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Savages: Blisteringly Fantastic Writing

By Pam Glazier · July 9, 2012

Directors, like fine wine, get better with age. That’s not to say that they weren’t good from the get go, but there’s something that happens to directors if they are lucky enough to work over a broad span of years. Their initial flavor blends into itself and becomes far more subtle than their initial offerings, but also wholly more of a quintessential example of their particular style than anything they had done previously. This can be seen with David Lynch (compare Eraserhead to A Straight Story), or Cronenberg (compare Shivers to A History of Violence), or Scorsese (compare Taxi Driver to The Departed). And Oliver Stone has given us a blisteringly fantastic example of this phenomena with his new film Savages.

Oliver Stone has never shied away from grit. From the shocking peek into the minds of homicidal maniacs (Natural Born Killers), to the shady underbelly of politics and commerce (JFK, Wall Street), he captured the realism of the sordid. But in this film, he turns it around .This is not a look into the warped from the standpoint of normal, it is an assumption that everything is warped, and within this assumption he offers us secret peek at the strangeness of the normal that pops out from said warpedness from time to time.

The plot of this movie is simple. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson), a couple of stoner friends, have figured out how to grow the world’s best weed. They build themselves a little mini-empire and everything is peachy—until a Mexican drug cartel comes calling. The cartel wants in on their business and is willing to make a deal. But when Chon and Ben tell the cartel where they can put their deal, as is to be expected, everything goes to shit.

The writing is great. Even though it’s got a lot of guns and pretty people doing violent and lewd acts, the writers found room for layering and twists and interesting subplots. Also, it feels like every cliché that could possibly exist in a movie like this is blatantly present, but turned on its ear. The film is extremely self-aware in a “fun, light-hearted romp” kind of way which really messes with your head since that tone is juxtaposed against the hard dangerousness of desperate drug runners. I found myself inappropriately laughing in delight at the stabbing of a cop and the kneecapping of a man in his own home.

There are a few flaws to this film though, but luckily they don’t detract too much from it. And that’s really saying something considering that one of those flaws is the blandness of the two lead characters. All the acting in this film was great, except for them. They were good enough, I guess. But when put up against Travolta and Hayek and Del Torro, the leads just couldn’t match them. There were a few points of the film that seemed to lag on a bit, but not so long as to cause extreme ire in the viewer. And there was also a textbook lame-o voice over which didn’t really aid anything and should have been cut. But again, these things didn’t ruin anything. They were just minor distractions.

I also have to mention the eyeball whipping scene. This is what prompted me to marvel at Oliver Stone’s newfound mature subtlety. I was able to watch. A man gets his damn eye whipped out with a freaking bullwhip and then he’s set on fire and I was able to watch it. Normally when this happens in a movie I am squealing like a freak and jittering my way toward the exit, but somehow Stone managed to film it in such a way as to create the horror of the scene without yanking his audience out of the moment. It was just the right amount of awful—and that takes skill.

Watch it, if you dare. It’s an excellent film from an excellent director. Thank you, Mr. Stone.