Stone Crazy

By RICHARD CORLISS

Has everybody gone nuts? Is violence the way we resolve every domestic grievance, or is it just the quickest way to get on TV? With the Bobbitts, the Jacksons, the Menendez clan and that favorite new horror sitcom, The (O.J.) Simpsons, the American family has entered its postnuclear stage. Talk shows offer quack catharsis from every form of spousal and parental abuse. We're shouting at each other in National Enquirer headlines and have promoted tabloid newspapers and TV programs, once on the fringe of journalism, up to its hot center. It's Armageddon with commercial breaks. Why, the whole bloody mess could be straight out of an Oliver Stone movie.

Now it is. Natural Born Killers, the new outrage from Hollywood's most audacious auteur, takes a wild look at America's infatuation with twisted minds. The $34 million movie is so manic, so violent, so seemingly at one with the subject it satirizes, that Warner Bros. was reportedly spooked about a potential fire storm. Now the execs say they are feeling better. "I'm encouraged and excited," says marketing boss Rob Friedman. "The media response has been overwhelmingly positive."

Natural Born Killers -- in shorthand, NBK, to echo Stone's nutsy-greatsy JFK -- traces the odyssey of love-thugs Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) as they terrorize the Southwest and mesmerize America's couch spuds. Like Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands and a zillion tortured teen movies of the '50s, NBK creates two doomed maniacs busy mythologizing themselves. "We got the road to hell in front of us," Mickey tells his bride, and he's not lying. These kids get their kicks on Route 666; when they go traveling, the devil thumbs a ride.

Three men want them bad, which is the only way Mickey and Mallory come. A brutish detective (Tom Sizemore) hopes to capture these miscreants and maybe write a best seller about it. A tabloid-TV newsman (Robert Downey Jr.) figures he can exploit their exploits, turning this Mansonized Romeo and Juliet -- 52 murders, no regrets -- into media darlings. A crazed warden (Tommy Lee Jones) is determined to achieve fame as the man who put them to death. It's the ideal recipe for a Stone-crazy parable of greed and abuse. Shake well, pull the pin and stand back.

Except, of course, that Stone doesn't let you stand back. NBK plunders every visual trick of avant-garde and mainstream cinema -- morphing, back projection, slow motion, animation and pixillation on five kinds of film stock -- and, for two delirious hours, pushes them in your face like a Cagney grapefruit. The actors go hyper-hyper, the camera is ever on the bias, the garish colors converge and collide, and you're caught in this Excedrin vision of America in heat. The ride is fun too, daredevil fun of the sort that only Stone seems willing to provide in this timid film era. NBK is the most excessive, most exasperating, most ... let's just say it's the most movie in quite some time.

NBK took quite some time to take shape. It began as a script by Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), then got spun and spindled: Tarantino is credited with the story, Stone and his collaborators David Veloz and Richard Rutowski with the screenplay. Meanwhile, NBK was acquiring a bizarre new resonance. "When I started," says Stone, "this was a surreal piece. Now, thanks to Bobbitt and Menendez and Tonya Harding, it's become satire. By the time I'd finished, fact had caught up to fiction. O.J. is the final blowout."

It's still on the surreal side, and not just in the carnage that almost earned the picture an NC-17 rating (see box). NBK is also a blanket indictment of the American family (breeders of abuse), the justice system (sadistic and incompetent) and the avid media that find in tabloid crime the no-brain modern equivalent of Greek tragedy. And intentionally or not, NBK romanticizes its hero and heroine, because they are smarter and sexier than their pursuers. As the kid in the movie's fake news footage says, "If I was a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory."

Stone is always ready to defend his movies' most outlandish theses. O.K., Oliver, hit it: "Let's look at the statistics. Violent crime has remained flat over the past 20 years. But the perception of crime has changed; now it's the No. 1 enemy. Every night on the news it's back-to-back murder and body bags. Even the national news is perverted, because the news has become a profit-oriented enterprise since Tisch took over CBS. It's the old yellow journalism. Now that communism is dead, they need new demons. This virus has infected us all -- the demons within us and among us."

NBK may have little new to say about those demons, but it has plenty to show, in images that mix beauty and horror, atrocity and comedy. Angels and red horses glide across the night sky. Mallory's family life is played as a grotesque sitcom that ends when her awful father (Rodney Dangerfield) is beaten to death and her weak mother is set ablaze. When Mickey and Mallory visit an Indian shaman (Russell Means), the words demon and too much tv are superimposed on their torsos. Flashes of Hitler and Stalin, insects and rhinos, The Wild Bunch and Midnight Express (the film whose screenplay won Stone his first Oscar) explode on the window of a motel room while the two ( make love and a hostage looks on. As the Cowboy Junkies' ethereal version of Sweet Jane plays on the sound track, they make a blood pact, and the drops form cartoon snakes -- a big motif here.

In all three stages of the project -- writing, shooting, editing -- Stone encouraged everybody to go higher, wilder. "The set was intense and exciting," recalls Harrelson, a bit of a real-life brawler whose father is in prison for murder. "Oliver played an incessant barrage of wild music to get you going. The crew would jam the music, then fire shotguns into the air." All the actors felt this electricity, like a searchlight or a cattle prod. "Oliver shot at a feverish pace," Sizemore says, "54 days and no standing around. It was managed chaos."

Chaos? Perhaps. Managed? Perhaps not. "The shoot was extraordinarily angst- ridden," says Stone's superb cinematographer, Robert Richardson, "because it was anarchy in style. It wasn't planned out in the traditional sense. It was more like throwing paint at the canvas -- you don't know if you're mak-ing art. The only rule was that you could change your mind." That same rule applied in the editing, which took 11 grueling months. Says co-editor Hank Corwin: "We wanted an impressionistic feeling, but there was no randomness. Every two-frame flash was thought out. This style can work on anything. It could be one of the futures of filmmaking."

One wouldn't want this to be the only future; then we really would go nuts. But most films today are afraid to try anything new. That's exactly what Stone does. He's like Mickey or Mallory careering to hell or heaven. And the viewer is like the bit-part cook in the opening diner scene. A bullet whirls toward him, stops for a split second as the victim's eyes widen in fear, then BOOM! Natural Born Killers is an explosive device for the sleepy movie audience, a wake-up call in the form of a frag bomb.

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles