Come On, Baby, Light My Fizzle

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE DOORS Directed by Oliver Stone

Screenplay by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone

At Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Jim Morrison's grave site pulls in the biggest crowds: pilgrims, rockophiles, ragged hippies who look as if they stepped out of a Woodstock Portosan 20 years too late. Last spring, while Oliver Stone's rockudrama on Morrison's group the Doors was still in production, with Val Kilmer in the lead role, one possessive admirer etched this graffito into the Pere-Lachaise headstone: VAL KILMER N'EST PAS JIM.

The scrawler was right. Morrison was a gorgeous creature -- face by Michelangelo, a mouth made for pouts and pleasures, his entire persona an erogenous zone -- with an electrifying stage presence. He saw himself, though, as a Romantic poet trapped in a pop star's body and worked hard at punishing that body with all-life binges of alcohol, drugs and heavy sex. "I'm rich and famous, smart and pretty," he must have mused. "Now how can I screw it up?" He did so by speeding up the physical and mental decay that aging forces on mere mortals. Like his hero Rimbaud, he raced death to the finish line. When he died in 1971, at 27, he was ravaged, depleted, spent. But for a few years Morrison was Satan's seraph -- the golden stud of '60s rock.

Kilmer is just conventionally good-looking; he can't prowl like Blake's Tyger or pose with the sultry arrogance of a Beat poet. Nor does he have the intellectual seductiveness that made Morrison a toy of the hip literati. In short, Kilmer is not Jim, and his casting denies The Doors the chance to be a meditation on the lure of sexual power. What else can the movie be? Morrison and his band were not political pathfinders, and musically they were close to negligible, with one compelling tune (Light My Fire) and an ambitious, pretentious attitude. The Doors had a good world when they died -- their albums sell almost as well now as they did in the group's brief eminence -- but not enough to base a movie on.

So Stone turned The Doors into a display of pop culture's wretched excess. "The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death," Morrison wrote when he was a student at the UCLA film school, and The Doors latches onto this fear in the first scene -- when five-year-old Jim sees a car wreck -- and rides the snake right to the end. In between come dozens of set pieces in which Morrison makes a spectacular, suicidal fool of himself: insulting his audience, trashing hotel rooms, dangling from 10th-story windows, engaging in a blood- sipping ritual with his witchy mistress (Kathleen Quinlan, who gets it right), locking his wife-to-be (Meg Ryan, who has no character to play) in a closet and setting it on fire. Perhaps Stone wants to show that Morrison was the victim of sensuality -- death's hunkiest groupie -- rather than its agent. But the film really proves only that Jim was a bad drunk and a worse friend, and that in no way was his life exemplary.

Stone has relived the Vietnam War in two bold, woozy melodramas, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July; his next movie is about the assassination of J.F.K. In subject and style he is the last director of the '60s, finding truth in rage, beauty in psychedelic sunsets, politics in self-destruction. His movies make people edgy, and that's a good thing. But this time Stone is a symptom of the disease he would chart. It is folly to lavish $40 million of somebody's money (that's $10 million a Door!) and 2 hr. 15 min. of your time on a proposition -- some guys can't handle fame -- that was evident two decades ago. Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.