Cinema
U-Turn
(18, selected cinemas)
Farce for acid freaks
Mark Steyn
Vanity Fair's James Wolcott calls the genre `scuzz cinema', which sounds about right. You know the sort of thing — emaci- ated, tattooed stars with junkie chic, usual- ly on the lam, doing their best to survive shoot-outs in diners, or convenience stores, or gas stations, ideally in some dusty loserville in the American South-West. Oliver Stone has made his own fevered contribution to the genre with Natural Born Killers. But, maybe because it's otherwise been the province of callow Taranteeny- boppers, the older man has now come up With his own ironic parody of scuzz cinema. Given that scuzz is already drowning in irony, that's a difficult trick to pull oft. Let's just say U-Turn is what happens when Oliver Stone lightens up. As an indication of Stone's gossamer, Lubitschesque lightness of touch when it comes to irony, the film begins and ends with Peggy Lee singing 'It's A Good Day', whereas what comes in between is a very bad day. Sean Penn is speeding through the Arizona desert in a '64 Mustang convert- ible filled with a ton of dough he owes to some unsavoury characters. With his painstakingly dishevelled hair and perma- nent shades, he's en route to Vegas. As an inveterate gambler, he's playing a very weak hand, not least because the loan repayment is overdue and — in the manda- tory torture scene — they've already relieved him of a couple of fingers. Anyone who's driven through the desert knows that it's a lot of nothing — an ever receding horizon rolling on before you. But that's not Stone's bag, so, in a twitchy movie even by his standards, the camera lumps all over the place, intercutting sud- den freakish shots of the flora and fauna, especially the local carrion picking out their favourite entrail from that morning's t°ad-kill. Possibly because he's concentrat- ing on the cutaways rather than the road, Penn blows his radiator hose and his limp- ing Mustang is forced to seek help in the town of Superior (more irony), a town exclusively populated by stellar crazies. The garage mechanic is Billy Bob (Sling Blade) Thornton, the railroad clerk is played by Roseanne's sister, the blind snap-case Injun with the dead dog and the mystic mumbo-jumbo is Jon Voigt, the town psycho is Nick Nolte, the junior psy- cho Joaquin Phoenix, the superannuated jail-bait Clare Danes, etc. As is traditional in these towns, the sheriff is called Virgil. You know each and every one of them is nuts because the camera points out tell- tale signs, like religious faith (Jesus is Lord').
Still, for once, Stone isn't doing a savage indictment of anything. Instead, he's play- ing Natural Born Killers for laughs. The effect is a kind of farce for acid freaks. Penn, the urban loser, assumes he's superi- or to the rural losers, but he soon discov- ers this is a difficult town to break free of. He gets invited back to take a shower by a dusky Native American beauty (Jennifer Lopez), whose husband beats Penn up and then promptly offers him a job in the old kill-the-wife-for-the-insurance-policy rou- tine. Repairing to the local general store, he gets caught in the middle of a hold-up, which ends when the old lady blows away the two punks and, in the course of so doing, scatters his loot to the four winds. ' With no money, Penn needs to scram before the Russian mobsters he owes back in LA show up looking for him. Unfortu- nately, the whacko mechanic has impound- ed his car and stolen his gun. And don't even mention the country music and incest, though inevitably people do: 'I was fuckin' my daddy and I married him. Okay?' Hey, sure, why not? This is the country, right?
U-Turn is a movie with one joke: Penn's day keeps getting worse. That might have worked, had the film been plotted with the precision of true farce. Instead, struggling to get out from under the directional sledgehammer, the plot becomes relentless and arbitrary. It's not that Stone's view of rural life verges on the paranoid, but that it's so disengaged. In the diner, to show what a redneck, country 'n' western hick town Penn's in, the jukebox plays Patsy Cline. But Patsy Cline is country music for city folks. A real jukebox in Arkansas would have been playing country songs by guys Stone's never heard of. But he couldn't be bothered finding out who they were. His other country song is Johnny Cash's 'Ring Of Fire'. This is the third scuzz film it's been in in as many months. That in itself suggests the genre is running out of options.
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