Battle of the '60s Film Visionaries

__"Dostoyevsky Behind a Camera" by Garry Wills, in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1997), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114; "Decency and Muck" by George Packer, in Dissent (Summer 1997), 521 Fifth Ave., Ste. 1700, New York, N.Y. 10017.__

Ever since his JFK (1991), which presented a far-fetched, fact-challenged conspiracy theory about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, filmmaker Oliver Stone has increasingly come to seem an irresponsible Hollywood loon, obsessively turning out simple-minded, albeit cinematically exciting, political "message" movies. Natural Born Killers (1994) glamorized violence; Nixon (1995) trashed RN, even if not as badly as many had expected, and last year’s People vs. Larry Flynt, which Stone produced but didn’t direct, draped the First Amendment around a misogynistic porn merchant who was sanitized for the screen. "You have to recreate the climate of madness in the culture," says Stone.

Wills, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), contends that the filmmaker is widely misunderstood and is actually writing "great novels . . . with the camera." Stone’s work shows "a feel for timeless narrative patterns" (a mystery story, for instance, in the case of JFK), Wills says, into which he imports "not only newspapers from below but also a mysticism from above. He is constantly suggesting cosmic showdowns behind or beyond the newsy events and the genres. Improbable martyrs and gurus haunt the screen." Just like Dostoyevsky! Wills breathtakingly asserts. "Both men set this material ablaze with fierce energies."

Packer, author of The Half-Man (1991), is far less impressed. Stone is "an extremely talented filmmaker," whose early Salvador (1985), about El Salvador’s slide into civil war and American culpability in the conflict, "is proof that he once had a strong gift for story and characterization." But Stone "has squandered his talents." (Not that it seems to have hurt him at the box office.)

In his nine subsequent films, Stone has come to depend so heavily on visual effect to generate excitement, Packer says, that he is unable to explore the "more complicated and more truly exciting" reality beneath the surface. "In Stone’s climate of madness there’s no room for human relationships—they are always static, and his women have no life on the screen except in the case of a strong performance, such as Joan Allen’s as Pat Nixon. Nor is there room for real politics, which is to say, moral and historical complexity."

Packer contrasts Stone’s films with the mature work of another left-wing writer-director from the baby boom generation, John Sayles. In Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), City of Hope (1991), and last year’s Lone Star, the independent filmmaker details "the relationships, personal and social, among a range of characters, all concerned with justice.... The style is understated, the pace often slow, the cinematography simple. Three or four plots are woven together, suggesting a theme of mutual responsibility." The main characters are working people caught in mundane obligations to family, job, or town. "His vision of community isn’t a dropout’s utopia held together by love but a town divided by social class in which individuals are faced with old-fashioned moral choices."

Sayles is not as visually inventive as Stone, in Packer’s view, nor even as good a screenwriter as Stone at his best. But his films draw on what was best in the 1960s ("reasonableness . . . collective hope . . . the Port Huron Statement"), instead of, as Stone’s do, on what was worst ("paranoia, grandiosity, romantic primitivism"). That Sayles’s career has been so overshadowed by Stone’s, Packer concludes, shows "the attraction of glamorous muck over common decency, and the difficulty of saying something serious about politics through the vehicle of mass culture, which seems the only way left to be heard."