Part love-letter to the spirit of revolutionary socialist politics that is sweeping South America, part savaging of the ultra-right hillbilly media that propagates the US’s insular and self-serving views of the region, director Oliver Stone’s 'travelogue-of-truth’ is an illuminating and entertaining film.
In the landscape of left-wing commentators who have thrived in the wake of the bungling Bush administration, Stone’s deconstruction of the Fox News propaganda machine and its role as a platform for politicians representing 'big oil’ interests comes too late in the game; small-screen dissenters like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert tear asunder Murdoch’s mouthpiece on a nightly basis. Given Stone’s pedigree as an incendiary filmmaking force, his rather perfunctory highlighting of Newscorp’s abuse of its lofty media position plays a bit like him shooting fish in a barrel. He spends too much time debunking the all-too-obvious agenda of the GOP-aligned media and not enough time questioning the overall stagnation of American investigative journalism. (As highlighted in a terrific clip of documentarian Michael Moore berating CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for doing nothing when Bush’s policies were dividing a nation and the world.)
Where Stone’s film soars is in the precise picture he paints of the growing unity amongst the leaders of the South American continent. Stone is granted unprecedented access to the power-brokers of Latin American politics – Presidents Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Raúl Castro (Cuba) and Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), as well as her husband and ex-President NÄ—stor Kirchner. These leaders speak despairingly of the crippling effect that American and European foreign policies have had on their poor nation – for example, the International Monetary Fund’s role in Venezuela’s revolutionary insurgence of 2002 and its ongoing US-centric role in regional capitalisation.
In his meetings with them (primarily Chavez, at first, then whirlwind visits to the homes and offices of the other officials), a determination of character emerges. Most of the leaders quote the spiritual legacy of Venezuelan leader Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios, who triumphed over Spanish rule in 1814 and soon became President of 'Gran Colombia’, the once-great unified nation of Latin America. Stone’s film heralds the reformation of a continent, under the socialist doctrine of its leaders, that for so long has been divided by both internal strife and the bullying influence of cloak-and-dagger operatives representing 'Western interests’.
Oliver Stone knows the socio-political state of the region very well, having explored its intricacies in his film Salvador (1986) and the documentaries Comandante (2003) and Looking for Fidel (2004). Through heavy with clips and soundbites from other sources, his film confirms that he is not a man who does anything by half measures – several cameras and microphone sources are always apparent, indicating the importance attached to the filmmaker’s meeting with this new generation of free-thinking politicians. But, stylistically and most satisfyingly, it is as an interviewer and a documentarian that Oliver Stone proves himself to be the anti-Michael Moore; he speaks softly, understanding that it must be the voices of Chavez, Morales, Castro, et al, that resonate most profoundly.
