Oliver Stone’s W.

Oliver Stone’s new movie, W., is a re-telling of the Bush presidency with an immense dose of creative license applied.  Josh Brolin is remarkably convincing as George W. Bush.  He not only looks like Bush, but he has his smirks, his gestures, and his manner of walking and talking down perfectly.  His performance goes well beyond the caricatures put out by outfits like Saturday Night Live and strays into the territory of seriously convincing method acting.  Richard Dreyfus plays Dick Cheney equally convincingly — at first you think that Cheney himself is playing the role.

The letter "W"

Part of the success of this movie is the pure entertainment generated by watching Bush and Cheney captured so well.  Unfortunately, not every character is portrayed convincingly.  Thandie Newton plays Condoleeza Rice atrociously (as a sneering syncophant) and Jeffrey Wright does a pathetic impersonation of Colin Powell (he plays him as a slightly dull fellow who speaks very slowly).  Were it not for these two performances I would consider the movie almost perfect.

It is clear throughout the movie that it is not meant to be a sympathetic portrait of George W. Bush.  Bush is always doing things like emerging from a room without his pants pulled all the way up, or thinking deep thoughts while sitting on the toilet, and so forth.  Remarkably, however, I found myself feeling more positively toward George Bush after watching the movie than I had before.  The movie is clearly tyring to boil him down to a buffoon who starts a major war because he is trying to live up to his father’s expectations, but he comes across as a good-natured sincere fellow with remarkably strong people skills who is trying to do right with his life and who happens to fumble his speech a bit.

Bush’s conversion to Christianity is initially portrayed in an overly dramatic style — he is running down a path, sees a light in the sky, and falls to the ground — but the subsequent exposition of that stage of his life shows him to be a man with some courage who is able to humble himself and ask for help.  Frankly, seeing a man struggle in life and then reach out for help and get back on his feet is difficult to portray unsympathetically. You find yourself rooting for George Bush to find his bearings.

And boy does he ever.  He announces to his parents that he plans to run for governor of Texas and they discourage him. He runs anyway and wins.  Next up is the presidency of the United States.  His father makes it clear that the presidency is something that Jeb Bush is better suited to, but Dubya wins again.  I think that Oliver Stone meant for the audience to accept Bush senior’s analysis of his son as the true analysis — that George Bush really shouldn’t have become Governor of Texas or President of the United States — but it is difficult, as a viewer, to keep yourself from seeing a man whom people don’t believe in but who makes good anyway.  When people tell the protagonist that he can’t do it, that makes the audience root for him.

(As for the actual elections, they are completely left out of the movie.  One day Bush wants to run for Governor of Texas, and the next day he is wearing cowboy boots with his feet up on the desk in the Governor’s office.  Same with the Presidency.)

Oliver Stone

It is hard to buy into Bush as a buffoon when his personal life transformation seems sincere, when you find yourself rooting for him to show his father that he can make something of himself, and when he keeps moving up in the world so dramatically.  One gets the sense that the picture of George Bush that you are supposed to take away from the movie is not the one that is emerging.

Even the Iraq War comes off better than expected.  Cheney is portrayed as a fellow who is pushing for the war in a conspiracy theory sort of way, but Powell, who is supposed to be the voice of reason, is played as such a boring dullard that one finds oneself practically agreeing with the decision to go to war.  In addition, Bush is not portrayed as lying about the weapons of mass destruction.  He is portrayed as sincerely believing Saddam posed a serious threat because of his WMDs.  From the events in the movie it is not obvious that the decision to go to war is a terrible one.  I suppose Stone is relying here on the audience’s outside knowledge of how that decision turned out.

For those who follow politics and current affairs, this movie is well worth seeing.  The players and events are recent enough in memory that seeing them recounted here feels familiar and relevant.  After emerging from the theater I found myself wandering the sidewalks of New York puzzling over who this man, Bush, is.  I still don’t know.  He doesn’t seem to fit the normal categories. On the one hand he is supposedly unintelligent, incurious, and barely able to hold a job or complete a sentence.  On the other hand he went to Yale, then Harvard, and then became President of the United States.  I have no doubt that ivy-league connections and the old boy network are important, but the movie makes it seem like that is all you need to become the most powerful man in the world and then invade the Middle East.  There seems to be a lot of complexity there that has been skipped over.

In a nutshell, this is a thought-povoking and often humourous portrayal of the Bush presidency and will be enjoyed mainly by adults who have an interest in world affairs.  I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

For a very different take on the movie, check out Mark Ambinder’s review.  He dislikes the Cheney portrayal, thinks Brolin caricatures Bush, complains about the notable decisions and lines being out of context, but thinks, as I do, that the conversion experience is done well.