THE DOORS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
Oliver Stone and Val Kilmer have done it, they have captured perfectly the feel of my Sixties in the new film THE DOORS, a film which will surely be on many ten-best lists come December and which ought to be in for several important Academy nominations unless the curse of spring release strikes again.
Stone has always shown the most amazing talent for recreating the look and feel of that turbulent time, as he did in PLATOON and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. But Stone's movies have always been flawed by what a friendly reviewer might see as an excess of zeal and an unfriendly one as the sledge-hammer approach to making a point. But, unlike his earlier films, THE DOORS does not seem to have a political point it wants to drive home above all other considerations; it definitely lacks Stone's usual smug superiority and instead concentrates on making Jim Morrison live for us again in the form of Val Kilmer.
Val Kilmer is the second actor this late winter/early spring who absolutely must be nominated for an Academy Award (the other being Anthony Hopkins in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS). What price did Kilmer have to pay to so perfectly become the driven, visionary, besotted Morrison, the Bacchus and Orpheus of many in my generation? I was impressed the last time I saw Kilmer, in a little film noir about a failing detective who gets involved with a devious thief and murderer played by his wife Joyce Whalley-Kilmer. I had no notion of what the man was capable of as an actor. What he does by way of becoming Morrison goes beyond acting into black magic. He looks like Morrison, he sounds like Morrison even to doing Morrison's vocals on top of the original Doors' instrumental tracks, he moves like Morrison. He scares us and disgusts us and fascinates us even as Jim Morrison did.
The film takes a mostly unblinking look at the demon that drove Morrison. It offers no insights or answers. It merely says this is him in action, make what you will of it. Unfortunately, one result is that the other Doors are unfairly neglected, especially Ray Manzarek, played here by Kyle MacLachlan; Manzarek was probably the unindicted co-conspirator who as much as Morrison made the unique and unnerving Doors sound. The other two Doors were Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley, Joyce's brother(?)) and John Densmore (Kevin Dillon), both of whom play rather minor roles.
Morrison is important as an artist in his own right, but for the movie his significance is that of the supreme type, the very summation and embodiment, of the Sixties rock culture. He is a cultural icon and as such is as mixed a bag as my own memories of those times--terror and ecstasy, living on the edge and barely conscious, all at the same time. We see and judge Morrison and the times on the strength of the music, the words, the actions, the script, the photography, and the sound track.
Stone and J. Randal Johnson wrote a wonderful script that captures the essence fully and honestly. The script gives exactly the right moments we need. The pacing makes the 135-minute running time both timeless and instantaneous--exactly the way I used to perceive or be deceived by time when I was stoned on acid in those days.
The music is in some ways the story and Densmore and Krieger were involved creatively in the making of the movie, I note. There are 28 Doors songs in the sound track (and a heavy promotion in the music stores). The concert scenes are perfect. I sat there in the dark saying Yes, this is the way it was, this is how it felt.
As for the photography, it is bold, imaginative, and innovative. Like the concerts, the drug trips are real, exactly right. It's taken more than two decades since Hollywood started trying to film a trip before someone got it right; even the trips in EASY RIDER fail to convince and evoke the way these do. And then there are the hallucinogenic figures that accompany Morrison, his shaman, the bald figure, enigmatic, suggestive, seen only by Morrison and us and maybe once by Pam Morrison, played wonderfully well by Meg Ryan, who has never been one of my personal faves--until now. The film's attitude to drugs and to alcohol, for Morrison was an alcoholic as much as a druggie, is accepting without being approving; these people were stoned more or less all the time and it killed some of them. But whether Morrison could have been Morrison without them is not a question the movie is interested in.
Will THE DOORS speak to people who weren't hippies and/or Doors fans? I suspect it will. For people like me, it speaks loudly and clearly. I recommend this movie to everyone except those who cannot tolerate rough language, sex, drug use, and/or frontal nudity in their films or their lives.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews