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The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Val Kilmer was electric as Jim Morrison in heroically ridiculous biopic The Doors
My favourite moment in Oliver Stone's exhilarating, grotesque, heroically ridiculous biopic The Doors isn't even in the movie itself: it's in the parody that appears during Wayne's World 2, in which Mike Myers's Wayne, having been visited in a dream by the ghost of Jim Morrison, relays his experience to the veteran roadie Del Preston, played by Withnail & I's indelible geezer Ralph Brown. 'Didn't you think it was a trifle unnecessary,' reasons Del, who had the same vision of the Lizard King and his Native American guide, 'to see the crack in the Indian's bottom?' The scene might goof on the wobbly mysticism of Stone's film – in which Morrison believes himself possessed by the spirit of a Navajo man – and poke fun at its gonzo indulgence and its rock 'n' roll bacchanalia. But it also serves as a tribute to a movie that succeeds precisely because it leans into those very qualities. As an account of the 1960s West Coast icons who soundtracked the demise of the decade, The Doors is a film perfectly synchronised to its subject, staggering down the road of excess in search of a palace of wisdom, or maybe just the next whisky bar. And none of it would work, of course, without the electrifying lead performance by the late Val Kilmer. Critics love to talk about actors losing themselves in roles, and it's true that Kilmer seems to commune with Morrison, to the extent that the surviving band members, upon hearing Kilmer's vocal recordings for the soundtrack, were said to have wondered whether they were listening to the actor or the singer. But impersonation is only half the trick; anyone can mimic a star and collect an Oscar. Commensurate with Stone's audacious design, Kilmer summons forth something that transcends mere behind-the-music drama, realising the mythical version that Morrison himself – a self-made Dionysus fleeing the conformity of the American dream – strove to construct. With his baritone voice and serpentine stage movement, Kilmer embodies the singer's uncanny physicality. He has the swagger and the volatility, the insolent pout that Eve Babitz once described as 'so edible'. Still, Kilmer's playful sense, his mischief, and his swirling self-doubt – 'I'm lying. I'm afraid,' he admits during an acid trip – offsets the movie's bombast. His Morrison is both rock god and little boy lost, a tale as old as time. 'We gotta make the myths,' says the band's keyboardist, Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan, in a wig that Evil Cooper might covet). Cliche, sure, but also power: as Baz Luhrmann would later accomplish with Elvis, Stone embraces the primal essence of rock's archetypes, playing them loud to find the ecstatic truth. 'The program for this evening is not new,' the film's intro asserts. 'You've seen this entertainment through and through.' If Stone is heavy-handed, then Mr Mojo Rising, with his songs about Oedipus and snakes and funeral pyres, wasn't exactly subtle – and I mean that as the highest compliment. At one point, a heaving concert turns into a nightmare from Bosch's hell; during another, Stone dissolves Morrison's face into a literal ancient idol before his screaming fans. Echoing the band's contemporary critical reception (recall Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, dismissing Morrison as 'a drunken buffoon posing as a poet'), The Doors wasn't especially well reviewed on release. It was taken to task for its historical liberties, its supposed humourlessness (did critics miss Crispin Glover's lurid turn as Andy Warhol?), its starstruck desire to print the legend in place of some kind of 'real' self – as though the two things were somehow inseparable. Stone's real subject was fame. One of the great shots in The Doors has a listless Morrison gazing over the city from an airplane window, in homage to Fellini's 1968 film Toby Dammit. Like Terence Stamp's hollowed-out movie star, Kilmer's Morrison becomes a shadow image of himself, where the only escape from fame – from the excess he sought to mainline – was a nice warm bath and a cold Parisian slab. Kilmer's performance understood this: the pursuit of abandon for its own sake, the contradiction and absurdity of his subject; he knew that illusion was truth, that art can be simultaneously serious and stupid, even if one accepts that Stone didn't. Like Morrison, Kilmer was also a poet and an artist – a 'funny, crazy, pain in the ass', as Cher lovingly described him – whose fire burned too wild for anything Hollywood could offer. It's pretty clear he saw the amusing side to it all: reprising his role for a Saturday Night Live skit in 2000, Kilmer plays Morrison in heaven, his ever-present bottle of Jack yet to quench the existential thirst. 'I've broke on through but I still got a question for you,' he sings, to the tune of Break On Through. 'Now we're on the other side, whaddya we do, now that we've died?' Farewell Val, you beautiful freak. The Doors is streaming on Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube in Australia, Prime Video in the UK and Pluto in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
