U-Turn . Newcity Chicago . 10-27-97

U-Turn

DIRECTED BY: Oliver Stone

REVIEWED: 10-27-97

Even as you admire the ambition, the sweat and blood that goes into a picture like "U-Turn," you have to wonder what it all adds up to. To prove himself as a commercial director, despite his many awards and the great success of "JFK," Stone picked up young screenwriter John Ridley's "Stray Dogs," based on his own novel. Sean Penn plays Bobby Cooper, a con-man on his way to Las Vegas to settle his gambling debts, but his car breaks down in Superior, Arizona, a hellhole filled with hobgoblins like Billy Bob Thornton's fat, filthy, stupid car mechanic, Nick Nolte as a scrawny, leering, murderous husband, Jennifer Lopez as Nolte's plush young wife recoiling from a lifetime of abuse. Penn plays a perfect patsy, the long leg of fate always situated to trip him up. Powers Boothe, Claire Danes, Joaquin Phonenix, Julie Hagerty and Jon Voight pop up from time to time, cruel cartoons all. Whatever Penn does, he gets beat down. Whenever Penn thinks he can escape, he gets the shit beat out of him. God may be laughing at him, but what about the audience? Working with cinematographer Robert Richardson and crews of editors that usually include Hank Corwin, Stone has been developing a dense, kaleidoscopic, punishing visual style for several years now. Fractured consciousness or splinters in the eye? Opinions tend to one or the other. In mingling desert oddballs and noir brutality in this plot resembling "Duel in the Sun," Stone's style has never been more vivid, more vigorous, and more confounding. Ennio Morricone's lovely, sproing-y score blasts the movie into yet another level of fever-dream. "U-Turn" seems like a young man's movie, with a young man's frantic style, a young man's go-for-broke energy, a young man's mistakes. This post-"Postman Rings Twice," bone-dry, blood-red ending $20 million, back-to-Hollywood-basics production belies everything Stone's chatted up lately. In his prologue to his novel, "A Child's Night Dream," Stone writes about his late-in-life Buddhist beliefs, and his acceptance that "all time is illusory, that are things are circular... The bad parts of life, I find, blend into the good parts, because we can never appreciate the good parts had we not experienced the contrast between good and bad -- all of it illusion in the end... the great circling wheel of life... in which we abide until enlightenment comes." Then we are faced with the sultry "U-Turn." Where is the thoughtful Stone? He's beaten the younger film brats with a picture that has not a gram of flab, but its cruel, hallucinogenic comedy does not seem to reflect the results of any kind of philosophical search, just more splashing, thrashing, wrestling with the indomitable self. John Ridley's script gets off a few good lines, and one of the best, placed in the mouth of a pseudo-mystic huckster is the throwaway, "Your lies are old but you tell 'em pretty good." Under all the fury of "U-Turn"'s style, you can hardly discern Stone's wink beneath that line.124m.

--Ray Pride

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Other Films by Oliver Stone
Any Given Sunday
JFK
Nixon

Film Vault Suggested Links
Junk Mail
Wild Things
The Nurse

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