‘Savages’: A Violent, Drug-Induced High

Often I’m asked, “What’s the worst movie ever made?” and I say, “I don’t know, but my own least favorite is Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.” The early script by Quentin Tarantino was heavily revised, and the final film became a celebration of serial killers, now existential heroes with absolute freedom. Beyond the bombardment that was Stone’s direction, the worldview was abominable.

The thriller Savages is in the same brutal, druggy realm of Natural Born Killers, but Stone has evolved in the past decade and a half, and the new film has a deeper, more complicated perspective. The violence isn’t a kick. It’s horrifying, senseless. Amid the mayhem, you think, “It didn’t have to go down this way.”

Why does it? Business. That was the point of Stone’s last film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps — that business could ravage anything, even family. The family in Savages is surrogate but ideal. It’s a menage a trois: two buddies, Chon and Ben, and their rich California girlfriend, O, short for Ophelia, who narrates. Their business is growing marijuana, innovative strains of it, using part of their profits to build villages in Africa. Aaron Johnson’s Ben is the idealist, Taylor Kitsch’s Chon the angry, haunted Iraq War vet; the men are opposites, loved equally by Blake Lively’s O because together, she tells us, they form the perfect whole.