See this for a Blast from the Reagan Past

When I first saw Salvador, way back in 1986, I didn't know who Oliver Stone was, but I knew I loved this movie. In fact, I went back and saw it, at the Quad Cinema, three times. The movie, featuring the John Belushi character's opening tirade against Yuppies and "this Yuppie city" (San Francisco), had much to appeal to a young, working person, such as myself.

But Salvador, as the name implies, is much more than a long-form rant against wealthy, urban professionals. To be more precise, it's a rant against the right-wing supported United States' intervention in Central America. The name would suggest that it's about El Salvador, but it seems to use a pastiche of various situations from Central America in the period since the end of the Second World War, especially the late-70's and early-80's. In fact, much of the drama revolves around the change-of-shift which occurred when American foreign policy left the command of President Carter and came under the grip of Ronald Reagan.

One thing's certain: the film prominently displays the left-wing orientation of Oliver Stone's politics. Stone, who wrote the screenplay, seems to have been of two minds about the foreign-service professionals who populate the movie. On the one hand, Ambassador Kelly, played by Michael Murphy, comes across as a well-meaning but ineffectual chap. On the other hand, the various military aids and analysts who stomp around in Salvador, frequently displaying large quantities of gold braid, appear as unambiguous bad guys. Think the "Tex" CIA character (played by Bo Hopkins) from Midnight Express (look way down in the credits, and you'll find Stone has a writing credit in Midnight Express) and you'll get the idea. The Embassy folks aren't all bad, though. The Ambassador's secretary seems very nice.

If you've seen some of Stone's other movies, such as JFK and Nixon, you'll know the director has some pretty silly ideas about recent American history. JFK features a memorable appearance by Tommy Lee Jones as a flamboyant homosexual who, for kicks, runs something like a guerilla training camp for campy terrorists. In the movie, Stone posits that the Jones character had something to do with JFK's assassination. He manages to conveniently sidestep a few key questions about the Kennedy assassination, such as the fact that Oswald had plenty of time to get off two more shots after the first, or that Oswald had started his career at the Book Depository, with its excellent vantage of the President's route, long before JFK's trip through the city had even been planned.

In Nixon, you can see lots more of Stone's noodle-headed notions: the cuts to the foaming-mouthed horse closeup when Nixon meets with Hoover at the racetrack; the significant looks. What significant looks? Well, you have the sequence where Nixon's at the ranch, in Texas, the ranch of the creepy Larry Hagman character. In that sequence, you get significant looks from the hookers, significant looks from the Cubans, significant looks from Nixon's adviser, played by Larry Hedaya (who himself got to play Nixon in a movie or two). With all those shifty looks, you just know something sneaky's going on. Not to mention the closeups of guys covertly zipping their flies.

To give Stone credit, his Vietnam opus, Platoon (which came out the same year as Salvador), stuck quite closely to the historical facts of that controversial war. Then again, Stone served in Vietnam, in the infantry, so he ought to know what he's screenwriting about when it comes to the little mess in which we got embroiled in Southeast Asia.

If Stone's sense of history and current events isn't always dead-on accurate, he's great at picking good actors. Part of his genius in this movie is the casting choices, with the lead played by James Woods as a burned-out freelance reporter and a strong supporting role from James Belushi as a fat, stoner FM rock deejay who's along on the trip to Salvador as Wood's sidekick. Neither Woods nor Belushi were particularly prominent actors at the time Salvador was shot, but they're very effective in their roles and Stone got a bargain by hiring them. Woods is one of the most talented actors in America. He may have been in some bad movies, but I've never seen him turn in a bad performance.

There are plenty of funny scenes between Woods and Belushi and that's partly the problem with Salvador. It makes war reporting look like Animal House with hand grenades. The subject matter here merits a serious tone, such as was used in a movie like Missing, and, while Stone does give the movie a weighty feel when it's appropriate, some people might be offended by the way he casually mixes murdered nuns with gross-out gags. I do not agree with people who think Stone was all wrong in this. Overall, the humor adds to the scope and power of the movie. Life can be funny, at times, and tragic, and by showing both sides Stone gives a certain honesty to the picture.

The humor also highlights the way in which Woods, Belushi, and most of the other Americans in this movie are like babes in the jungle. The violence in Central America (as in North America) has been going on for centuries and, as this film shows, any American who gets involved in the scene there, especially the military/political scene, needs to be prepared for a serious experience.

Still, there are points in the movie where the tone does feel too light, where it seems that the light-hearted buddy relationship between Woods and Belushi isn't a proper subject when set against the background of so many people who have gone through so much suffering for so many years.

One of the main background events in Salvador is the election of President Reagan. I think America is still trying to come to terms with the Reagan experience, and seeing a movie like this is very helpful to get a fix on the way one felt during the Reagan age. In fact, during a short clip of Reagan speaking on television, I immediately remembered the sense I always had, whenever watching Reagan speak, that he was just delivering lines and that he would say anything that his writers put down on the page. It wouldn't have surprised me at all if, during a policy speech, Reagan were to begin to say, "The continued influx of green jello is just further proof that the evil dessert-topping empire is continuing to encroach on every corner of our domestic, strategic Tupperware reserves." It wouldn't have surprised me a bit. But seeing Reagan in this movie, which I haven't seen for years, really brought back to me the way I had felt about many events at that time.

If you're a fan of Stone's, but haven't seen Salvador, then I strongly recommend it as a significant signpost along the road of his career development. You can see, here, that he's getting his narrative style together. The edges are a little rough, but he's building the skills that would explode in powerful, later works like Born on the Fourth of July and Nixon.