‘Lula’ review: Oliver Stone chronicles the dramatic rise, fall and rise of Brazil’s current president

Oliver Stone always had one eye south of the US border.

It started with his phenomenal script for Brian De Palma’s film a man with a scar, which transformed a celebrated Chicago mobster into a hardened Cuban refugee. Stone then directed the photojournalist saga Salvadorabout the deadly civil war that engulfed El Salvador in the 1980s. He later made several documentaries about Latin American leaders, two featuring Fidel Castro and another featuring leftist figureheads such as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales.

Stone’s fascination with sullied politics and brutal class struggles in the Southern Hemisphere seems perfectly suited to the dramatic plot twists and non-stop conspiracies present in most of his other fictional works, from JFK Down Nixon Down IN Down Snowden. In the director’s world, which he believes is also ours, leaders are either corrupt or overthrown by the corrupt, while the very existence of democracy is threatened by a powerful deep state composed of multinational corporations, spies, far-right fanatics and mysterious intermediaries.

This all sounds like a good airport novel, and yet, according to Stone, most of it is true. It is therefore not surprising that he chose to describe the turbulent rise, fall and resurrection of the current Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose story from rags to riches, to prison and to freedom reads like a movie script Stone could have written himself. And that’s even with a Hollywood-style ecstatic ending, where truth ultimately triumphs over adversity, at least for now.

Co-directed by Stone and Rob Wilson, Lula is nothing novel in terms of form. Using plenty of archival footage, an uninterrupted voice-over from Stone who always explains everything to us, and a lengthy interview conducted with Lula during his 2022 re-election campaign, the film is like a comprehensive crash course in contemporary Brazilian politics.

The first half of the documentary charts Lula’s extraordinary journey from an needy child in the countryside, where he was raised by a single mother and his six siblings, to working as a trained steelworker, during which he lost his little finger in an accident, to becoming a powerful trade union leader and founder of the Workers’ Party. In 2002, he ran a popular campaign that unified the nation and got him elected president, joining a coterie of Latin American leaders, including Chávez and Morales, from indigenous backgrounds or working-class families who rose to top positions in their countries.

None of this information will be novel to anyone who has followed Brazil over the past few decades, and that’s why Lula It only gets intriguing when we reach the second half. That’s when the filmmakers delve into the nationwide scandal that led to the arrest and imprisonment of the former president in 2017, opening the door for undecided far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro (known as “Tropical Trump”) to win the next election.

Initially, many Brazilians believed that a massive government anti-corruption drive called Operation Car Wash (the name already sounds like another Oliver Stone project) was a legitimate and necessary effort, spearheaded by rising federal judge Sergio Moro. Lula was ultimately detained along with other officials involved and later sentenced to prison for bribery and related charges, which prevented him from running for re-election in 2018. The fact that Brazil’s then-acting president, Dilma Rousseff, also a key ally, appointing him chief of staff to provide the former president with some form of legal immunity also seemed suspicious to some.

But this is Stone’s film, so things are never what they seem on the surface. With the support of an investigative news source Interception and its founder Glenn Greenwald, who talks to the director in later scenes, we learn that Operation Car Wash was in fact also a extensive conspiracy – fueled by right-wingers and corporations, whether in Brazil or the US, who were dissatisfied with progressive social policies and economic policy that Lula implemented during his decade in power.

It all sounds too movie-like to be true, but the documentary provides proof (though quickly – it’s best to read it). Interception more details), supported by the testimony of both Greenwald and Lula. In their view, Brazil is the latest in a long line of Latin American countries that have become targets of US intervention, whether it occurred during various CIA-sponsored coups during the Frigid War (including the one in Brazil in 1964), or what is best known today as “lawfare,” where trials and investigations can result in bloodless regime change.

Of course, similar pre-election processes are currently underway in the USA – as Stone himself mentioned in a recent interview while discussing this latest work. The “illegality” argument, whether you ultimately buy it or not, is one of the more intriguing conclusions Lula, and the director tries to place it in the broader context of American foreign policy, where trade and commerce often matter more than preserving global democracy. (Another conclusion is that Lula believed that George W. Bush was a better president to deal with than Barack Obama, even if he disagreed with the former’s policies.)

For those who despise Lula – and there are still many such people in Brazil, where after his release from prison he was re-elected with only a slim majority of 50.9% – this film will seem to be merely preaching to the choir, leaving out certain facts that others have reported over the years . While they can be enlightening at times, Stone’s documentaries should be taken with a pinch of salt: he is not a journalist, but a filmmaker with certain beliefs, both political and thematic, that he tries to convey in each of his films.

She also seems to love being around powerful men, whether it’s the likable Lula or less likable people like Vladimir Putin, with whom Stone interviewed at length in the four-part Showtime series. The director is something of a powerhouse himself, at least in the world of film, and often appears on screen alongside the leaders themselves. That Stone uses his power to chronicle causes he believes are right or to speak out about politicians he admires is to his credit. But there’s also something wrong when every novel documentary he creates feels like an “Oliver Stone movie” in all senses of the word.