordering on labyrinthine into triangulations that will hopefully give them the best advantage when on the other side of this bloody mess, moments of incredible violence (one man's whipped so hard his eyeball pops out of its socket) and icky tortures both physical and psychological (especially uncomfortable and unnecessary is a video that Del Toro shows Lively late in the film) feel both shocking and inevitable.

Stone’s always, especially in his more clearly political films, been interested in authority, who has it, who benefits from it, who is hurt by it, whether it be soldiers (Platoon, Born on the Forth of July), presidents (Nixon, W.), politicians (JFK), bankers (Wall Street), conquerors (Alexander), and media forces both institutions (Any Given Sunday) and the infamous (Natural Born Killers). In Savages, the only real authority in the drug trade comes from what can be bought with threats and violence. This is an unstable situation. What makes this a compelling representation of this concept is the way Stone keeps a sharp eye on the characters as they slowly make their moves towards gaining or retaining the upper hand.

Here, after a big violent shootout, one character begs the others to pull to the side of the road and vomits out of the getaway car. This is a vicious movie filled with scared characters desperately trying to find their way back into some kind of comfort zone, an amount of weary realism in aggressive, stylized pulp. Stone may eschew nuance for intensity, but he provides the texture to keep things interesting. It’s telling that, although Stone isn’t out to make any sort of overtly political statement and no character could be considered a moralistic center, at different points in the movie the Americans and the Mexicans each call the other “savages” behind the others’ backs. And then they each get the chance to live down to that description.

Crime and Punishment: WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Oliver Stone’s 1987 financial thriller Wall Street worked because it pinpointed the human tragedies imbedded in the fluctuations of the stock market by placing a young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) between his union-man father (Martin Sheen) and a slimy potential father-figure mentor, the financial tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The movie thrills with its juicy drama, electric script, and the almost tactile sense of the stock market as one giant game played only by the rich and the power-hungry.

How was Stone to know that Douglas’s Gekko, the film’s villain, would become a hero of sorts to a generation of Wall Street employees? Gekko’s central, memorable speech, where he explains the virtues of unchecked greed (it’s, “for lack of a better term, good”) is chilling in context. Once ripped from the film, the speech entered the business lexicon. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale (Gekko eventually gets in big trouble for his shady dealings), good greed became the name of the game. The film is dated now and not just because of the fashions, the music, and the technology. In 2010, the financial crimes and outrages of 1987 seem quaint.

The time is exactly right for a follow up. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is set in 2008 in the moments leading up to the financial meltdown and the subsequent bank bailouts. Though following fictional characters, the basic facts of the crisis are left unchanged. There weren’t competing banks run by Frank Langella and Eli Wallach, but it’s not hard to assume that the nameless bank owners who sit in ominous boardrooms and backrooms stand in for those who really were partly responsible for running our economy into the ground. The milieu in which the film takes place rings more or less true.

It is the build up to this crisis that Gordon Gekko finds himself witnessing after being released from prison seven years before the film’s action begins. In the interim, he’s written a book and become a hit on the lecture circuit. There’s the sense that he’s merely circling his old stomping grounds, waiting for the right moment to get back in the game. He’s been burned before, but he’s learned from his mistakes. He may be older, but he’s no less ruthless. He may appear slightly softer, mildly gentler, but this is a man who still has deep reservoirs of danger and anger with which he can sting his enemies.

And yet, this is a film that will never really live up to the promise of its premise. Scenes involving slimy bankers, especially the suave sleaze of Josh Brolin’s billionaire investor, are often captivating in their rush of jargon and amoral greed. This is where we need to see Gekko. He needs to be going toe-to-toe with the people who make his villainy outdated. Instead, he’s working by proxy through Shia LaBeouf, a young ambitious suit who also happens to be the fiancé of Gekko’s estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan).

LaBeouf and Mulligan are perfectly fine in ill-conceived roles. Their respective struggles with the Wall Street game – LaBeouf wants to get in it while Mulligan is still dealing with the destruction it did to her family – are of some mild interest. But the relationship between LaBeouf and Douglas, though it has its moments, isn’t as deeply felt as the similar relationship between Sheen and Douglas in the first film. And Mulligan, despite all her considerable talent, is given little more to do than tear up from time to time and constantly refuse to have anything to do with her father. At best, the interfamily relationships, including Susan Sarandon in little more than a cameo as LaBeouf’s mother, are perfectly watchable and appealing. At worst, they distract from the real fun.

And there is certainly real fun to be had with Money Never Sleeps. Fueled by a score that includes great songs from Brian Eno and David Byrne, it’s effortlessly enjoyable when it follows its characters manipulating stock prices, schmoozing at galas, and engaging in tense discussions of economic and business policies. The ease with which the stock market can be influenced and the simplicity with which billions can be lost is real-world scariness channeled into rapid-fire thriller-speak. The film watches the fluctuations in stock prices, keeping the audience informed how the shapes of the graphs are being used for revenge, for greed, for the sheer dark pleasures of playing the game.

The script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff is not at all as sparkling as the writing to be found in the first film with its great monologues and memorable exchanges penned by Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser. In fact, the sequel includes a lengthy speech that is clearly intended to be the new “greed is good” moment. Douglas delivers it well, but it goes on for far too long with no stakes involved and not one memorable line. Stone’s filmmaking picks up some of the script’s slack with its mostly solid craftsmanship. This is a fast, messy 133 minutes, despite occasional symbolic hiccups. It’s filled with genuine interest in the fascinating, infuriating machinations of Wall Street.