Filmmaker Oliver Stone tends to rile people up, even when he’s trying to take it easy. In his latest movie, “U-Turn,” he has temporarily abandoned radical political history (“JFK,” “Nixon”) and over-the-edge social satire (“Natural Born Killers’) — the two genres that have gotten him in hot water with establishment types — for something seemingly safer and more entertaining. He has given us a modern film noir comedy, with Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez and Nick Nolte, about a sleazy adventurer who stops in one place strangers should never tarry long: an exaggerated Arizona town full of bad luck and lecherous or homicidal madcaps. And he’s done it in a robust comic style that moves like a greased rocket and can’t be taken seriously for a second.
But nothing Stone does is ever really safe. “U-Turn” is no exception. Even though he’s obviously in a jocular mood and using a script concocted by another writer (novelist, TV and movie scribe John Ridley, who adapted his own book “Stray Dogs”), Stone can’t help lighting more fires. The movie is genial and incendiary, with a dark, corrosive vision that’s just as radical as the viewpoint in Stone’s other recent films. But here, he’s foxy enough to follow Bernard Shaw’s advice: “If you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.”
With its scorched, sweaty visuals, its gutpuncher jokes and its rattlesnake bite, “U-Turn” paints a funny, hellish mean little portrait of a man-on-the-run in a red Mustang who gets trapped in an evil little desert town that won’t let him leave. The doomed wayfarer is Bobby Cooper (Penn), a would-be slickster speeding back to Vegas with some cash that will mean his neck if it doesn’t reach its violence-prone owner sometime soon.
Waiting for him in Superior (a real-life Arizona town that has the brass and humor to let Stone use its real name) are the damndest bunch of small-town psycho/weirdos this side of “Twin Peaks.” First off, there are Jake and Grace McKenna (Nolte and Lopez), a maritally challenged couple who each try to hire Bobby to kill the other. Then there’s Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton), the auto mechanic from hell, who latches on to Bobby’s busted car like a buzzard hopping on a fresh carcass.
Superior’s pig-tailed town cutie-pie Jenny (Claire Danes) bops up to Bobby flirtatiously, followed by her tantrum-throwing boyfriend, Toby N. Tucker (Joaquin Phoenix). The local seer, the Blind Man (Jon Voight) dispenses salty wisdom while carrying around his dead pet dog. And omnipresent Sheriff Potter (Powers Boothe) pops up whenever trouble starts — or when he’s starting some himself.
They’re only part of the populace. But why give away all the jokes? The fun of “U-Turn” is that whatever Bobby’s worst nightmare is at any moment, Superior will always obligingly provide it. The movie has “Red Rock West’s” story structure, but “U-Turn” is more raw, explosive and outrageous. The jokes are rougher. The violence is more extreme, And thanks to virtuoso cinematographer and Stone’s alter-ego, Robert Richardson, everything sizzles voluptuously before your eyes like hot chrome and rubber in a sandy wasteland.
Stone always encourages his actors to go for broke, and they’ve responded here with great gusto. If “Dead Man Walking” or “She’s So Lovely” show Penn in his best dramatic mood, “U-Turn” has him at his comic peak. (Or have we forgotten what a riot he was in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”?) Penn’s intensity holds the screen and gives the craziness a focus. With his ferrety face and darting eyes, he paints a trenchant picture of man at the end of his rope, a rat in a Southwestern maze. At every second, he projects believable dead-sweaty panic and desperation, enfolded in comic glee and inspiration.
He’s not alone. Thornton, packing 40 extra pounds and a sickening leer, comes up with one of the funniest small-town monsters ever. Lopez and Danes are sensuous and funny. Nolte, always good, is a revelation as a barmy, menacingly oddball realtor with tons of guilty secrets. All the actors — including Julie Haggerty, Bo Hopkins and Laurie Metcalf — are stylish and amusing. And, as he did in “Anaconda,” Voight triumphs (this time in a much better movie). All but unrecognizable as the fuzzily oracular Blind Man, he’s terrific as both mysterious buffoon and haunt-your-dreams eccentric.
Hollywood’s two great macho movie genres, the film noir and the Western, collide spectacularly in “U-Turn” — which, at its best, suggests some unholy fusion of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, novelist Jim Thompson and the Marx Brothers. Back in the early 1970s, the studios made lots of movies in the acid, jokey mood of “U-Turn.” But “U-Turn” mates that ’70s iconoclasm with post-“Star Wars” slickness, technical brilliance and dash. And though it’s not as rich or wild as Stone’s previous Western noir, “Natural Born Killers,” it’s a better audience show. He seems more dexterous and easy with the style now. The first half of “U-Turn” is almost irresistibly funny; the last half increasingly bloody and nightmarish. Together, they distill a vision of America as a comic madhouse full of vast, empty, hot spaces and populated by gun nuts, sluts, beer-guts, bubble-butts, dead mutts and the doomed klutzes who drive through.
“Natural Born Killers,” a movie I liked, was hurt because Stone seemed to lose his nerve about the ending. He closed with comical affirmation, when the right finish was the blood-freezing psychic meltdown — Mickey and Mallory gunned down in hell — that can be seen in his “Director’s Cut” video. But here, maybe because the plot of “U-Turn” seems slighter and the goals less ambitious, he keeps his nerve, driving all the way to a splendid screwball apocalypse.
Of course, audiences who dislike Stone, bad taste, excess, machismo and violence are advised to stay away. But what would they be doing at a movie like this anyway? “U-Turn” is a glorious maniacal goof: so fast, funny and audacious, it turns hell into a carnival.
”U-TURN”
(star) (star) (star) 1/2
Directed by Oliver Stone; written by John Ridley, based on his novel “Stray Dogs”; photographed by Robert Richardson; edited by Hank Corwin, Thomas J. Nordberg; production designed by Victor Kempster; music by Ennio Morricone; produced by Dan Halsted, Clayton Townsend. A Phoenix Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:05. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Bobby Cooper …………………….. Sean Penn
Grace McKenna ……………………. Jennifer Lopez
Jake McKenna …………………….. Nick Nolte
Blind Man ……………………….. Jon Voight
Sheriff Potter …………………… Powers Boothe
Jenny …………………………… Claire Danes
Darrell …………………………. Billy Bob Thornton
Toby N. Tucker …………………… Joaquin Phoenix
