THE DOORS (1991)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
"The Doors" is a hallucinatory acid-trip of a rock and roll movie...and a bummer. Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan) even tells rock superstar Jim Morrison that his last acid trip was a bummer. Exactly. There is no joy, no celebration of rock and roll as an art form in "The Doors," only as a creative means of expression fueled by drugs and nothing more. That is not to say that the movie is worthless, it is often quite brilliant and vivid and furiously alive, but there is precious little to Oliver Stone's vision other than a drunkard who did his best to appear on stage and make himself into a loud raving lunatic.
Jim Morrison is first seen in a truly hypnotic flashback as a kid who observes a car wreck involving a Native American family. The image haunts and fascinates him, and the rest of Stone's Rock and Roll Odyssey shows a Jim Morrison obsessed with death. Val Kilmer plays the young rock and roller who is at peace as a poet living on a rooftop, searching for something transcendental and falling in love with the tragic flower that was Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan, in a role that far out shadows her overbearingly cutesy rom-coms of the late 90's). When Morrison can't bear the criticism of his NYU short films, he starts writing lyrics and lets his pal, Ray Manzarek (MacLachlan), hear them as he sings. Before you know it, a band forms as they record songs such as the iconic "Light My Fire" (when Morrison takes his first crack at it, written by Robby Krieger, it will give you goosebumps).
The band calls themselves The Doors but Jim often sings at clubs with his back to the audience. Pretty soon, he faces them and begins to improvise ("This is the End" has some impromptu lyrics with regards to, well, incest that shocks the audience). The band members, including Ray on keyboards, John Densmore on drums (a fantastic Kevin Dillon) and Krieger on guitar (the underrated Frank Whaley), aren't receptive to Morrison's drug-fueled rages on stage and off. When Morrison isn't allegedly exposing himself on stage, he urinates inside a bar. When he isn't tripping on acid in the middle of the desert, he is destroying a Thanksgiving meal prepared by Pam, hoping she will stab him to death. He is an unwieldy, defiant soul who needs death to be lurking (Death makes a frequent cameo appearance in the guise of a bald man) to obtain potency when having sex. When Jim isn't screwing every groupie on tour, he finds some measure of solace with reporter Patricia Kennealy (Kathleen Quinlan), a Celtic Pagan whom he marries though he doesn't take the ceremony seriously.
Sometimes Morrison changes the lyrics when performing on the Ed Sullivan stage, sometimes he makes pronouncements that come out of left field ("Let's make a road movie in black and white. We will call it Zero"). More often than not, the man is not really attuned to his surroundings - he is outside of them.
For a visual journey back to the late 1960's and early 1970's, "The Doors" is a hyperkinetic, expressively high-pitched and poetic assault on the senses that captures the essence of the times - it is like stepping into a time machine and going back to an era I never got to witness. Never has the desert looked so beautifully mesmerizing in any film (excepting Antonioni's "The Passenger") and never has concert footage looked and felt so remarkable, as if you were there with the audience at a live show (the show stopping "Break on Through to the Other Side" number is an unbelievable sequence that has to be seen to be believed). No one can argue that Oliver Stone is an immeasurably gifted director with a keen visual eye (thanks largely to gifted cinematographer Robert Richardson). Some scenes inspire awe, such as Morrison in one of several trance states at a party where he meets Andy Warhol (Crispin Glover, relishing his cameo while licking his lips) while Lou Reed's "Heroin" plays in the background; Mimi Rogers as a sexy photographer who captures a glorious, iconic image of Jim as he removes his shirt during a photo shoot; the stunning overhead shot of Venice Beach as Ray tries to meditate as the McCoys' "Hang on Sloopy" plays; an accurate depiction of a college audience's reaction to Jim's "pretentious" student film (the student film is not an actual recreation of any of Jim's work); the desert and the caves where Jim sees the ghosts of Native Americans from that horrifying car crash of his youth, and much more. Stone has captured the look and feel of the era but not the man, and that is largely his fault. Anyone who has read a book on Morrison or seen the 2009 documentary "When You're Strange" knows that Jim may have been a hardcore alcoholic and an unrepentant drug addict, but that is only half the story.
I've seen "The Doors" in theaters twice and on video several times, and every time I watch it, I am riveted...and depressed. Those reactions may be the intentions of Oliver Stone, a director who makes you feel numb by the end of most of his films, but I wanted more out of Jim Morrison. There are half-second flashes of Morrison's humor, especially when after a recording of one his songs, his groupies are told to leave the studio and he says, "Okay, see you all later." I also love the moment when Jim tells a crowd outside of the Whisky a Go Go, "Come on! How many of you people know you are really alive?" It is Jim sending his message of opening the doors of perception. The tragedy, perhaps a false one, is that Jim stayed in a druggy trance until the end of his life. The real Patricia Kennealy had once stated what Jim wrote to her in a letter: "My side is cold without you." That is the Jim Morrison we only see flashes of - Stone's fervor feels cold without it.
