director
Oliver Stone
screenwriters
David Veloz
Richard Rutowski
Oliver Stone
story by
Quentin Tarantino
producers
Jane Hamsher
Don Murphy
Clayton Townsend
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
music
Trent Reznor
tomandandy
editors
Brian Berdan
Hank Corwin
cast
Woody Harrelson (Mickey Knox)
Juliette Lewis (Mallory Knox)
Robert Downey Jr. (Wayne Gale)
Tommy Lee Jones (Dwight McClusky)
Tom Sizemore (Jack Scagnetti)
Rodney Dangerfield (Ed Wilson)
Edie McClurg (Mrs. Wilson)
Sean Stone (Kevin Wilson)
Balthazar Getty (Jimmy Lupont)
Russell Means (Old Indian)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (Kavanaugh)
Everett Quinton (Wurlitzer)
Steven Wright (Dr. Emil Reingold)
Joe Grifasi (Duncan Homolka)
James Gammon (Redneck)
Arliss Howard (Owen Traft)
Jared Harris (London Boy)
O-Lan Jones (Mabel)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 122m
u.s.
release: 8/26/94
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other oliver
stone films
reviewed on this website:
- alexander
- any given sunday
- nixon
- u-turn
- world trade center
see also:
- review of the home-video
director's cut
- review of jane hamsher's
book killer instinct, about
the making of NBK
|
By
now, American critics have worn out their thesauri hunting for
adjectives to describe Natural Born Killers. So I have
set myself the following challenge: not to use the words "gonzo,"
"chaotic," "revolutionary," and especially
"brilliant" in this review. So what does that leave?
Words like "unpleasant," "breathtaking,"
"incoherent," "unforgettable," "exhausting,"
"disturbing," "hypocritical," "near-great,"
"oafish".... As you can see, I'm of two minds about
NBK. Would I recommend it? Definitely -- I aim to see
it at least twice more. Yet I must be honest: NBK is electrifying,
except when it's stupid. That's par for the course in a film
by Oliver Stone, the burly master of cinematic assault (JFK,
The Doors, Platoon). Here, however, Stone's approach
is even more toxic and confrontational than usual -- that of
a rapist who attacks your daughter in front of you, then tells
you the experience will make you and her stronger. Stone both
gleefully anticipates and wearily disdains our heated response
to his work, a strange position for an artist. And he is
an artist, a red-black mirror on ugly times.
Natural Born Killers is nothing if not ugly. Treating
an original script by Quentin (Reservoir
Dogs) Tarantino as a blueprint, Stone has come up with
a hectoring satire on our degraded culture. The most expensive
experimental film made in this country since Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, NBK employs a variety
of film stocks and techniques (video, animation, back-screen
projection, morphing). Edited ferociously, so that each scabrous
image pierces us like a flying shard of glass, the movie is a
bubbling cauldron of movie sorcery, intended to suggest the violent
iconography of the 20th century thrown into a blender. I smelled
weed on many of the strangers surrounding me in the theater,
but going to this movie stoned is redundant: The director makes
sure you get Stoned. Nothing in NBK, literally not a single
shot, looks or sounds normal, and Stone mounts an all-out war
on our senses, our sensibilities, our sense of reality. This
is an ambitious, all-or-nothing guerrilla project, and it seems
churlish to point out that it's all a lot of sound and fury signifying
nothing.
But it has to be said. For Natural Born Killers is without
mind and heart. And plot. Stone follows two murderous young crackers,
Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis),
as they shoot and stab their way down the highways and through
the ghost towns of the Southwest. On their trail are Jack Scagnetti
(Tom Sizemore), a loathsome, violent detective who wants to capture
them and pen a self-glorifying bestseller about them (he also
has a thing for Mallory); and Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.),
the pretentious Aussie host of the trash-TV series "American
Maniacs," whose philosophy about his job seems to shift
according to Stone's hop-skip whims. Everyone else in America
seems to be cheering on these sociopathic rednecks -- everyone,
that is, except the 52 corpses they leave in their wake. Mickey
and Mallory come from dysfunctional backgrounds, and they kill
for spiritual and cathartic reasons; years of Oprah and Donahue
have taught us not to condemn these poor lost souls who continue,
helplessly and unconsciously, the cycle of brutality. A movie
that explored the new, misguided, touchy-feely media interest
in psychos and their troubled origins (this is a climate that
made possible the publication of a bewildered memoir by Jeffrey
Dahmer's dad) would truly be a brave satire. But Stone takes
the easy road, giving evil its own fan club. NBK is like
a William S. Burroughs rewrite of The Legend of Billie Jean.
These lovers are lean, cool and sexy, and they take no crap.
Right on, Mickey and Mallory -- go get 'em.
Stone, an enemy of "the media" who somehow always forgets
that he is also part of "the media," uses Scagnetti
and Gale to score blatantly obvious satirical points off of "the
media." No victim in Natural Born Killers is as viciously
bloodied and mutilated as is "the media." That the
film has been lionized by TV, print, and radio critics, that
it has a tie-in soundtrack album and novelization, and that it
owes at least half its success to the aura of controversy generated
by advance media hype, are probably not ironies that Stone chooses
to acknowledge. After all, he leaves out the most obvious touch
of all: At the end, Mickey and Mallory take off for points unknown,
and Oliver Stone makes a movie about them. What is Stone doing
if not glorifying their trippy journey? He doesn't disapprove,
and he doesn't view them neutrally.
Natural Born Killers has been likened to A Clockwork
Orange by critics who seek another dark, violent satire to
compare it with, but who may not have seen the recent Belgian
"mockumentary" Man Bites
Dog, which NBK more closely resembles (and which
makes a much bolder statement about the complicity between a
killer, those who film his actions, and those who watch the film).
