Oliver Stone tackles Snowden's story

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance clicks, but Snowden doesn't reach powerhouse levels.

Oliver Stone's Snowden turns out to be a reasonably straightforward procedural about a young man who drank lots of patriotic Kool-Aid before learning that it gave him moral indigestion. We are, of course, talking about Edward Snowden, whose explosive 2013 leak of classified information exposed a mass NSA surveillance operation that included ordinary US citizens.

Now resident in Moscow, Snowden has become one more figure around which Americans can divide. Some view him as a hero who did his country a great public service. Others see him as a traitor.

By the end of Snowden, it's clear that Stone wants to place Snowden on the heroic side of the ledger, even including him in a final series of images.

Whatever you think of him, Snowden hardly projects the personality of a calculating villain intent on damaging his country, something we already learned from Citizenfour, director Laura Poitras's Academy Award winning documentary about how Snowden leaked his information to the press and, subsequently, to the world.

The talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Snowden as a one-and-done whistleblower; he captures Snowden's persistence and intelligence, and charts his course from an apparently conservative patriot to a man at odds with his own government.

In this version of the Snowden story, Zachary Quinto appears as single-minded Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald; Tom Wilkinson breathes a bit more life into Ewan MacAskill, another Guardian journalist; and Mellisa Leo plays Poitras as a filmmaker who tries not to add to Snowden's already huge pile of problems.

For the most part, these characters remain underdeveloped, but Stone uses scenes in the Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden and the journalists were ensconced to punctuate a story that traces Snowden's development from a solider (he enlisted after 9/11, but was discharged after he both broke legs) to a rising star in the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Rhys Ifans brings suggestions of evil to the role of Corbin O'Brain, a fictional CIA character who hires Snowden. The young man's intelligence impresses O'Brain, partly because hje believes that the future of warfare isn't on battlefields but in rooms full of tech wizards who know how to hack and protect data.

A teleconferencing scene in which O'Brain confronts Snowden about a violation of CIA rules finds O'Brain towering over the young man on a huge screen, and, I'm afraid, serves as an example of Stone's fondness for overstatement, which he mostly keeps in check here -- unless, of course, you believe there could be more sides to the Snowden story.

Nicolas Cage shows up as a jaded CIA cryptographer Snowden meets during his training; Cage's character later reappears to add an exclamation point of approval to Snowden's decision to fight the power.

Perhaps to keep Snowden from turning into a vaguely fictionalized version of Poitras's documentary, Stone focuses much attention on the relationship between Snowden and girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley).

Stone captures the tension that ripples through a relationship in which one of the partners (Snowden) never can talk about his day at the office.

The screenplay by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald sometimes resorts to position-paper dialogue, and the movie lacks the dense intrigue of Stone's JFK or the undertow of rank corruption that filtered through Stone's Nixon.

I suppose that's another way of saying that a certain thinness keeps Snowden from feeling like a major statement about the ways in which the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects individual privacy.

The story often benefits from Stone's ability to create momentum, but if Stone wanted to shake us to the core about the perils of a government that's using security as a pretext to widen its control over us, I don't know that he gets the job done.

Perhaps Snowden isn't an epic enough character around which to build a powerhouse drama. As Snowden himself might attest, it's the debate he hoped to foster that matters, not him.

Oliver Stone gets his groove back

Savages takes a blistering look at the drug trade.

If you didn't already know that it's a bad idea to get crosswise with a Mexican drug lord, Oliver Stone's Savages will deliver the message in bold, gut-kicking fashion. Author Don Winslow's 2010 novel of the same name has provided Stone with a cornucopia of ingredients that he definitely knows how to cook.

Spilling over with sex, violence and ill-gotten luxury, Savages is Stone's best work in a long time, a movie that tells a vivid story that pretty much keeps Stone off his soapbox.

The action revolves around three characters. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is a former Navy SEAL who runs a thriving marijuana business along with his parter Ben (Aaron Johnson), a brainy Berkeley grad with a social conscience. Ben uses some of his money to help folks in Third World countries.

Chon and Ben live with Ophelia (Blake Lively), a woman who goes by the name of "O" and who narrates this seductive story of crime and corruption. Both men sleep with "O," and both profess to love her. She insists she loves both of them. It takes two guys to make a whole man for "O" -- or so she says.

Stone wisely surrounds the movie's young leads with a veteran supporting cast that includes Salma Hayek (as a drug czarina); John Travolta (as a corrupt DEA agent); Benicio Del Toro (as a brutal mob enforcer) and Demian Bichir (as a well-dressed executive in Hayek's crime network).

