Stone: Salvador (1986)

Before Oliver Stone released his Vietnam trilogy, he made Salvador, a loosely fictionalised account of journalist Richard Boyle’s experiences in the buildup to the Salvadoran Civil War. Set at the cusp between the Carter and Reagan administrations, it works quite effectively as a protest film, as Stone re-enacts most of the key events leading up to the crisis – including the murder of Archbishop Romero, Jean Donovan and the American Maryknoll Sisters – in order to question Republican support for the Salvadoran National Guard. At the same time, though, it feels as if Stone is questioning how to even go about creating a protest film in an age in which war is inextricable from mass media and mass entertainment. In that sense, it’s very much a post-Vietnam war film, perhaps even more so the Vietnam trilogy itself, which tends to be less anxious to interrogate its own protest credentials than Stone is here. On the one hand, Boyle, played by James Woods, plays as a kind of emblem of mass media at its least mediated, infecting Stone’s camera with a photojournalistic frenzy that exceeds anything it lights upon, until the entire fictional artifice and apparatus of the film feels like something of an inconvenience, an impediment in the way of the docudrama, or documentary, that Stone is really trying to create. As a result, the film never settles into one groove, shedding its skin every couple of scenes in search of ever more visceral points of contact between the camera and the combat. Sometimes it finds them, especially whenever Boyle’s camera finds itself mediating between the death squads and the disappeared, roused by everything that photojournalism can do. But those moments tend to be few and far between, lost somewhere among Boyle’s jaunts and outings, since it’s never totally clear whether he’s investigating, emigrating or just having a holiday, dropping in like the most exploitative of third-world tourists. With the addition of Jim Belushi, as his friend "Doc Rock," it often feels like National Lampoon’s Salvadoran Vacation more than anything else, a road trip that critiques the cult of the combat photographer as much as the combat he’s recording. And Stone never really resolves that, which makes it a less consistent film than Platoon, but perhaps more resonant for the volatile, dissonant ambience that hangs over everything, perfect for capturing a country on the brink of war, crowds clutching Boyle even as they waver about how and why to constitute themselves as crowds. Perfect, too, for Boyle himself, who's called that ambience home, in one form or another, for twenty odd years, with the result that even his most mobilised moments never quite escape the homeliness of a Hollywood blockbuster, never quite allow Stone to discard his convulsive, compulsive frustrations with the film and all it stands for.