Talk Radio

Oliver Stone, USA 1988, 110 minutes

Of all the films ever made about radio, this one best explores the perversely co-dependent/antagonistic relationship between DJ and listener. Based on Stephen Singular's book `Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg', this film deals with the phenomenon of `shock broadcasting' but manages to spread a much wider message about the media as a whole and our relation to it.

As well as playing the lead, Eric Bogosian co-scripted this adaptation of his own stage play, a dark, brooding work that puts the seedy underbelly of American society under the microscope and comes up with some disturbing revelations. As late-night talk show host Barry Champlain, Bogosian sets the screen alight with what has to be one of the most intense and underrated performances of the last ten years, creating an enigmatic, affable yet unbearably arrogant anti-hero - a man blessed (or cursed?) with the gift of insight. He sees the real America and he despises what he sees, his disgust with many of the people who call in to speak to him is poignantly combined with a feeling of being trapped in a glass cage, powerless to do anything about the rot that is eating away at the heart of society.

Oliver Stone wisely leaves his usual visual fireworks on the shelf and deploys the tactic that served Barry Levinson so well in Good Morning Vietnam: that of simply pointing the camera at his star and letting him get on with it. There are a couple of subplots involving the potential national syndication of Champlain's show as well as flashbacks to his early days of radio, but the unmistakable standout scenes are the ones in which, with Stone's camera gracefully swooping around him, Champlain gradually realises that the world is quietly going mad, and he's on his own. His final near-breakdown on air, a ranting stream of consciousness in which all his fears and paranoia spew forth, has to be seen to be believed. A true wake-up call to society, this is one of the most un-American films ever made.

"Bogosian commands attention in a patented tour-de-force" - Time Out

Review by Ben Stephens
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97