Stylistically, the comparison does hold water. Stanley Kubrick's
classic, which remains as provocative today as it was 23 years
ago, pushed the envelope of film language much the same way Stone's
movie does. As satire, though, NBK isn't in the same league.
The characters, particularly Tommy Lee Jones (admittedly hilarious)
as a grotesque prison warden, are so frantically cartoonish that
each horrific event lies at a safe remove from us. The movie
is set on Bizarro World, its inhabitants and visuals so overheated,
so overwrought, so over-everything, that nothing in it relates
to us directly. It's a howling vortex of a movie, and staring
into a vortex can be mindlessly enthralling until you realize
you are looking into an infinite loop of emptiness: A vortex
has a vacuum at its center. That's Natural Born Killers.
The movie comes at you and comes at you; it leaves you with nothing
except sore eyes and a numbed brain. Yet I left the theater raving
about it -- when I was eventually able to speak -- so I guess
I'd better justify that now. This has not been a summer for daring
films (what summer ever is?), and I've spent the last several
months departing most every movie with a boring certainty of
what I thought of it. Come home, write the review, forget about
it. (Recently I was a little surprised to remember that I had
in fact seen Maverick.) Natural Born Killers won't
vacate my memory any time soon. The movie annihilates itself,
but what gorgeous suicidal sparks it sends off! For two hours,
Stone pelts you with images that are sickening, beautiful, nonsensical,
lucid, offensive, soothing, sometimes all at once. Inevitably,
some images stick faster than others. A recurring shot of a headless
bloody body rising slowly from a chair has stayed with me longer
than I want it to, but I had to think a minute to recall its
context (ah, yes, Mickey's dad shotgunned himself).
No sane moviegoer would want a steady diet of films like this,
but its ferocious abrasiveness is precisely what makes it perversely
refreshing. If you can dissociate yourself from the brutality,
this is a hell of a ride; and yet that same dissociation produces
apathy and even contempt for the suffering people on the screen.
No two ways about it: Natural Born Killers is not a moral
work. But I've sat through many moral films that weren't half
this vivid; the movie has a writhing, ugly life unlike anything
I've seen before. The troubling question: Do audiences respond
so readily to the violence Stone does to conventional narrative
form, or to the violence Mickey and Mallory do to their randomly
selected and mostly undeserving prey? To see the movie in a packed
house, sitting with excitable teenagers, can be more disquieting
than the movie itself: The film carries a whiff of danger, which
spreads through the audience like a virus. In more ways than
one, I was relieved to get out.
When Oliver Stone isn't busy mauling "the media," a
sprightly side comes out. Mallory, flashing back on her first
meeting with Mickey, remembers it as a sitcom -- "I Love
Mallory" -- with Rodney Dangerfield (perfectly cast) as
Mallory's repulsive, sexually abusive father. Complete with a
laugh track and a burst of applause when Mickey enters, the scene
is the funniest thing in the movie, but the laughter sticks in
one's throat, as Stone probably means it to. But is Stone also
saying that sitcoms contribute to our spiritual cancer by presenting
unrealistic candy-views of loving families? Has Stone seen Married...with
Children or Roseanne, two of the most popular and
durable sitcoms on the air? I also liked Mickey's complaining
about violent movies ("Don't anybody kiss any more?")
while clips from Midnight Express and Scarface,
scripted by guess who, play on TV -- signalling that Stone is
willing to take at least some of his own abuse. (The joke is
funnier if you know that these two films represent opposite tacks
in the art-influences-life debate: Midnight Express was
touted -- falsely, as it turned out -- as having greased the
wheels for more humane treatment of prisoners in Turkish jails,
while Scarface has provided a role model for countless
real-life gangsters.)
But in the end, Stone spares himself. Unlike Man Bites Dog,
NBK sprays little venom at those who made the movie or
those who pay to see it. The target is safely "them"
-- "those people" who produce or watch "those
tabloid shows." (Ah, so television is the fountain of evil
-- not movies or music or video games? Oliver Stone, meet Marshall
McLuhan.) If that's the target, why not get into the subject
of why many Americans, made fearful and paranoid by the brutal
worldview presented by tabloid TV, go out and buy guns, therefore
becoming part of the problem? Oliver Stone's best work has been
muckraking take-no-prisoners stuff like Salvador; if any
moviemaker has a tabloid sensibility, he does. Unless I'm mistaken,
Natural Born Killers, beneath its dark jocularity, is
Stone's self-hating projection onto our society. We're not seeing
what's in Mickey and Mallory's heads -- we're seeing what's in
Oliver Stone's head. Who else put it on the screen? Perhaps Stone,
who's described the making of NBK as "more fun"
than anything else he's directed, was reluctant to piss too much
on his own parade. The fearless, confrontational muckraker backs
away from confronting himself.
For my part, I'm ready to give considerable slack to any filmmaker
who takes me somewhere I haven't been. Whether good or bad (and
there've been a few bad), all of Oliver Stone's movies are passports
to someplace hostile, strange, brutally rejuvenating. He is the
Sin Eater of Hollywood, turning his heart black to absolve us
of our guilt; nobody elected him, but nobody else is doing it.
Thematically, and in many other ways, NBK is juvenile
unless this is your first satire or your first road movie. Stylistically,
though, it's a new, scary critter far outside the usual film
menagerie. Your response to it depends on what means more to
you. Content and form matter equally to me, and so I end as I
began: I'm torn. Natural Born Killers is both awesome
and exasperating. So is a lot of outright trash; so is a lot
of great art. |