Probably the tackiest subgenre of showbiz is the impersonation of dead celebrities. And Oliver Stone’s new movie, “The Doors,” has its share of creepy look-alikes in scenes featuring Ed Sullivan and Andy Warhol. But the film’s lead performance is a rare instance of an actor rising above the pointlessness of mimicry. Val Kilmer’s portrayal of the beautiful, pretentious and self-destructive Jim Morrison is more incarnation than imitation, in a league with the star turns of Gary Busey as Buddy Holly or Kurt Russell as Elvis. Uncanny is the only way to describe the transformation of Kilmer’s surfer look (think of him as the arrogant flyboy Iceman in “Top Gun”) into Morrison’s stoned pantherine posturing, his Doublemint grin into Morrison’s insouciant pout. Beyond the bizarre resemblance–and the near perfection with which Kilmer sings the Morrison vocals–the actor knows how to play not just the man but the myth.
Of course, Kilmer and Morrison have a few things in common. Morrison was the quintessential California rocker, Kilmer himself is a Valley boy. Over free-range chicken and cappuccino in a London restaurant last week, Kilmer explained the affinity he felt for the dead rock star. A self-confessed “writer of bad poetry,” Kilmer seems to like his poems soft and squishy. He pored over Morrison’s own verse; he was amazed to find out his favorite Rimbaud poem was Morrison’s favorite Rimbaud poem. Synchronicity! And not unlike Morrison’s psychedelic parlor chat, Kilmer’s conversation rambles from William Blake to nuclear disarmament, to Einstein on Gandhi, to Bob Dylan, to questions of “the soul.”
But let’s not forget that Kilmer, now 31, spent the ’60s in grade school. Never a Doors fan, he belongs to the Just Say No generation. Despite his remarkably convincing performance as Morrison boozing and tripping, he says, “I would not have been interested in doing the film if there was a risk of promulgating substance abuse.” But Kilmer can make the leap from Age of Aquarius to New Age in a flash; he sees Morrison as a “disciplined drunk, a disciplined poet and a disciplined performer.” Since playing the “disciplined” Morrison, he’s become “healthier, better and more religious…For every bottle of whiskey he drank, I ran another 10 miles,” he says. “I had to–just to be able to do 10 takes where he drinks 10 bottles in a row.”
Other aspects of the part presented different kinds of problems–like pigging out to become the bloated Jim at the end of his life (“I was like Elvis in a rock rut,” he says) or dressing like a ’60s rock star. “It sounds like a joke but for me personally wearing leather pants was very hard to do.” To really get into the part, he made sure the Lizard King’s skintight pants were never cleaned. “I wanted them ripe as quickly as possible,” he says. “When they got really bad, we kept them in a big Ziploc bag, big as a Buick.” (But Kilmer didn’t drop the pants–he had a body double for a big lovemaking scene.) Off camera, Kilmer tried to keep in character, though he denies the report that he wanted the cast and crew to stay away from him on the set. In fact, he describes himself as the ringleader of the other actors when they joked around between takes. “There was part of Morrison’s impishness and Irish take on life that I enjoyed keeping going,” he says.
Now that Kilmer has left that “tortured character” behind, his hair is short and blond again, and he’s wearing baggy cotton trousers. He’s in London while his wife of three years, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, appears in a play called “Lulu.” “She had to listen to “Light My Fire’ a thousand times, so now it’s my turn and I’m home when she gets there,” he says. The couple met when they starred in the 1988 film “Willow”; between projects, they live in New Mexico. This spring Kilmer starts shooting “Thunder Heart,” directed by Michael Apted, about a murder on a Sioux Indian reservation. The actor, who has Cherokee ancestry, plays an FBI agent who is part Sioux.
