Oliver Stone's movie about Chavez as bad as you'd expect

At the panel after the film’s showing at the AFI last week, Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, told the audience and Stone that his film was a “fundamental disservice” to the truth, and was as distorted a picture of reality as Stone thinks Fox News and the regular media is. “This film,” she said, “is far from reality. It is a distortion of what it means to be on the Left in Latin America.” She noted that, contrary to the film’s claim, a genuine moderate left was taking a path quite different than that favored by Chavez and Castro. Moreover, she added, it is wrong on the facts, slighting Chile whose moderate government reduced poverty far more than any other country, including Venezuela. In a country like Brazil or Chile, left parties emerged in a democratic transition as part of a stable system, while in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, they emerged as the result of the collapse of democracy, and featured the absence of any limitations on power. They failed to create a desire for social and economic justice with “any measure of democratic transparency.”

Strangely, the Times film critic wrote his own positive review of the film one day earlier. Given Rohter’s article, that must also prove embarrassing to the paper and to critic Stephen Holden. Although Holden argued that Stone had “muted” his paranoid tendencies revealed in films like JFK, he did add that it was a “provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism.” But he even includes mention of an obviously false assertion made by the former president of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, that “President Bush became irate at the suggestion that what the country needed was a Marshall Plan and insisted that the best way to revitalize an economy was through war.” Only an already committed leftist watching the film who hates George W. Bush could believe that Bush could have said anything like that. Holden concludes his review arguing that Stone’s film is a “naïvely idealistic, introductory tutorial on a significant international trend,” although it is not idealistic, and anything but a sound tutorial.