The Doors

Starring: Oliver Stone

Directed by: Oliver Stone

RS: Not Rated

1991 Other

The Doors

600 3-21-91
Jim Morrison, the lead singer and lyricist of the Doors, was equal parts poet, provocateur and snake-oil salesman. You might say the same of Oliver Stone, the writer-director (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) who has turned Morrison's short life -- he died of heart failure in 1971 at the age of twenty-seven -- into a film of wretched and splendid excess. You expect in-your-face from Stone and Morrison. Both are products of the turbulent Sixties. The decade jazzed them, molded their sensibilities, taught them that art should be violent and dangerous: Feel it, mock it, even fake it, but keep it larger than life.

The Doors is a thrilling spectacle -- the King Kong of rock movies -- featuring a starmaking, ball-of-fire performance by Val Kilmer as Morrison. I can't recall a film that evokes the myth of the Sixties more potently. It's not all free love, psychedelic drugs and electric blues, either. The cruelty, delusion and self-destruction are included, along with the dopey hippie rhetoric. Stone goes to extremes -- the movie is too much of everything -- but the eerily alluring music of the Doors helps him capture the dark side of a decade.

In his 1990 book Riders on the Storm, Doors drummer John Densmore expressed fears about what kind of movie Stone would make. As a friend told him, "They're going to take your six-year career and squash it down to two hours and then blow it up to the size of a two-story building." Densmore had reason to worry. Stone and co-writer J. Randal Johnson, who based their script on eyewitness interviews and their own fervid imaginations, have done some squashing. Though Kevin Dillon is fine as Densmore and there is solid work from Frank Whaley as guitarist Robby Krieger and Kyle MacLachlan as keyboardist Ray Manzarek, Stone's movie isn't really about the Doors. It's a one-man show.

And what a show. With ferocious cunning, Kilmer shows how this introspective son of a navy officer put his past behind him (Morrison told the press his parents were dead) and built a persona as "the god of rock and cock." In his licorice black leathers, Kilmer's Morrison stalks the stage, spitting out lyrics to shock his audience ("Father, I want to kill you/Mother, I want to fuck you"). It's not art -- Morrison's avant-garde posturing can grow grating -- but it is great theater. Paul Rothchild, who produced most of the band's albums, supervised the soundtrack, which should send Doors freaks into Dolby bliss. (Kilmer's vocals are seamlessly meshed with Morrison's in a few numbers.) The film is also a stunning re-creation of the period -- from the early gigs at L.A.'s Whiskey au Go Go to Morrison's arrest at a 1969 Miami concert for exposing his private parts.

Stone does little to soften Morrison's reputation as a user. Booze, drugs, blondes and blow jobs -- the Lizard King did whatever it took to light his fire. The film focuses on two women in his life -- Patricia Kennealy (a strident Kathleen Quinlan), a journalist whom Morrison bullies into having an abortion, and Pamela Courson (a wan Meg Ryan), his common-law wife, whose smack habit -- she OD'd in 1974 -- is tied to his indifference and neglect. If Morrison had a brighter side, you won't find it shining here.

Stone wants to uncover the tragic poet in the pop icon. Morrison's fatalistic yearnings seem to touch a responsive chord in Stone; the film may provoke charges of morbid glamorization. Lying dead in his Paris bathtub, Morrison has a transcendent smile. But Stone doesn't pretend to know whether Morrison did break on through to the other side. The movie stops at the grave. Stone never persuades us to believe that Morrison was a genius on a par with MoliFre, Proust, Oscar Wilde and the other artists resting in Paris's PFre-Lachaise Cemetery. But the flashes of brilliance in the film exert a powerful hold. Twenty years after his death, Jim Morrison can still convince an audience that he's onto something.