The Independent
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
‘Go on, get this over and done with': Richard E Grant says his father tried to shoot him aged 15
Richard E Grant has detailed a harrowing account of when his father tried to shoot him aged 15. In a new interview, the 67-year-old star of Withnail & I recalled the breakdown of his parent's marriage when he was a child, which saw his father granted custody due to Grant's complicated relationship with his mother, Leonne Esterhuysen. However, after the divorce, Grant's father, Henrik Esterhuysen, developed an alcohol addiction where he would drink a bottle of whiskey each night and become 'a completely different person'. Speaking to Davina McCall on her podcast Begin Again, Grant recalled a particular incident when, aged 15, he attempted to pour away his father's Scotch collection but his father quickly turned violent and put a gun to his head. 'He tried to shoot me when I was 15 when I emptied all his Scotch supply down the sink,' Grant recalled. 'As I was half way through [pouring] the eleventh bottle, gun at the back of my head, I ducked, went off, ran to the garden. He finally found me, said 'I'm going to blow your brains out,' I said 'go on, do it, just get this over and done with''. Grant said his father pulled the trigger but 'because he was drunk it wavered so it went straight past and I fell to the ground and ran away'. Despite the difficulty of living with his father, Grant said that he still would have chosen to live with his father over his mother, who he has said was a 'narcissist'. 'Even though he became an alcoholic after my mother left, the person who I knew and loved by day outweighed the monster that he turned into when he downed a bottle of Johnnie Walker.' Reflecting on his parent's marriage, Grant remembered falling asleep in the back seat of a car aged 10 only to wake up and see his mother and father's best friend 'having it off' in the front seat. He recalled: 'My mother and my father's best friend were in the front seat of the car and stopped on the way back from a cricket match. And I was asleep on the back seat and I woke up and the lights weren't on and I knew I wasn't home. But there was a rhythmic movement in the car that wasn't the car engine. I gingerly looked over the front seat and my mum and my dad's best friend were having it off in the front seat.' 'I knew that I was seeing something that I shouldn't – I didn't really understand what they were doing,' he said. 'I just kept completely quiet and pretended to be asleep.' Asked about how that experience affected him, Grant replied: 'You feel guilty, because I thought, you feel that you're complicit in it. That you know something that nobody else should know. I obviously couldn't tell my dad, couldn't tell my mother. So, I tried God, got no reply. So, I started keeping a diary, because if I wrote it down, then it did happen.' When Grant's mother died in 2023 aged 93, he reflected on his 'incredibly complicated relationship' with her. The pair had been estranged for many years followed by a reconciliation when Grant was an adult. He told McCall that when he saw his mother for the first time after years of no contact, he finally told her about what he had witnessed in the car in 1967, and she asked for his forgiveness. 'That was extraordinary because in that moment of course that's what you long for as a child, from the person who has not taken responsibility for what they've done.' 'Of course, she didn't know that I had seen this, so it completely shifted everything. Didn't change the fact that she was a narcissist because I think you're born like that, but it changed everything and we started having an ongoing conversation.' Grant's father died of lung cancer in 1981, aged 51. If you are a child and you need help because something has happened to you, you can call Childline free of charge on 0800 1111. You can also call the NSPCC if you are an adult and you are worried about a child, on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adults on 0808 801 0331 If you or someone you know is suffering from alcohol addiction, you can confidentially call the national alcohol helpline Drinkline on 0300 123 1110 or visit the NHS website here for information about the programmes available to you.
