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Comandante
Directed by: Oliver Stone
___________________________________Whatever happened to Oliver Stone?
Midnight Express, Scarface, Year of the Dragon, Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon all took audiences into familiar territory that turned out not to be so familiar. Some people liked his work. Others didn’t. But Stone was always revving those engines, shouting over the traditional din, demanding that attention be paid.
And now, we have his documentary about Fidel Castro. Or rather, we have Fidel Castro’s interview about Fidel Castro. It’s well made. It’s worth watching. It will last forever as a rare document of a man who will be remembered by history. It’s a yawn.
Comandante is the third documentary built around the Cuban leader in the last couple of years. The other two, the earnest but propagandistically one-sided Fidel, from legit documentarian Estella Bravo, and My Fidel, made up of the insane ramblings of madwoman Marita Lorenz, both suffer from limited or no access to Castro himself. Comandante suffers from too much access.
Were this a TV magazine show interview, the 90 minutes culled from 30+ hours of taping would be more than satisfactory. You’ve never had a chance to spend this much time with Fidel Castro. And there are style points made with interesting cinematography from Stone’s mostly Mexican crew, including legend-in-the-making cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto. But this is Oliver Stone. Even if his position, which seems to be pro-Castro, were to differ from my own, I expect that this man would at least make his case aggressively. But alas, no.
There is Stone, looking for all the world like the living incarnation of another Oliver - Hardy – avoiding any uncomfortable questions about the history of Castro-era Cuba, only making Castro squirm when speaking of love. Ah, amor. That’s what I go to see an Oliver Stone movie for… his insight into romance. This is a filmmaker whose idea of a romantic gesture is for the young man to kill the young lady’s child molesting father. Sweet. Billy Hayes did fall in love in that Turkish prison. Does that count?
Stone seems pretty happy just to be there. And that doesn’t cut it. Cuba is a beautiful place and there is a deep and abiding love for Castro there. But the answers to the questions that Castro avoids are too close at hand for a guy like Stone not to answer. How can Cubans live on less than $50 a month in wages? What about the prostitution? What is the gay lifestyle in Cuba? Is there true black equality? Why is the American dollar the currency that drives the country? What about the Mariel Boat Lift that dumped Cuba’s prisons onto American soil? How does this man feel about people who are desperate enough to leave Cuba that they are willing to risk death? Elian Gonzalez is discussed, but you would never know from this film that his mother died bringing him to America.
Stone’s film makes a big show out of the fact that Castro had the right to stop taping and to not answer questions, and that he did neither in the hours and hours he spent with Ollie. But there was no need for Castro to censor Stone when Stone was so willing to censor himself.
What I would be fascinated to see is Oliver Stone’s 3 hour version of Comandante, the one that includes Stone’s pithy amplifications on Cuban history. Unfortunately, this Comandante is more a fancy death shroud than a serious document of history, or even fancy.
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___________
U.S.A., 2002
93 Minutes, Color
___________
Documentary
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Review Date: January 17, 2003
