NATURAL BORN KILLERS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones. Screenplay: David Veloz, Richard Rutowski and Oliver Stone. Director: Oliver Stone. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Few filmmakers in the last twenty years have so consistently had so little to say as loudly as Oliver Stone. By pairing up his single-note self-righteousness with cinematic histrionics, Stone has managed to create a controversial body of work which dazzles with its visual inventiveness even as it clubs you insensible with its strident moralizing. NATURAL BORN KILLERS is the natural culmination of this style/message schism, a gutsy and gaudy assault on the senses that forgets to bring along a single original or insightful thought. Even the dynamic performances of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis can't salvage this busy mess.
Harrelson and Lewis star as Mickey and Mallory Knox, a pair of happy-go-lucky lovebirds who happen to be in the middle of a massive killing spree when first we meet them. Both are the result of deeply dysfunctional families, and with little moral awareness they cut a path of death through the Southwest. Eventually they are captured, and become the objects of a media frenzy and a cult of personality. Most eager to cash in on this fame is Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.) the hose of a tabloid television program called "American Maniacs." He sets up a live interview with Mickey on Super Bowl Sunday, destined to be a ratings bonanza. The one hitch in the plan is a riot at the prison, which turns into a nationally televised bloodbath.
The first hour of NATURAL BORN KILLERS is made watchable only by the intensity of the two stars. Woody Harrelson stretches himself as never before, his simpleton charm connecting to a genuine amorality, while Juliette Lewis takes her wounded white-trash act from KALIFORNIA and runs with it, exploding at arbitrary moments into astonishing ferocity. But for all their sound and fury, Mickey and Mallory aren't really characters. They're ciphers, stick-figure representations of a societal ill, and ciphers just aren't all that interesting. The technical flotsam and jetsam surrounding them can't disguise that fact, and only the positively inspired segment casting Mallory's home life as a twisted 1950s sitcom goes anywhere beneath the surface. As it nears its mid-point, Mickey and Mallory's road show becomes extremely tedious.
The prison-based second half of NATURAL BORN KILLERS is something of an improvement, if only for the inclusion of some delightfully bug-eyed acting by Tommy Lee Jones as the prison warden and Tom Sizemore as the brutal cop who arrested Mickey and Mallory. As over-the-top as they are, they seem at least remotely grounded in humanity, unlike our surreal chauffeurs through the netherworld. Again, however, Stone falls victim to the One Obvious Idea syndrome. "Look at what the media has done to us," he says with genuine shock and, of course, superiority. "Any of us could become like Mickey and Mallory." The problem is that it's the same idea that drove MAN BITES DOG. And KALIFORNIA. And SERIAL MOM, for that matter. And every one of those films told the same story better, without pumping steroids into the production. There is no satire to the excesses of NATURAL BORN KILLERS, because Oliver Stone has no idea how to achieve that level of subtlety. It's simply a freak show, and Stone comes off looking like a colossal hypocrite attempting to cash in on exactly what he spends two hours clucking his tongue at.
If NATURAL BORN KILLERS had been made by any other director, I might have given it grudging support simply for having the courage to run to the limit in its audacious originality. Unfortunately, I have lost all patience with Stone's pedantry-as-art approach to filmmaking. Compare the first hour of NATURAL BORN KILLERS with David Lynch's WILD AT HEART, which leavened its shock value with a warped sense of humor and simmering menace, and you'll see that what Stone attempted to accomplish could have been done right. Instead, NATURAL BORN KILLERS is like getting a lecture from your parents during a particularly bad acid trip. You just want it to stop.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 natural born killers: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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