TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031191/0311420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 84 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 73

Come On, Baby, Light My Fizzle


By RICHARD CORLISS

THE DOORS
Directed by Oliver Stone
Screenplay by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone


    At Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Jim Morrison's grave
site pulls in the biggest crowds: pilgrims, rockophiles, ragged
hippies who look as if they stepped out of a Woodstock Portosan
20 years too late. Last spring, while Oliver Stone's rockudrama
on Morrison's group the Doors was still in production, with Val
Kilmer in the lead role, one possessive admirer etched this
graffito into the Pere-Lachaise headstone: VAL KILMER N'EST PAS
JIM.

    The scrawler was right. Morrison was a gorgeous creature --
face by Michelangelo, a mouth made for pouts and pleasures, his
entire persona an erogenous zone -- with an electrifying stage
presence. He saw himself, though, as a Romantic poet trapped
in a pop star's body and worked hard at punishing that body
with all-life binges of alcohol, drugs and heavy sex. "I'm rich
and famous, smart and pretty," he must have mused. "Now how can
I screw it up?" He did so by speeding up the physical and
mental decay that aging forces on mere mortals. Like his hero
Rimbaud, he raced death to the finish line. When he died in
1971, at 27, he was ravaged, depleted, spent. But for a few
years Morrison was Satan's seraph -- the golden stud of '60s
rock.

    Kilmer is just conventionally good-looking; he can't prowl
like Blake's Tyger or pose with the sultry arrogance of a Beat
poet. Nor does he have the intellectual seductiveness that made
Morrison a toy of the hip literati. In short, Kilmer is not
Jim, and his casting denies The Doors the chance to be a
meditation on the lure of sexual power. What else can the movie
be? Morrison and his band were not political pathfinders, and
musically they were close to negligible, with one compelling
tune (Light My Fire) and an ambitious, pretentious attitude.
The Doors had a good world when they died -- their albums sell
almost as well now as they did in the group's brief eminence
-- but not enough to base a movie on.

    So Stone turned The Doors into a display of pop culture's
wretched excess. "The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of
death," Morrison wrote when he was a student at the UCLA film
school, and The Doors latches onto this fear in the first scene
-- when five-year-old Jim sees a car wreck -- and rides the
snake right to the end. In between come dozens of set pieces
in which Morrison makes a spectacular, suicidal fool of
himself: insulting his audience, trashing hotel rooms, dangling
from 10th-story windows, engaging in a blood-sipping ritual
with his witchy mistress (Kathleen Quinlan, who gets it right),
locking his wife-to-be (Meg Ryan, who has no character to
play) in a closet and setting it on fire. Perhaps Stone wants
to show that Morrison was the victim of sensuality -- death's
hunkiest groupie -- rather than its agent. But the film really
proves only that Jim was a bad drunk and a worse friend, and
that in no way was his life exemplary.

    Stone has relived the Vietnam War in two bold, woozy
melodramas, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July; his next
movie is about the assassination of J.F.K. In subject and style
he is the last director of the '60s, finding truth in rage,
beauty in psychedelic sunsets, politics in self-destruction.
His movies make people edgy, and that's a good thing. But this
time Stone is a symptom of the disease he would chart. It is
folly to lavish $40 million of somebody's money (that's $10
million a Door!) and 2 hr. 15 min. of your time on a
proposition -- some guys can't handle fame -- that was evident
two decades ago. Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back
then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.