DOORS, THE - Blu-ray review

"The Doors" is more proof positive that director Oliver Stone has been intent on chronicling the Sixties--which historians consider to be that period between JFK's assassination and Nixon's resignation--from his own perspective. Sometimes that perspective is communal and historical, while other times it's almost so unique that it's eccentric or esoteric. To his credit, Stone seems quick to acknowledge that, and makes no apologies.

It's refreshing to watch one bonus feature ("The Road to Excess") that actually attacks his take on "The Doors," accusing him of zeroing in on the wild side of the lead singer and ignoring all other facets. The criticism comes from a reliable source: surviving members of the band. In the film, Doors front man Jim Morrison gets involved with a witch, and the real woman (whose real name was used in the film) also attacks Stone for his one-dimensional treatment of Morrison and for his too multi-dimensional treatment of her character--meaning, ace researcher Stone took accounts involving some 40 different women and combined them into one composite character. But Kathleen Quinlan, who plays the witch in the film, defends Stone by saying, in essence, that he's not making a biography. It's his vision that we're seeing.

Well, yes and no. If he's not making a biography, then why not call the group by some other name and let viewers draw the parallel? Why not use different names for everyone, instead of sticking to the real participants? And why not just depart from the facts altogether, rather than trying to document how The Doors were formed in L.A., how they rose to become one of rock's hottest bands, how Morrison was hauled off the stage in Miami and booked on an obscenity charge, and how his heavy drinking and recreational drug use earned him the same honor as rock icons Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix: dead and lionized at age 27. The answer, of course, is that this is a biopic in the sense that Morrison is the focal point and Stone sticks fairly close to the facts. But as with all things Stone, "The Doors" is a story of the Sixties more than anything. Stone says he first heard The Doors when he was a 19-year-old soldier in Vietnam who was smoking pot and dropping acid. The music spoke to him, he says, and his main purpose seems to be to somehow get the music to do the same thing for audiences who see this film. If that means trying to make you see what it's like to hear the music while you're on acid or pot, so be it. Wherever we're at in the film, whether it's a peak moment or an incidental one, music from The Doors continually washes over the images we see on the screen. And after 138 minutes (speaking of excess), you do end up humming Doors songs and looking for downloads for your iPod. In that respect, "The Doors" is a successful film.

But it's hard to do "trippy," and there are far too many sequences where you look at a dreamy or vacant-eyed Val Kilmer (as Morrison) and you wonder how he's able to keep from cracking a smile. In Stone's world, LSD trips are always far-off ventures that put a body in another time, dimension, or scenario as if you were the guy from the old Hertz commercial who suddenly finds himself placed in the driver's seat of a moving vehicle. Here, Morrison and his "old lady" Pam (Meg Ryan) end up in the Sahara without boarding an airplane. There are also plenty of segments that try to show how Morrison believed that when he passed a wrecked car in the New Mexico desert when he was just an impressionable child, one of the dead Indians he saw was a shaman whose ghost leapt inside him and stayed with him all his life. But if you didn't know about Morrison's beliefs, the hand seems overplayed. In fact, you could say of all the attempts to depict "trippy" and psychedelic inner states that Stone is guilty of the same excesses as his hero. But maybe Stone had better dope in Vietnam than hippies did back in the States. For the average viewer, though--and by average I mean someone who hasn't had that strong of an LSD experience, or any at all--seeing Kilmer stagger through these sequences will seem more unintentionally funny than insightful or profound (I mean, Heavy). And that's the chief weakness of "The Doors." It seems far too silly when it's meant to be serious. The strongest scenes are the concerts and performances, and the weakest ones are the psychedelic segments.

Part of the problem is Stone's focus on the Dionysian. Morrison bought into that as a philosophy, and it's clear from the gleam in Stone's eye as he talks about it that he does too. Know God through excess. This is the Sixties, so there's plenty of nudity--mostly female, but some male--and Stone in his commentary track sounds positively annoyed when in one scene Ryan instinctively goes to cover her bare breast with a hand. Real flower children were open and free, they wouldn't have done that, Stone scoffs. And it's true, Ryan does seem a little more Midwestern than the part calls for. Then again, we only get a sense of "real" flower children when they're in the Dionysian temple of Jim Morrison and The Doors. There's no real sense of the social milieu beyond that. The ironic fact that Morrison's father was an admiral at the Gulf of Tonkin is a non-factor where Stone is concerned, and the whole shaman thing is the only shaping influence on Morrison's life.

As for the performances, Kilmer does a decent job playing Morrison and looks, at times, like a dead ringer. The Doors were formed in 1965 and courted controversy mostly because of their singer-poet's cosmic (some might say "pretentious") lyrics and wild improvisations. Drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger (the second most important member of the group, who penned "Light my Fire") and keyboardist Ray Manzarek are played by Kevil Dillon, Frank Whaley, and Kyle MacLachlan, respectively. Like Ryan's character, Pamela Courson, they're present and accounted for, but not in any real depth. They only exist as satellites that revolve around Morrison's bright star, which is to say that everyone but Kilmer plays a supporting role. Are they convincing? For the most part. But their "normalcy quotient" is a lot higher than Morrison's, and whether it's the result of the performances, Stone's direction, or historical fact, the gap between the others and Morrison seems wider than the decade would demand.

