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YELLOW KARMA Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth opens with paradisiacal shots of agricultural lands and jutting mountains with clouds passing through them—the kind of setting you’d imagine would be the end result of the Genesis Device in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. The beauty of it is Stone saying, “This is what it was like before we got there.” When the American helicopters and napalm arrive, we get the burnt out fields and villages, with Stone lecturing, “This is what it was like after we got there.” Stone has said the movie is a glimpse of what the Vietnamese went through during the time the French and Americans descended upon them. But it’s not about Vietnamese proles—it’s about an American moviemaker’s view of what a Vietnamese woman, lucky to escape, endures through Americanization. This isn’t a quibble, it’s a major beef. This is no more a movie about how the Vietnamese people lived through the inferno created by others—China, France, Japan, France again, America, and China once more—than Born on the 4th of July is about a disillusioned war hero returning to a jaded homeland. Except for a few terrorist threats by the Vietcong, who warn the farmers against betraying the motherland, there’s no believability these Vietnamese have defining politics or pride in nationality. Worse, the bits and pieces of their struggles to maintain a crazy kind of normalcy in daily living amidst the incursions are rehash from all the other Vietnam War movies. No schools for the kids? Did no teens or young adults date and fall in love? There’s a flimsy, slow-motion reach towards Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ala Apocalypse Now to remind of war’s inherent insanity but eventually the movie tires itself out and becomes a rather less affecting Killing Fields—we even get Haing S. Nor as a loving father searching for his pregnant daughter, reminiscent of Sam Waterston’s pursuit of Nor himself. What Heaven and Earth wants to be about is karma, and tragi-yellow karma to boot: it suggests the sum and consequences of the heroine’s life determined her fate—she might have deserved to be raped, she was destined to meet and marry psycho Sad Sack Tommy Lee Jones, despite her success in America she’ll return home to hear her family scold her and America for its continual punishment of her motherland never deserving to be the pawn of global power strategies. As such, Hiep Thi Le is competent; despite the upholstery-like coifs make her look China Doll trampy, she sticks to you. Joan Chen, playing Hiep’s mother, was in Bertolucci’s snoozer The Last Emperor, in which there’s something unconvincing about her makeup: she didn’t age “naturally,” she looked comically faked. This doesn’t happen here: while it takes time to get passed her mouth full of rotten dentistry (or a lack of it), she’s stunningly cosmetized, you really believe what you see. Her voice and face have a nobility you can’t stop absorbing; she’s a hybrid of Glenn Close and Jessica Lange, with a slight amount of Olivia Cole as finishing touch. In her last scenes, you realize it’s her story you want to see, as she’s the salt of Vietnam’s earth Stone has tried to turn Hiep Thi Le into. When Hiep delivers the earth mother bromides all mothers want to hear—in fact, Heaven and Earth is dedicated to Stone’s mother—it’s Joan Chen who should be speaking. SHOCK WAVE: No one but Stone would want to make a movie like Natural Born Killers. Shrilling to the max an original concept by Quentin Tarantino, who smartly distanced himself from this project, Stone has became the full fledge male fishwife he’s been promising to become since Midnight Express. Preaching at maximum volume, angry at us for the fools he thinks we are for our insatiable appetite for ever-escalating violence and trashy, wacko, dangerous infotainment, it becomes clear he can’t get all the elements of his denouncement to come together. Snockered with flashy vitriol, he can’t get us feel the fear of our growing immoral/amoral indifference. But the maelstrom of imagery as high isn’t the breakthrough he’s hoping to have achieved, it’s psycho(dated)delics. Likely why the movie is beyond severe criticism—it indicts itself for its own yahoo hysteria. Stone doesn’t start with the drudge he ends up with: the beginning sequence is virtuoso—an example of razor-sharp editing with an artist-like sensibility about how far the bloodletting should go. Don’t know about the rest of you, but I was sort of semi-rooting for Mickey and Mallory while watching their choreographed Rambada. I’m not an anarchist, or an addict of violence, but the cinematics were surprisingly, even gracefully funny. An inescapable tribute to Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde, this opener is Stone being especially stylish and inventive. (It suggested to me what Sara Gilbert’s deadpan Darlene and her boyfriend David on Roseanne might conjure up in one of their sickie comic books.) The pleasure doesn’t last: right after the blaze of the diner wipeout, there’s a deluge of nanosecond editing going by in such discombobulation there’s no way we’d want to remember it all. Borrowing from music videos, some of the split images and shifting modes have the mix of a Cuisinart surged to burn out. Woody Harrelson is every anti-hero Brando played in the 50s; Tommy Lee Jones, repulsive in thin Jose Ferrer mustache, sounds like James Garner on speed and at times invokes a foaming-at-the-mouth Dean Stockwell; and Robert Downey Jr. is the former A Current Affair Steve Dunleavy as Harvey Fierstein on Nutra System might play him. (And intermittently sounding like a piss elegant Mel Gibson.) Rodney Dangerfield is Jabba as iguana. Poor Juliette Lewis: after Too Young to Die and the phoned-in Cape Fear, after the botched Romeo is Bleeding and for sure with this exploitation and her appearance in Melissa Etherridge’s video of “Come to My Window,” she’s unchallenged as the psycho bitch of the 90s. Natural Born Killers is Stone’s neutron bomb meant to blow us out of our seats and at the same time leave our brain cells with enough outrage we’ll cause shock waves of insurrectionary actions against the prevailing authorities—the prime targets being the media trashlords who have turned us into zombied idiots. And why Mickey and Mallory have a “screw you” ending; they’re not only O.J. but also Twitler as mockers of justice. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER (Revised 11/2021) All Rights Reserved.
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