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"We're discussing America here tonight." The foundation is Meet John Doe, Dallas at night is a mass of hostile-bonkers-needy voices picked up by the plugged-in anger artist. The radio host (Eric Bogosian) lights a cigarette over the microphone and welcomes his foes, bigots and rapists and insomniacs reply, a typical studio shift. At the baseball stadium he retreats before a jeering crowd but on the airwaves he reigns supreme, confessor and absolver and jittery needler. Ex-wife (Ellen Greene), girlfriend (Leslie Hope), boss (Alec Baldwin), network man (John Pankow) and assistant (John C. McGinley) gaze helplessly as he spirals. "I get a bit tired of words sometimes, don't you?" (Pinter's The Collection) Visualizing Bogosian's off-Broadway play, Oliver Stone turns the recording booth into a gleaming pressure-cooker: The camera swirls in confined spaces, reflecting panes and abrupt changes in focus stretch the glassy cage, bulbs glow in close-up like exclamation points. The temptation of the medium for "a fucking suit salesman with a big mouth," the phantom of integrity for the paranoid with eyes on the ratings. Splashed with beer and presented with dead rats wrapped in swastikas, the protagonist gets a look at his audience when a stoned headbanger (Michael Wincott) turns up as impromptu guest, grinning at his self-righteousness. Osborne's "ripe stool in the world's straining anus," screaming into the void as it spins, a minute of blessed silence following the Chayefsky whirlpool. To the very top of the broadcasting tower, Stone's most naked self-portrait as anguished truth-yeller. "Free speech isn't really free at all, it's actually a little bit like Russian roulette. A very expensive commodity." The Lenny Bruce element has been noted, the next decade's tabloid shocks are foretold (Natural Born Killers). Cinematography by Robert Richardson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |