Review of Salvador (1986) by Jake R — 05 Jan 2009

This is Oliver Stone at the height of his powers. Warmed up from jail piece 'Midnight Express' and cutting his teeth with intense political detail (and drugs, sleaze and violence) with the script to 'Scarface', Stone now begins the brief but ballistic few years where his films were virulent, violent outcries of rage and desperation at everything at the heart of American in the Yuppie, Reaganomics era.

1986 is the year everyone remembers with 'Platoon', Stone's first real Vietnam movie and the first Vietnam film to offer a damning disagreement with the entire premise after the dreamy, nightmarish hazes of the Viet flicks of the 1970s. But whereas with his war film Stone charts a destruction of an individual amongst the chaos and primal brutality of a constructed conflict, with 'Salvador' we see the story of someone who witnesses an entire country tear itself apart with unspeakable levels of violence, all under the uncaring eye of the US military.

In many ways this film is far more harrowing and upsetting. Like 'The Killing Fields' a couple of years earlier, we're brought up close to the atrocities of a country without law, but what makes El Salvador's bloodbath more disturbing is the fact that the despoting right-wing militia are backed with US military aid, which gives them licence to murder and pillage. The US are shown to be so unwavering that even aid workers are raped and murdered without any reprisal. As ever, and as the world has seen time and again since, it's the financial matters that decide whether a country's population lives or dies at the hands of a greedy US.

Stone voices his disillusionment with this increasingly, relentlessly angry film. In 'Platoon' he could criticise the government for making a 'mistake' with Vietnam, but here he gives them no excuse for letting the violence to escalate. He exposed the simple unmovable views and opinions of the people who could make it all stop, and that they're too obsessed with the idea of geopolitical manouvering to care about whether thousands of people in some country that isn't America die. We are shown brutal, upsetting atrocities with no punches pulled, still shocking after almost 25 years, because it's combined with the knowledge that it could've so easily been avoided, and yet was left to fester.

James Woods is brilliant here, putting a twist on the journalist-in-hell cliche by having his character a by-and-large asshole; but he's an asshole with a heart, and one that is perpetually being worn down by the degrading animosity he witnesses around him, from foreign and familiar people alike. What's a small comfort is knowing of Wood's enormous intellect and the fact that every word he speaks in this film comes directly from his own heart as well as what's written on the page. He throws himself into the role of indicting both sides of the civil war and everyone in power at how this appalling situation comes about, and was criminally overlooked at the Oscars, with them preferring to go with warm and fuzzy Paul Newman in weird Scorsese vehicle 'The Color of Money', rather than reward a character who spits venom at their own incompetence.

The same goes for the Oscars for 'Platoon' as well. While Stone outdid himself in 1986, Best Picture and Director went to a guilt-tripping heart-breaker rather than to 'Salvador', who's fearless recreation of a disgusting series of events and how honestly and powerfully emotional disappointment far overshadows 'Platoon's' heart-on-its-sleeve politics.

But at least Stone made the movie at all. One of his most overlooked and underrated efforts, this showcases a fireball Woods and a sincerely horrifying story into one of the depressing numbers of humanitarian disasters at the beginning of the modern era. What's most shocking two generations later is that 'Salvador' and Richard Boyle's story could be transported to any one of the current wars and conflicts plaguing the world; hopefully, this is something we can change, and 'Salvador' will lose its dubious honour of being a chillingly resonant and recent holocaust documentary.