Guerilla Cinema

Oliver Stone's Salvador is a film that in many ways represents what a politically turbulent time the 1980's was, and just how radical and daring cinema could be back then.

Salvador is a view of the 1980-81 period in El Savador seen from the fictional point of view of journalist Richard Boyle (played by James Woods). Having recently been evicted from his apartment and being down on his luck in terms of money, Richard travels down to El Salvador with his similarly down and out DJ friend Dr. Rock (John Belushi) in the hope that there might be a job for him there in chronicling the civil war. There he is reunited with an old flame and becomes committed to getting her out of the helltorn country.

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Oliver Stone has made a name for himself by being an uncompromisingly political filmmaker. And here he goes into the politics of El Salvador circa 1980. Taking an explicit look at the death squads, the massacres, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the CIA training and funding of the country's corrupt tyrant Major Max. Like a surgeon opening up the body and revealing the true ugliness inside under a scrutinising spotlight.

So how does he bring us into the environment of El Salvador? Well he introduces the film like a buddy comedy road movie. The early part of the film is shot like a road movie and the film actually has the grimy gonzo look of a road movie, in a way that conjures memories of Easy Rider. So we're introduced to our no hopers, Richard Boyle and Dr. Rock, and immediately it becomes plausible why they'd be driven to spending time in El Salvador. They both describe how money is too tight to mention for either of them and they're both short of a place to stay. And so we immediately get why the benefits of a long holiday in El Salvador, a country where prices are very low, and it's possible to get by on a low income have an overpowering pull factor.

Well for Richard anyhow, who's determined to go there, though for Dr. Rock he's only going with Richard under protest, because that's what a best friend does. Indeed the very presence of John Belushi conjures memories of Blues Brothers. This opening segment of the film misleadingly plays very much as a comedy. A comedy that's very acidic and very funny, and works by hitting on common economic frustrations and relationship issues with real bite.

It was becoming hip in the mid-80's to take this kind of post-modern approach of taking the kind of characters from one genre of film and putting them in the wrong movie. So this film takes characters from a comedy film and puts them in a harrowing politicial war drama and show how out of their depth they are. It's a bit like how Aliens had taken a bunch of macho type heroes from an action film and put them in a horror film, and showed how most of them ended up dead for being too obtusely macho to realise the kind of film they were in. Notice it's only the characters like Ripley and Newt who realised they were in a horror movie all along, who survived at the end.

So we have the comedy and the characters as our hook into the film, and they're a very mesmerising hook indeed. But the film actually makes this transition from disarming comedy to harsh war film almost seamlessly. Because in many ways Salvador captures that tragicomic mood of how if you don't laugh you'll cry. The film really does well to make us feel the environment and culture of El Salvador in a very sensual, tactile way. That sense of poverty, disrepair and dislocation, the smell of weed and choking smoke in the air, the sensation of hot rashes and a sharp booster shot, and of course the fear and sense of a country fractured and divided. But also sees Richard forming intimate shoulder to shoulder bonds with the people there. It brings across such an oppressively confrontational environment, too confrontational for comfort infact.

But in many ways Salvador is the kind of film I'd normally find hard to warm to. As with a lot of Oliver Stone's films it's very excessive, very bombarding. The film is cluttered with one dilemma tripping over another, and in some places the emphasis that should be there just isn't so we don't engage with the situation, we just feel saturated in tension. And for all that, all the excess dilemmas, it is a predictable film. I don't mean predictable in the sense of knowing how it was all going to turn out beforehand, but you're rarely in any doubt of how a given scene is going to turn out.

On that note though, it's a bit like Alan Clarke's 1988 short film 'Elephant', a virtually silent film filmed in Northern Ireland, that consists of scene after scene of a nameless gunman shooting one person after another without compunction. What the film did was to turn the killing into something everyday and banal, in a manner that was real and frightening. This film does the same. The violence and killing is predictable in the way that life at its bleakest is always predictable. Basically it's authentic in presentation. Occasionally the violence oversteps the line, for instance there's a rape scene in the film that feels vaguely exploitative to me. Though having said that, in the scene after the rape, one of the women victims faces her death with a beautiful dignity despite her fear, and that moment really stayed with me more than any other. Most of the time the violence is refreshingly honest. The scene where Boyle is trying to breathe the last moments of life into his fallen journalist friend John Cassady is so real and authentic in a blood on your hands kind of way.