But one part of being Jim Morrison may stick with Kilmer–the music. Kilmer was eager to sing live on screen and even made his own video to convince Oliver Stone that he could do it. (It is Kilmer’s voice in the film’s concert scenes but Morrison’s voice elsewhere on the soundtrack and on the soundtrack album). Now offers to make records are coming Kilmer’s way; he says he’ll hook up with David Crosby to record at least one song. “I’ve got a lot of different voices I like to play with,” Kilmer says, and Jim Morrison’s was just one of them. “I was just affecting six years of whisky in the movie. Jim had the mileage, not me.”
DAVID ANSEN
Many people, veterans of the chemically enhanced ’60s, have reported a remarkably similar response to seeing Oliver Stone’s The Doors. It made them want to rush out and get stoned. It’s not that Stone has set out to make an ode to drug taking–the crashing comet trajectory of Jim Morrison’s brief, self-destructive career could have been drawn by the Temperance League as a cautionary tale. But if the arc of this showbiz fable spells death and destruction, the sound and feel of it produce a powerful rush of nostalgia. “The Doors” plunges us, with all the technical wizardry in Stone’s $40 million arsenal, into ’60s L.A.’s Sunset Strip bacchanalia at the height of its self-indulgence, silliness and rebellious splendor. As a purely sensory experience, “The Doors” often achieves the trippiness many ’60s movies, with their tacky psychedelic effects, tried and failed to achieve. This may not be the most elevated achievement, but it’s what’s most fun about Stone’s movie, and the pumped-up, druggy energy keeps you hooked into this long movie even when your mind begins to question why a sullen, alcoholic rock star with literary pretensions and great cheekbones merits such a mythopoetic send-off.
When you come down off “The Doors” it may take a while to sort out what you’ve seen. Stone’s movie manages to be fascinating without being truly interesting, dazzling without being “good,” powerfully evocative without being particularly insightful. But maybe Jim Morrison, the self-proclaimed Lizard King dead at the age of 27, was like that too. Stone has said he worshiped the Dionysian rock star, and it’s easy to see how the maker of “Salvador,” “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July” would identify with Morrison, the former UCLA film student and acolyte of Nietzsche and Rimbaud. “I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos,” Morrison wrote in his Elektra Records publicity bio, and the anti-authoritarian Stone shares Morrison’s romantic notion of art as primal scream.
At the end of the movie, we see Morrison’s tomb at Pere-Lachaise cemetery, alongside the likes of Balzac, Proust and Oscar Wilde. Stone asks us to consider him their peer, but let’s face it: The Doors only produced one great album–their first–and their most indelible song, “Light My Fire,” was written by guitarist Robby Krieger. Jim Morrison a great poet? Don’t think so. What Stone is left with, the raw materials of Morrison’s short, furiously inebriated life, are the standard outlines of many a tragic showbiz movie bio: the golden idol who can’t handle fame and immolates himself in booze and drugs. Stone is too honest to avert his eyes from Morrison’s sometimes homicidal behavior–he throws his longtime girlfriend Pamela (Meg Ryan in an underwritten part) in a closet and sets it afire. And Val Kilmer is too honest an actor to soft-pedal Morrison’s childish self-absorption. It’s a riveting performance, an uncanny physical and vocal restoration of the singer’s persona, but ultimately Kilmer is limited by Stone’s conception of his hero. “The Doors” simultaneously mythologizes and debunks Morrison, but it never dares to make him lifesize. Stone is interested in the rhetorical Jim Morrison, not the real man–the rhetorical pain and anguish, not the true vulnerability of a sensitive, formerly overweight young man who wanted to be a poet but was idolized as a sex symbol. (He’s certainly not interested in Pamela Courson, who was a much more formidable figure than the cute groupie Ryan plays.) It’s hard not to enjoy the movie’s craft, its heady evocation of the rock-and-roll orgy, its gifted cast (Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon and Kyle MacLachlan are fine as the other, short-shrifted Doors) but ultimately “The Doors” doesn’t have anything new to say about fame, self-destruction or the ’60s. It’s the same tired old romantic myth of the artist, redrawn with psychedelic colors. Maybe it’s the story we want, but is it the one we need?
