U-Turn Review
by Michael Redman (mredman AT bvoice DOT com)October 9th, 1997
U-Turn
A Film Review By Michael Redman
Copyright 1997 By Michael Redman
*** (out of ****)
Oliver Stone. Let's get it right up front and out of the way. That's what this film is about. Oh, it may pretend that it has something to do with a down-on-his-luck small time gambler running into the weirdest characters this side of the Pecos, but this is the director's film. It says more about him
than it says about anyone on screen.
Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn) is driving through the Arizona wastelands with a bag full of $30,000 to repay his gambling debt to Russian mobsters who have
already expressed their displeasure at his tardiness by cutting off two of his fingers. A blown radiator hose lands him in the town of Superior, a lost civilization that time forgot and peopled with an grotesque cast of rednecks, Indians, millionaires and babes.
Pulling into a junkyard masquerading as a gas station, Cooper encounters proprietor Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton) who reckons that he can fix the
vintage 1964 1/2 Mustang convertible. One look at Darrell's grease-covered exposed pot belly, coke-bottle glasses and teeth that look as if they belong
in a medical specimen museum convinces you that he's going to fix something, but it's more likely to be Bobby's wagon than his car. Things aren't made any better when Cooper makes it clear who belongs where in the hierarchy of hicks and city slickers.
At this point the gambler's fate is sealed, he just doesn't know it yet. To kill time he decides to take in the town. When he meets Grace McKenna
(Jennifer Lopez), a sultry femme fatale whose body and lips promise anything and everything -- but first the price, he quickly accepts her invitation to come home to help her with some things.
Just as they are about to "hang drapes", Grace's husband Jake (a virtually unrecognizable Nick Nolte) bursts into the bedroom. After knocking Cooper around, he offers him a ride back to town.
When he asks him to kill his wife, Cooper replies "I'm not a murderer."
"How do ya know if you haven't tried it?" questions the grizzled millionaire.
His hunger is to do is leave town, but all he gets is trouble. Jake wants him to kill Grace. Grace wants him to kill Jake. While in a grocery store, he witnesses a robbery that results in two graphic shotgun killings. His money is destroyed. A fifties-inspired bimbo (Clare Danes) wants to have his love child and her equally anachronistic slick cowboy boyfriend TNT (Joaquin Phoenix) would rather let his fists do the talking. Billy Bob Darrell thinks that a radiator hose is worth a couple of hundred bucks. The hard-drinkin' sheriff (Powers Boothe) keeps an open eye on the stranger.
It's not a pleasant community. In a town that looks to have about 500 people, there are more hidden agendas than in the naked city.
The only almost friendly, albeit no less bizarre, face belongs to a blind Vietnam vet Native American shaman (an even more unrecognizable Jon Voight)
who hauls around his dead dog and demands Dr. Peppers.
Based on John Ridley's "Stray Dogs", the most obvious aspect of the film is Robert Richardson's cinematography. Jerky fast zooms and pans combined with over-exposed grainy film stock work well to create an edgy uncomfortable feeling in the audience. Although a bit too MTVesque for my tastes, it certainly does what it is designed to do. It puts you into Cooper's frame of mind: stark, frantic and desperate for the experience to end.
And that's one of the problems with the movie. It may be art, but it's often not enjoyable. The quirky filming gets old after a while. There's not one likable character in the story. The dark violent humor is uncomfortable;
you're unsure if you want to laugh or be disgusted. It's a bloody car wreck with clowns strewn on the highway.
Stone has been on an eccentric road himself. From his marvelous "Platoon" and "JFK" to the brutal "Natural Born Killers" and now to this, it's obvious that he's looking for something. What it is, we can only guess. "U-Turn" is a sideroad to excess, but hopefully he's gone to the extreme, found his muse and is on his way back.
With Stone, even the mis-fires are worth experiencing and all we can do is strap on our seatbelts and brace ourselves for the ride.
(Michael Redman, after over 22 years of writing this column, is probably going to do it again next week. Email to [email protected] will probably find him eventually.)
[This appeared in the 10/9/97 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be reached at [email protected] ]
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