Oliver Stone’s Vision Thing: Bush, the Family
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: October 17, 2008
The megamillion-dollar question that hovers over Oliver Stone’s queasily enjoyable “W.,” his Oedipal story about the rise and fall, fall, fall of George W. Bush is: why? Neither a pure (nor impure) sendup of the president nor a wholesale takedown, the film looks like a traditional biopic with all the usual trappings, including name actors in political drag — Josh Brolin plays the frat boy who would be king, while Richard Dreyfuss creeps around in a Dick Cheney sneer — alternately choking on pretzels and spleen, and reciting all the familiar lines and lies. History is said to repeat itself as tragedy and farce, but here it registers as a full-blown burlesque.
Mr. Stone’s take on the president, as comic as it is sincere, is bound to rile ax-grinders of every ideological stripe, particularly those who mistake fiction for nonfiction. History informs its narrative arc from Texas to Iraq, but it should go without saying that this is a work of imagination, a directorial riff on real people and places complete with emotion-tweaking music cues, slo-mo visuals and portentous symbolism. It says nothing new or insightful about the president, his triumphs and calamities. (As if anyone goes to an Oliver Stone movie for a reality check.) But it does something most journalism and even documentaries can’t or won’t do: it reminds us what a long, strange trip it’s been to the Bush White House.
In “W.” that trip starts with the middle-aged Bush wearing the number 43 and standing on a baseball field in an otherwise empty stadium. When the off-screen announcer introduces him — “the 43rd president of the United States!” — he looks around for the crowd that isn’t there. It’s a potent image, and while Mr. Stone overuses it, returning Bush to his, er, field of dreams once too often, it works to underscore the film’s ideas about life, political and otherwise, as a performance. In the story Bush burns through one job and identity after another — partying student, imperfect son, indifferent oilman, serial flirt, attentive husband, sports guy, born-again Christian, newly born politician — before taking on the role of a lifetime.
Mr. Stone obviously doesn’t think the role fits, though he goes easier on Mr. Bush on screen than some of his off-screen remarks suggest. In a recent televised schmooze session with Larry King, Mr. Stone characterized the real 40-year-old Mr. Bush as “a bum.” But the movie shows him more as a boozing womanizer, a spoiled son of power and privilege — James Cromwell plays George H. W. Bush, and Ellen Burstyn does a comically mean Barbara Bush — who, swaddled in privilege and hurting for love (a familiar Stone fixation), doesn’t stick with a single book, job or woman. That all changes with Jesus Christ and a little lady named Laura (Elizabeth Banks), twinned epiphanies who steer him down the path of righteousness and over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Mr. Brolin eases through these transitions effortlessly, but it’s a necessarily incomplete performance because, like all the major White House Players, his character looms too large in our lives for him to fully possess. It can be disconcerting when actors play historical figures, and it’s infinitely stranger when those figures aren’t obscured by time. But it’s one thing to watch Paul Giamatti scowling about in a presidential wig, as he did in the recent HBO mini-series “John Adams.” It’s something entirely different to watch Mr. Brolin sloppily downing drinks in a pantomime of the current president’s younger self, a figure that doesn’t belong to history but to the present and, by extension, to us. Good as he is, he can’t touch the original.
“W.” isn’t as visually baroque as “JFK” (1991) and “Nixon” (1995), Mr. Stone’s darker, more ambitious excursions into the American psyche and presidency, partly because, I think, he does not yet have enough aesthetic distance from his subject and partly because he seems keen to weigh in as more evenhanded than usual. But while he has tamped down his style, he retains a pleasingly fluid approach to narrative. The story repeatedly shifts between scenes of the younger Bush meandering through his life, and the older Bush navigating through the early stages of the Iraq war. This shuttling across time and space undercuts the drama — the story doesn’t so much build as restlessly circle back — but it puts into visual terms Mr. Stone’s ideas about the present and past being mutually implicated.
That’s fine, often better than fine, though it’s hard not to wish that Mr. Stone had put history into more dynamic play with politics and ideology and given the Big Daddy Bush thing a bit of a rest. Mr. Cromwell does a nice job imitating a block of wood, but there are only so many ways to voice patrician displeasure. Because the film spends so much time on the pre-presidential younger Bush — first glimpsed marinating in vodka in 1966 — and ends sometime in 2004, more than a year into Iraq, it can’t help feeling like a prologue to a more involved story. At a compressed 129 minutes, it only gestures in some directions (Sept. 11), though Mr. Dreyfuss’s impersonation of Mr. Cheney pulling a Dr. Strangelove speaks volumes, encyclopedias.
Because “W.” focuses on the warm-up and not the meltdown, it leans more toward comedy than toward tragedy, a crucial exception being the graphic images of wounded and dead Iraqis and American soldiers that Mr. Stone drops late into the film and that stuff the laughs right back down your throat. This may be a comedy of errors, Mr. Stone seems to be saying, but it’s a murderously costly one. The intrusion of real horror is bluntly effective, though there is something at once morally and structurally suspect about the use of such images in any fiction entertainment, no matter how high-minded and well intended. It’s not just that the dead can’t argue against their commercial exploitation, but Mr. Stone can’t get to where I think he’s trying to go — deep — without them.
He does go deep at that moment, though I’m glad, wrung out by off-screen reality, that he doesn’t stay there long. In “W.” he doesn’t need to haul out the dead or excavate the depths to keep us hooked: he just needs to show Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton) tightly smiling while Bush rants; Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) flaunting his contempt for presidential power by savoring a piece of pie — Bush has given up sweets to show support for the troops — and Barbara Bush snapping her fingers at the family dog as if calling for its head. The pleasure of Mr. Stone’s work has never been located in restraint but in excess, a commitment to extremes that can drown out the world or, as in this film, give it newly vivid, hilarious and horrible form.
“W.” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The film has some extremely graphic images of real war and some expletives.
W.
Directed by Oliver Stone; written by Stanley Weiser; director of photography, Phedon Papamichael; edited by Julie Monroe; music by Paul Cantelon; production designer, Derek Hill; produced by Bill Block, Eric Kopeloff, Paul Hanson and Moritz Borman; released by Lionsgate. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.
WITH: Josh Brolin (George W. Bush), Elizabeth Banks (Laura Bush), Ellen Burstyn (Barbara Bush), James Cromwell (George H. W. Bush), Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney), Scott Glenn (Donald Rumsfeld), Toby Jones (Karl Rove), Stacy Keach (Earle Hudd), Bruce McGill (George Tenet), Thandie Newton (Condoleezza Rice) and Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell).