The trouble starts when Hayek's Elena decides that she's going to take over Chon and Ben's business. She's attracted to this California duo because they've cultivated the best pot in the U.S., marijuana known for its killer THC count.

Ben, who's had enough of the drug business, is ready to sell. Chon wants to hold onto the enterprise they've built. Besides, he's convinced that no involvement with Mexican drug lords comes with insurance: It only can end badly.

If there's a certain amount of callowness among the movie's younger actors, the old pros compensate. Looking thick as a side of beef and sporting a close-cropped hair cut, Travolta is both funny and appalling as a rogue DEA agent; Del Toro's turn as the quietly vicious Lado follows suit; it's, by turns, chilling and amusing; and Hayek brings power-hungry bitchiness to new levels of steely-eyed intensity as Elena.

The rest of the plot involves kidnappings, torture and a level of brutality from which Stone never shrinks. Think of it this way: When drug lords decide to "punish" someone, they're not talking about spankings or slaps on the wrist. The squeamish should know that the movie includes beheadings and a scene in which a suspected rat is doused with gasoline and burned alive.

I don't know if there's a larger point here, although we can't help noticing that the drug trade couldn't thrive without massive police corruption and wanton violence.

Stone and cinematographer Dan Mindel balance the bloodshed with the rich light of Laguna Beach, where Chon, Ben and "O" reside. They also do a fine job of pointing out how luxury contrasts with squalor, depending on where characters fit on the drug-trade ladder.

Some of the dialogue is burdened by a phony, pulp toughness that rings hollow ("You don't charge the world, it changes you") and some of it is bitingly funny. I can't cite the movie's best darkly funny example without including a spoiler, so you'll have to take my word about the amusing part.

You'll find many of Stone's trademark visual tricks, but this time, he's letting the story do most of the work, and Savages is better off for it. Put another way: The movie is good enough to make you forget all about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Even an overly tricky finale (bound to annoy some viewers) can't cancel the pleasures of this robust, sensual and unashamedly scabrous movie.

The real fun of Savages springs from the movie's pungency, from Stone's bravura handling of its violent set pieces and from his insistent acknowledgement that the dark side doesn't necessarily disappear just because the California sun is shining.

'Stone' sinks under weight of its pretensions

Say this: Stone showed me something I haven’t seen before, a movie that's gritty and labored at the same time. With Christian radio frequently droning in the background, Edward Norton and Robert De Niro play a film noir duet as convict and prison case worker. Sporting cornrows, Norton looks and sounds like a wannabe rapper who thinks he has a shot at toppling Eminem from his perch. De Niro – all impacted rage and middle-age bulk – portrays the caseworker who must decide whether Norton’s character – he calls himself Stone – will be paroled from the Michigan prison where he’s spent the last 9 years. Trips to mass don’t seem to have helped DeNiro’s Jack find his spiritual bearings. His downtrodden wife (Frances Conroy) reads the bible and drinks heavily, a coping strategy composed of equal parts alcohol and Catholicism. True to noir demands, Jack is ripe for a fall. Along comes Stone’s sexy wife Lucetta (Mila Jovovich) to provide all the temptation any man (God-fearing or otherwise) needs. For a while, it looks as if director John Curran may pull something powerful together, but the longer Stone goes on, the less credible it becomes. And for all their obvious skills, DeNiro and Norton are bested by the women. Both Jovovich (impossibly sultry) and Conroy (weathered by years of emotional deprivation) are more intriguing than their men, a convict and a prison worker who may be headed in opposite directions. It’s nice to see De Niro try something heavy, but his choice of material leaves something to be desired. Stone ultimately sinks under the weight of philosophical pretensions that don't seem to have been thoroughly worked out.

'Wall Street' sequel closes mixed

Michael Douglas and Shia LeBeouf tackle Wall Street.

America's favorite champion of greed is back. Freshly released from prison, Gordon Gekko is ready to use his status as a celebrity criminal to lecture the nation on how Wall Street ravaged the economy, pushing unsuspecting investors over a financial cliff. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps -- director Oliver Stone's follow-up to his 1987 hit -- plays variations on the kind of revenge themes that gave the first installment much of its punch and offers more than a few discourses on how we found ourselves on the brink of financial ruin.

Money Never Sleeps can be likened to a much-heralded initial public offering. The movie begins with high expectations and momentum, but ultimately suffers from a greed of its own: the desire to jam a ton of information and opinion into a story that sometimes loses itself in a tangle of financial maneuvers. And beyond all expectation and perhaps sense, Stone includes an epilogue that tries for (gasp!) a bit of happily-ever-after bliss.