But that leads into my next complaint. There's a defeatism about Salvador as a film. Hotel Rwanda dealt with similar subject matter, but it did leave me with a sense of hope at the end. Salvador didn't. I generally don't like defeatism, it's the reason why I went off Buffy, and Doctor Who when they became all introspective and angsty. It's the reason why although I love Diana Ross, her songs about surrendering submissive unconditional love to caddish jackasses always left a bit of a nasty aftertaste with me. It's the reason why I've never completely warmed to Taxi Driver.

And Salvador certainly does present a hopeless situation. From the moment we enter Salvador, and witness an innocent man brought to his knees by the military and shot through the head for trying to travel through a border without a valid birth certificate, we know that Salvador is no place to stay, but that there's no escape for the people who live there. Worse still, the death squads of Salvador have the financial and military backing of America, so there's no chance for a revolution. As Richard Boyle points out, America simply comes down hard and places a stranglehold on any country that has inklings towards socialism. I've recently been reading Bill Bryson's autobiographical book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and there's a whole chapter devoted to America's anti-communist rhetoric, and it's shocking just how much America could get away with on the strength of the red scare. And in this case America was on hand to destroy any chance that Salvador had to reclaim its independence. Richard lays all the facts at the feet of the American military higher ups in an unstopping tyrade of the brutal truth, all the ugly facts from history that keep repeating themselves the moment America steps in, but it falls on deaf ears as he is repeatedly dismissed as a Commie.

But still Salvador has its resistance fighters, and Richard falls in with the rebels, and genuinely hopes that they'll succeed against the odds and bring down the tyrants. But as he joins them in a siege and the soldiers of the military surrender, the rebels simply start massacring them for revenge, and Richard quickly realises that they've become no better than the death squads. It's a horrifying scene, it's one of those really morally challenging and disturbing scenes where you can no longer tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. It's a shocking, provocative 'which side are you on?' moment. And it's morally challenging because most of us watching the film up until this point would have wanted this moment of vengeance to happen. But it's not even a question of whether these soldiers 'deserved' it or not. It's just immediately clear that either way this is the future of Salvador, it won't end here, that if the rebels succeed, they'll only be replacing one murderous brutal regime with another. Eventually Richard simply has to resign himself to trying to save a few and help them to escape, but as the film climaxes in a downbeat fashion, he even fails to do that.

I should probably qualify my issue with defeatism. I have a problem with defeatism in cinema if it is dishonestly defeatist, it there's an obfuscation of other options. Defeatism does usually have a hint of the pretentious about it. I don't have a problem with presenting an honestly hopeless situation, and Salvador is certainly not guilty of being anything less than honest. But still the question remains of why this film is worth viewing beyond conveying a depressing situation that watching the news or a documentary could tell us just as much about?

Quite simply the reason this is worth watching is to tell the story of Richard Boyle and his character journey. In many ways Richard Boyle represents a dying relic of the radicalism of the 60's and 70's. The film is set at the beginning of the 80's and in many ways is about the ethos of the 80's crushing the ethos of the 60's. Where being a shallow, self-involved yuppie is more fashionable than being a politically aware activist. When Richard and Dr. Rock try their pulling power with women, their tendency to talk obscure politics sees them getting quickly snubbed as weirdos.

Richard finds himself a professional adversary with one yuppie journalist woman who downplays the horrors of El Salvador and basically concocts safe spin. To tell the truth, this thread does feel a bit mean spirited in that we're meant to despise her for playing safe (making her the butt of a hilarious practical joke just before her film report), when the film shows us that journalists like Richard are more likely to get killed if they don't play safe.

And this is the point put to Richard by his journalist friend John Cassady whilst they're photographing corpses on a bodymount. John wants to make photographic art, the kind of front line war pictures that captures the meaning and soul of what's happening. He points out that this means getting close to the people, the victims, which means putting himself in greater danger. In many ways this is what the film is about, capturing a moment in life that really matters.

