'South of the Border': Oliver Stone's portrait of an evolving Latin America

"It's a weird little thing, not a documentary," Oliver Stone recently said in describing "South of the Border," his fascinating, sometimes puzzling, inevitably controversial account of meeting Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and other left-leaning Latin American leaders in 2008.

"Border" is, in fact, a documentary, in the visionary-essay sense. But Stone's comment, if paraphrased, could describe a lot of his films. His recent "W" looks less like a portrait of George W. Bush's political rise than it does an artist's rendering of speculation about Bush's family and presidential administration. "The Doors" isn't rock hagiography so much as it is the distant fantasy of a man who capped 1967's Summer of Love by requesting combat duty in Vietnam.

The personal-journey side of Stone — that sense he reaches toward remote but compelling subjects ("Nixon," "JFK") with conceptual verve rather than historical accuracy — results in startling movies. But it also draws, understandably, accusations of naiveté and sensationalism.

That's already the case with the nonfiction "South of the Border," which has drawn charges that Stone presents a soft, willfully imbalanced depiction of Chávez, a socialist at odds with U.S. foreign policy.

Stone somewhat brings on this harsh judgment with such quirky moments as filming Chávez, a former baseball pitcher, riding a bicycle as an example of a "bearish" physicality Stone admires. He also lets the president talk up Venezuela's social and economic progress in broad, unchallenged strokes.

In fairness, Stone is after a bigger picture than Chávez. The director portrays South America in a wave of political evolution, outgrowing centuries of right-wing dictatorships and violent manipulation by outside powers. He interviews popularly elected presidents from Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and elsewhere, usefully connecting ideological dots.

You can see, on camera, that Stone's trying to work out ideas about the roots and direction of that evolution and what it means. But his thesis doesn't arrive before closing credits.

Stone's fuzziness feeds into claims the director looks duped by Chávez. But the real problem is that "South of the Border" is a little formless, not quite grounded in the present. It looks like raw notes and impressions for a future novel.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com