The Doors

Oliver Stone's misjudged account of Jim Morrison's life squanders mainstream production values and dynamic directorial style on telling us the well-rehearsed story of the rise and fall of one of the best-known victims of 1960s counter-cultural experimentation. But as this amounts to little more than two hours of Jim Morrison behaving badly to the accompaniment of The Doors' songbook, one wonders what was the need for this lavishly indulgent regurgitation?

With its carefully-constructed but ersatz-looking Haight-Ashbury and hippy fashions, all of which play to Stone's taste for kaleidoscopic visuals, much of the film borders on the kitsch and whoever thought of casting Meg Ryan as Morrison's girlfriend, Pamela, and even more bizarrely, Kyle MacLachlan, complete with dodgy wig, as The Doors keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, has a large degree of responsibility for undermining whatever credibility the film might otherwise have had.

Val Kilmer acquits himself handsomely as Morrison, both as a preening rock god and particularly in the latter stages of the film when the dream has turned to dust and the Lizard King is a burnt-out shell of his former self, an obnoxious boor with a beer gut.  Not that either of these incarnations are particularly engaging.. Whilst evidently Stone found in Morrison a figure of fascination, he does not manage to bring out anything of interest in his short life, leaving him lying in Père Lachaise cemetery, a symptom of and testament to the heyday of sex n' drugs n' rock n 'roll and its unkept promises.

 

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