Oliver Stone’s Salvador, from 1986, is the kind of movie Hollywood can’t make anymore, especially owing to the era’s political turmoil. Stone’s near-satire of journalistic hubris stars James Woods as a self-righteous, boozing, dope-smoking, hipster screwup excited by the sense of purpose he gets from covering international war zones. The film is propelled by liberal pieties that are now outdated. Yet Stone’s cynicism about America’s international policies also extends to his depiction of American media and their irresponsible, irredeemable role in fiascoes from Vietnam to Cambodia to El Salvador in 1980.
Like Woods’s weaseling, hustling protagonist Richard Boyle, Stone reveals his ambivalence — feeling moral disgust about other people’s politics, plus middle-class American guilt about his own helplessness. The remorse and futility that led to Stone’s Vietnam apology movies (Platoon, Heaven and Earth, Born on the Fourth of July, even his great paranoia epic JFK) surely inspired his embarrassing infatuation with Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chávez in the docs South of the Border and Mi Amigo Hugo.
But at least Stone is up front about his passions, and that transparency makes Salvador fascinating today even though its mawkish regard for Central American “root causes” seems particularly misguided in light of today’s invasion. Salvador features a video clip of the recently elected President Ronald Reagan warning about “the infiltration into the Americas by the terrorists and I’m sure eventually into North America.”
It is Stone’s cynicism that recommends Salvador for contemporary viewing. No other American filmmaker this millennium dares Stone’s candor about the sins and absolute corruption of political journalism. This is where Stone hits the bull’s-eye of Salvador’s moral target — and such media criticism has never been more necessary. Boyle is a typical arrogant journalist-hack (loosely based on Stone’s co-screenwriter Richard Boyle, who worked for the Pacific News Service, a news agency that closed in 2017). When he sees his idealized communist rebels executing their right-wing oppressors, he shouts, “You’ve become just like them!” But his anger is egotistical, not objective.
Stone makes journalistic egotism undeniable — and frequently lambastes it. A woman who is a network-TV reporter (Valerie Wildman) flirts deceitfully, promising a ruthless general, “We want to do an in-depth and sympathetic portrait.” Later, she asks a politician, “Are you sure you can capture both the Catholic and the women’s vote?” perfectly illustrating the vapidity that still rules corporate media.
Boyle prides himself on being “the last American out of Cambodia while Sydney Schanberg was running after his Pulitzer Prize!” Bad-boy Stone rags on the grandiosity of Roland Joffé’s Schanberg biopic The Killing Fields, yet Salvador’s brash vulgarity provides the answer we need to the sanctimony of the media-worshipping All the President’s Me, mythology lately revealed as an intel op.
Salvador comes close to the blunt yet astute insight of Sam Fuller movies (such as Park Row or The Steel Helmet) that took on serious political issues without being lofty. Salvador opens with paeans to Spanish Civil War photographer Robert Capa: “He captured the nobility of human suffering. He not only captured how they died, he captured why they died.” But it’s just sentimental blather of the kind journos use to glorify themselves.
Surely the film’s high point is the scene in which Boyle confesses to a priest, adding a boyish contour to Woods’s all-out performance. It is sensitive and comic — a perfect realization of the scheming and scamming of bad-Catholic Boyle. “What kind of redemption can you expect?” asks his lovely Latina peasant mistress María (Elpidia Carrillo), a question that goes to the heart of media narcissism.
As Civil War, Alex Garland’s recent anti-American fantasy, unhelpfully projects hipster nihilism onto our contemporary panic, it’s evident that irresponsible media lead us into emotional and political chaos. Salvador is an antidote that contrasts old-style, even disreputable reporters with contemporary (and contemptuous) media bureaucrats in a profession that has now lost any moral foundation.