Richard is a character who has loved the pulpit and the bottom. It has to be said that we don't really get characters as multi-faceted as him anymore. He's basically an antihero, and at the beginning of the film he seems like a self-serving hedonist, with a whiff of the slimy and scummy about him, who's only purpose in going to Salvador is to get paid, and spend the money on the cheapest beer and the cheapest hookers whilst he's there. But Salvador changes him, or rather ignites his old nobility, makes him remember the political and humanistic reasons why he became a journalist. That it was about bringing home the truth rather than making a quick buck.

So what we have is a character who can be both a laddish skirt chaser, and an angry moral political activist with a real sensitive side. Quite frankly I think any other actor than James Woods couldn't have pulled off such a multi-faceted, contradictory character and made him consistent, with all these contradicting characteristics drawn as all being part of the same soul. James Woods has actually been one of my favourite actors ever since I saw him in Once Upon a Time in America. There's few actors who could steal a scene when in the same room as Robert DeNiro. And here James Woods really dives straight into the deep end with the character of Richard Boyle. He just runs with the character so well like a juggernaut, he becomes the character so seamlessly. It's a brilliant tour de force performance, seemingly done on the spot. More importantly he clearly has a lot of passion for what the film has to say.

Pauline Kael has already identified the scene where Richard goes to a confessional to renounce all his sins and make a commitment to his old flame in Salvador, as the scene that makes the film. He is going to marry her to ensure she is given the proper credentials to be allowed to leave the country. His confession is a turning point moment, equally funny, poignant and incredibly human and James Woods plays it with the right level of earnest sincerity. And that is the turning point for his character, his moment of bravery, and of giving something of himself away. For most of the film, in self-serving fashion he weasels his way out of tight situations. But gradually as the situation of Salvador outrages him, he starts to display moments of real moral courage.

It's moments where Richard is at a political forum meeting and publically calls out the vicious Major Max for the monster that he is, or when he protests when the resistance fighters start killing their prisoners in cold blood, his perfect, shocked and angry delivery of "You've become just like them!" which make the film, and make these moments all the more poignant for their futility. And so Richard goes from bullsh**ting his way in and out of back doors, to actually having something true and important to say that no-one wants to hear and ramms the facts down everyone's ears like an unstopping juggernaut. In many ways Salvador is at heart a film about still fighting on and being true to yourself even when the odds are against you. That you have to remain true to your moral principles, even when presented with the cold hard facts about how the world operates on conflict and the struggle for superiority to oppress others. It's about finding spiritual strength in this wolrdview.

It's a scaldingly awakening film, but also a cathartic one, where Richard learns to face death in the eyes with dignity. Salvador does actually show various people facing the moment of death in a very uncliched, unique, real and brave way. By the end of the film, Salvador isn't simply the helltorn country we read about in the news, but a place where a man rediscovers himself. Where the brutality brings out one man's nobility and his sense of duty to his fellow man. It's almost a life affirming environment, where life actually matters and a sense of purpose is rediscovered. It's about something beautiful emerging out of an ugly situation. And that's what makes this film worthwhile and important.

And in that regard it is probably Oliver Stone's most personal film. Just like his later film, Born on the 4th of July, Salvador articulates through its lead hero a sense of patriotism of a man who loves his country but despises the amoral thugs who run it and rightly scorns them for their humanitarian crimes and for rubbing shoulders with the fascist scum who stand against everything the American way is supposed to be about. By being about journalism, Salvador is all about the artistic drive to capture the essense of humanity and harsh reality.

Sure Platoon might be a better piece of cinema in many aesthetic ways. But in its own uncompromising dareing way, Salvador makes Platoon and most other Vietnam films look like safe navelgazing and trend-following. Savlador was a film that was about something current and ongoing, rather than something safely in the past and a convenient distraction to today's world. It brings forth the facts on a mostly ignored issue and really feels like it's saying something that the Government wouldn't want you to hear.

We may never see the like of its bravery again.