SALVADOR (1986) *** Can that (perfect) staccato music in the opening sequence really be Georges Delerue? It is, which simply demonstrates that the great ones can do anything. With that sequence Oliver Stone sets the bar incredibly high, with the camera lingering on corpses in what appears to be an authentic newsreel, waiting to understand. Shooting people is bad, maybe especially on cathedral steps, so how did it happen and why did it happen with weapons provided by America? The questions aren't simple ones, and Stone doesn't bother with simple answers. Simple causes? Yes-the economic concerns of the entrenched elite in El Salvador, the election of Reagan, the threat (or [false? premature?] hope) provided by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. But there is no clear path from the causes to the answers, and even the reasons get blurry along the way. Like most conflicts, the situation is more amenable to an able story teller than a bought-and-paid anchorman looking at the clock and trying to figure out how to fit in his feel-good human interest story at the end. Stone tells the story well, and if there is occasionally a slight feeling of manipulation it's his trying to shove the story back within the framework of the film, rather than overt propaganda. To be sure, Stone doesn't leave you wondering where his sympathies lie, but words of wisdom-the simple aphorisms that serve as the fuel for the killing machine-fall from mouths on all sides. James Woods does a good job with the complex and multiply flawed central figure, James Belushi is believable as his stoner buddy, and Elpidia Carrillo sympathetic, but it's not really so much a film about the figures portrayed as the tens of thousands that you can feel just off screen. No matter how effectively Stone does his job, we know that Woods, and Belushi, and Carrillo, have at least the possibility of a soiree in the Hollywood Hills tonight, if they want it. The desaparecidos and campesinos do not, and they are who the film is really about.
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