Salon | "U-Turn"

M O V I E S
U-Turn
Directed by
Oliver Stone
Starring Sean Penn,
Nick Nolte
and Jennifer Lopez
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Stone turns to black comedy
BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG | OLIVER STONE, it seems, is tired of his reputation as a flat-footed paranoid polemicist and is ready to leap aboard the Tarantino gravy train with the Western-noir blood fest "U-Turn." There's no overt message in this fatuous montage of crowd-pleasing brutality, just double and triple crosses, gory shoot-outs set to ironically cheerful Peggy Lee songs and tons of horrific, technicolor Americana.
"U-Turn" begins by playing to the same city-boy fears as "Deliverance" and, more recently, "Breakdown." On a trip from one coast to the other, arrogant wise guy Bobby Cooper's (Sean Penn) '64 Mustang dies in the desert and he ends up in Superior, Ariz., trying to get it repaired. Unfortunately for him, Superior is populated almost exclusively by black-toothed, inbred psychopaths intent on using Bobby for their own nefarious purposes. Chief among these is Jake McKenna (Nick Nolte), who wants Bobby to murder his gorgeous wife Grace (Jennifer Lopez). Grace, in turn, offers him even more cash to off Jake instead. Bobby is also pursued by Jenny, an adorable trailer-trash nymphet (Claire Danes), to the displeasure of her suitor, Toby N. Tucker (Joaquin Phoenix), a lunatic with "TNT" shaved into the back of his pompadour.
Bobby has recently had two fingers chopped off by the Russian mob, to whom he owes $30,000. He has the money and is ready to deliver it, but during a grocery-store robbery early in the film, a bullet shreds all the bills, which then get mixed with human entrails and raw ground beef. Bobby can't even salvage the $150 he needs to get his car back from the satanic mechanic, so he has to kill someone if he ever wants to get out of town.
All this mayhem is rendered in Stone's trademark style. Jerky cameras,inexplicable black-and-white shots, editing as quick as strobe lights and lurid, over-saturated color. Close-ups of hideously grinning mouths and terrified wide eyes abound, as well as myriad shots of vultures and scorpions. The soundtrack is equally hectic -- there are six different songs in the film's first 60 seconds.
Stone has never gotten over his hippie fascination with Native Americans, but in "U-Turn" the obsession has become sexualized and a bit twisted. Grace, the libidinous Apache, tells Bobby sordid stories of rape on her reservation, and there's a revelation of (yawn) consensual father-daughter incest. Pictures of Grace's dead mother are weirdly eroticized, her face pierced all over in a way that suggests both tribal practices and S/M. The movie also features, for no apparent reason, a blind Native American wise man who dispenses advice over a campfire, prompting Bobby to say, "You see a lot for a blind man." The closing credits are interspersed with black and white pictures of Native Americans, as if to lend some allegorical weight to the idiocy that has come before.
Grace proves to be the most murderous character, and when she finally kills someone, she's transformed into a screaming savage hacking away with an ax adorned with feathers, as if the violence in the film springs from her "primitive" nature. Far worse than the mildly racist portrait of Grace, though, are the execrable lines she is given. "I'll bet right now, you don't know if you want to kill me or fuck me," she tells Penn at one point, apropos of nothing. Later, looking longingly over a canyon, she sighs, "If I were a bird, I'd fly away to Florida, to Disney World." Not that anyone else's lines are more illuminating. Penn is very good at playing shady, violent but essentially passive hustlers, but no amount of slit-eyed retro posing can make Bobby seem real if he has to utter sentences like "Women. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em."
To be fair, "U-Turn" is billed as a black comedy, and there are some genuinely funny moments -- the best of which is Billy Bob Thornton, as Darrell, in a Parka and underwear playing Twister by himself. The absurd ending, in which everyone manages to screw themselves, is also fairly witty at first, until the injuries pile up and it degenerates into farce.
Mostly, though, the jokes are heavy-handed and ugly. Surprisingly, Stone even seems to mock his own political passions in one of the opening scenes. When Bobby first arrives in Superior, a series of shots demonstrates the town's depravity: There's a comiclike Jesus billboard, a close-up of Billy Bob Thornton's greasy, hairy gut hanging out under a baby T-shirt, magnified pictures of sweat oozing through pores and, finally, a U.S. flag with a POW-MIA flag flying underneath it. Since every frame of "U-Turn" seethes with Stone's contempt, it's hard to interpret the shot as anything other than an ugly joke on those who share his obsession with Vietnam, as if he's assuring the audience that's he's joined the ranks of sneering hipsters. Stone the propagandist was insufferable, but as a cynic he's even worse.
SALON | Oct. 3, 1997
Michelle Goldberg is an assistant editor at Salon.