The opening scenes of Midnight Express grab you by the scruff of your neck and rub your face right in the tension and fear that follow Billy Hayes as he attempts to smuggle hash out of an airport in Turkey.  You know that he’s going to get caught, but you still feel almost as if every bead of sweat dripping off of Brad Davis’ face could be your own.  The writing and direction tap into a deep human fear of punishment and apply it so well and meticulously that by the time Hayes is found out you’re just glad that it’s finally over.  It’s the sort of well-crafted opener that makes you think “Ok, fine.  Show me what else you got.”  From that moment on, you’re invested in the film.  And yet, Midnight Express isn’t a movie that’s really being talked about anymore.  It won a few Oscars and garnered huge critical success upon its initial release, but I would guess that most people today are familiar with it in name only.  A movie that at the time seemed like an incisive and personal view of an important issue now looks like it’s probably just an older Crash.

Something stopped Midnight Express from being a classic.  It had all that steam and buzz built up and now it’s just a footnote of 1978 in specific, not even worth mentioning until you narrow your scope to the level of “I love The 70’s Strikes Back.”  Sometimes movies like these were just too much of their own time.  Other times, like with Crash, they just turn out to be a film with a ton of surface appeal and absolutely nothing underneath.  Midnight Express isn’t a movie about disco, so it’s very tempting to assume that the second option is correct.  However, unlike a Crash or a Silver linings Playbook, Midnight Express doesn’t just deal with a hot button issue in way that makes you feel ok about yourself.  It’s a dark, uncomfortable film and it digs much deeper than either of those films can claim to.  So what about Midnight Express made the critics forget it?

Being racist certainly didn’t help it.  Normally, racism isn’t something I would delve into in a movie that isn’t specifically addressing it.  It’s just a messy issue, it can be hard to know where the line is and people who know what they’re talking much more than I do are addressing it already.  With Midnight Express things are a little simpler than that.  Turkish people have called it racist.  Billy Hayes, who was imprisoned and beaten by Turkish people, also called it racist.  Even Oliver Stone, who wrote it, has apologized for the way it depicts Turks.  So I think we can just go with that.  I would certainly say that the racism in Midnight Express could be passed off as merely accidental.

And then it could be passed of as a real song.

Midnight Express is very similar thematically to another well-received prison film, The Shawshank Redemption.  Much like Shawshank, Oliver Stone is trying to capture the image of a man thrust into a corrupt and uncaring system.  The portrayal of Turks in Midnight Express is much more self-serving to those themes than it is intentionally pointed at the Turkish people.  Basically, the Turkish characters are evil because it helps us feel sympathy for Billy Hayes, not because Oliver Stone wanted to Mr Yunioshi himself.  Being a self-serving, accidental racist doesn’t excuse you from being racist, it just makes it easier for the kind of white people who hand out Oscars to overlook on the first viewing.

The Oscars – the only thing we love more than white people are white people talking about other people.

The Shawshank Redemption and Midnight Express also share a very similar structure – brief intro, series of vignettes that show how shitty prison is, and then an escape.  What holds Midnight Express back where Shawshank does just fine is that during the vignette portion of the movie,Midnight Express starts to lose focus.  It doesn’t have the same tight focus that Shawshank does, making the whole middle of the movie feel like a hazy recollection of disparate memories.  From an acting perspective, the one constant we’re given during all this meandering is Brad Davis.  Brad Davis is no Tim Robbins – and even if he were, that’s still not exactly a great compliment.  Basically whatever Midnight express did what the prison break genre of films has been done better since.  It’s difficult to keep praising a movie that only reminds you of other movies that have done it better.

Just think, Midnight Express: with only a few small changes you could’ve been THIS overrated.

Finally, there’s Oliver Stone and the way he handles facts.  For plenty of people, fudging the truth is just part of the adaptation process.  I agree with that – movies aren’t real life.  Even if your intention is to tell a story as truthfully and accurately as possible, you’re going to have to give yourself some wiggle room just for formatting purposes.  But telling the story accurately is usually so far from Oliver Stone’s mind that he’s kinda part of the reason we have to ask where the line is.  For some people, it’s not an issue at all.  I would love to be on that side of things.  Being on the side that I’m on means I have to ask what a filmmaker’s responsibility to the truth entails, and I really hate anything that has to do with responsibility whatsoever.

I still can’t help but get an uncomfortable, used-car salesman vibe from Stone.  He adapts stories from the truth the way that studios adapt stories from anything at all – it’s so dissimilar to the source that you should’ve just changed the title and character names and made it something else.  I think he wants the credibility that being based on a true story grants you the same way that those studios want the built-in audience that comes with handling an existing property and neither are willing to accept the limitations that come with that.  Midnight Express strays so far from the truth that saying it’s Billy Hayes’ story is pretty much an out-and-out lie.  Almost every single important dramatic point is a fabrication.  In one very important scene, Hayes bites a man’s tongue out of his mouth during a fight.  That’s a pretty heavy moment to “tack on” to a true story.  It’s also one of about five or six “tacked on” moments that pretty much comprise the entire second half of the movie.  Midnight Express could’ve been just as good or better by telling the true story.  It’s not a movie about a white teacher helping black kids keep a diary.  A man went to prison in Turkey for five years and then escaped.  I already want to hear that story; you don’t need to spice it up for me.

There isn’t enough white guilt in the world to make me sit through this. 

Feel free to disagree with me on that point.  I kind of want to disagree with me too.  You can make a very strong argument that believing what anyone tells you in a movie is your own fucking fault and I’d kind of agree.  If nothing else, being dishonest should still be the final straw forMidnight Express.  When you’re done with this movie you should at least think that it was kind of sloppy and a bit more than kind of racist, and that being full of hacky lies makes it even more of a disappointment.  The weight of all of these things dragged Midnight Express down well out of “The Classics” range.  The intro that completely sold me ended up being just a tease for what this film – and to a lesser extent Oliver Stone’s career – could have been.  There’s a frustrating amount of potential and a much more frustrating lack of payoff.-DT