It's a mostly entertaining film that goes a little off the deep end. What saves it is what saved a lot of people in the Sixties: the music. The soundtrack is like a greatest hits collection:

"Riders on the Storm"
"Light My Fire"
"Moonlight Drive"
"Love Street"
"Break on Through"
"The Crystal Ship"
"The Movie"
"The End"
"Alabama Song"
"Strange Days"
"Love Me Two Times"
"My Wild Love"
"Not to Touch the Earth"
"The Soft Parade"
"Roadhouse Blues"
"End of the Night"
"Back Door Man"
"You're Lost Little Girl"
"People are Strange"
"Touch Me"
"When the Music's Over"

And when the music's over, turn out the lights, turn out the lights.

Video:
From what I can remember from seeing this in the theaters, it was always a little rough in spots, a little gauzy, a little grainy, a little hazy, as if to support the inner state of Morrison's mind. Same with the concert footage, which is a bit smoky (pun intended, given all the cops that stand on the stage like Easter Island monoliths). So Stone wanted to craft a film that had a raw look to it, supported by "downtime" sequences that have a look that's much closer to reality as we know it, with much more distinct edges and much more clarity. In 1080p (AVC/MPEG-4 transfer) "The Doors" looks probably as good as it's going to. There were two prints originally made, one in 35mm and the other in 70mm. This appears to be the 35mm print, which measures out at 2.35:1. There's a little noise in some scenes, and a few squiggles, but otherwise the transfer is artifact-free.

Audio:
Now, the audio is a nice tribute to Morrison and the band. The English 7.1 DTS HD Master Audio delivers a dynamic audio and makes full use of the channels, with the music spilling out of all of them in what seems, at times, to be equal measure. Other times we get ambient sound, with the music coming out of the FX speakers and dialogue coming out of the mains. The bass isn't quite resonant enough to blow anything out of the room, but it has a nice rich, full sound, and the treble isn't too bright or tinny. There's also a very good mix to keep the dialogue and music and ambient sounds in believable and comfortable balance. Subtitles are in English and Spanish.

Extras:
There are no Blu-ray exclusives, but there's still some nice stuff here. A good director's commentary can make you rethink a film and like it, in retrospect, much more than you did as a first-time (ignorant) viewer. That's happened to me before with Stone's "Heaven & Earth" commentary, which blew me away and made me feel like a student sitting at the feet of the master. Here, Stone is probably as low-key and matter-of-fact as I've heard him. I don't detect a single hint of passion in his voice. It's as if the music really is over for him, and he's moved so much beyond it. And yet, when you see him on-camera in the other bonus features, that's clearly not the case at all. What this commentary mostly reveals is how Stone revels in the Dionysian aspect of the Morrison mystique, and how much more weight he gives the shaman thing than any of the books about Morrison.

There are a number of excellent bonus features, chief among them "Jim Morrison: An American Poet in Paris," a 50-minute show by Jacques Viallon put together presumably for French television and relying heavily on an American expatriate musician who had contact with Morrison. You get a virtual tour of the sites in Paris that Morrison frequented, and see how the French thought of this American superstar. It's pretty fascinating.

Fans of what's left on the cutting-room floor will enjoy 14 deleted/extended scenes that run roughly 40 minutes. Another nice feature is "The Road to Excess," which challenges many of Stone's takes on Morrison's life and the directions he took in the film. This 37-minute feature raises some interesting questions while also introducing some fun facts about Morrison's life that were left unreported. An "original featurette" is a throwaway bit of pre-release hype, but "The Doors in L.A." is interesting because you hear from the Three Dog Night keyboardist who partied with Morrison about the party and music scene in L.A. at the time, with everybody living in Laurel Canyon and basically house-hopping (no one kept their doors locked) to jam and party. Conspicuously absent is Manzarek, the Doors member who thought the movie was a bad idea and a film that didn't do a good job of depicting the way it was.

Then again, it was Stone's vision of The Doors, and he saw them through whatever he was smoking and dropping in Vietnam.

Bottom Line:
Ultimately, viewers will watch (and appreciate) "The Doors" as a musical indoctrination and a vicarious sense of what it would have been like to have been one of those worshippers at the temple of Morrison. But it's deeply flawed as a biopic. At his best, Morrison was a brilliant songwriter and performer; at his worst, he was a sometimes pretentious poet given to excess. Stone's film may not show all sides of the rock icon, but he does a fantastic job of capturing the heart of the music and a sense of one aspect of the period. If only so many of those psychedelic scenes weren't so unintentionally funny . . . .