Don't think I'm completely sour on Stone's effort. To begin with, Money Never Sleeps represents one of the few instances when a sequel makes sense. The audacious Gekko is past due for release from prison, and there hardly could be a better time for Stone to aim his cannons of rancor at Wall Street. In all, the idea of a Wall Street sequel seemed like a hanging curve ball, a fat pitch Stone could knock out of the park. I'd say, he's doubled off the left field wall.

The set-up is simple enough. Gekko, ably reprised by Douglas who won an Oscar for his work the first time around, is released from jail after having spent eight years on ice for insider trading. Not one to waste an experience, Gekko writes a best-selling book that goofs on the signature line from the last movie: It's called Is Greed Good? Gekko's ideally positioned to reveal the ways in which Wall Street sold out the country for fun and profit. Gekko, after all, invented the game. The book lands Gekko on the lecture circuit.

But Gekko isn't entirely happy being a prophet at the gates of the crumbling wall of capitalism. He seems to understand that he's hurt others, notably his family. Saddened by the death of a son (from a drug overdose), a remorseful Gekko would like to reconcile with his daughter (Carey Mulligan). Disgusted with her father, Mulligan's Winnie runs a left-leaning Web site. She's also engaged to a "hungry" young investment banker (the always avid Shia LeBeouf.) She hasn't spoken to her father in years.

LeBeouf's Jake Moore - really the movie's main character - embarks on his own vengeful ploy when he realizes that his Wall Street mentor (Frank Langella) has been victimized by the corrupt manipulations of another tycoon, the silky smooth Bretton James (Josh Brolin). Jake meets Gekko at a speaking engagement, and asks for advice. Gekko agrees to play the role of revenge consultant on condition that Jake brokers a meeting between father and daughter. For her part, Winnie has no idea that Jake has been in touch with her father.

That's enough about plot to give you an idea about where the story is headed - or maybe not. The script by Alan Loeb and Stephen Schiff expands its portfolio to include a green energy company that badly needs an infusion of capital, Swiss banks that still know how to hide money, an aging power broker (Eli Wallach) who may be cagier than we think. All this and bailouts, too.

But you know what? The real fun of Stone's movie - and it does have some kick -- involves precisely the things the director may be attempting to condemn. Brolin, in another fine performance, plays a character who's interesting only because he's rich and powerful and has a well-upholstered lifestyle.

And the movie is at its engaging best when the rich are seen flaunting their wealth, power and cunning. A charity ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art drips with alluring opulence. The infighting at a Federal Reserve meeting creates the illusion that we're experiencing an inside look at how the power structure works.

Moreover, Jake's energy has an infectious quality. He may be young, but he's living high on the hog in a fancy Manhattan apartment. LeBeouf conveys the giddy sense of confidence that can come from being certain about one's ability to make big money, something I've observed in others but never experienced personally.

But there's a liability in focusing on Jake's adrenalin-fueled ambition. The movie invests too much of its dramatic capital in LeBeouf's character, a young man who's not the equal of the character Charlie Sheen played in the original. And the relationship between LeBeouf and Mulligan falls short of terrific. It's as much plot contrivance as love affair.

The movie also indulges in a myth, a bit of nostalgia for capitalism past. Time was - or so we're led to believe - when Wall Street was different. Langella's Louis Sabel comes on like a cut-rate version of an Arthur Miller character, a Wall Street trader who longs for the days when companies had substance. Remember when we used to make things? Remember when we didn't accumulate mountains of debt just to stay afloat?

Not content to take shots at Wall Street excess, Stone also drags in murky real-estate practices. Susan Sarandon plays Jake's mother, a Realtor who has to borrow money from her hotshot son in order to hold onto properties that have become increasingly difficult to unload. Chewing on a New York accent thick enough to choke a house cat, Sarandon is fun to watch.

I've previously admired Mulligan's work. Here, though, her most impressive feat involves the way that Winnie cries. On a couple of occasions, a lone tear trickles down Winnie's rounded cheek. Very touching.

I decided to let those solitary tears stand for my feelings at the end of a movie. Money Never Sleeps mostly held my interest, but it lacks the emotional and intellectual that the subject demands. In a key line that I reveal here only because it found its way into the trailer, Gekko instructs Jake about the harsh way of things: "It's not about the money. It's about the game," says Gekko.

In the context of the character, the line makes sense, but try telling that to the people who suffered most from the Wall Street collapse, those with vanquished IRAs, devastated pension funds or lack of gainful employment. For all its pontificating, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps works better as glossy escapism than as a biting social critique.