At no point during its cumbersome 131 minutes does Oliver
Stone’s W. prove much more about President George W. Bush
than that he’s nearly impossible to make an objective movie
about at this point in history. But perhaps I’m just saying that
because it’s equally impossible for any politically-savvy viewer
to objectively judge an attempt.
Watching W., I repeatedly felt that Stone had missed
the mark in terms of Bush’s personality. It came across to me
that Stone was blinded by his own perception of the man’s
foreign-policy—disastrous, arrogant, and imperialistic—and that
he wrongly allowed this to cloud his view of Bush’s personal
life. The president I’ve watched for the last eight years is a
charmingly cocky individual who was re-elected largely because
Middle-Americans were sympathetic to his homegrown demeanor.
Stone, on the other hand, represents Bush’s life as one of
raging alcoholism, angry father-son conflicts, and cluelessness
in the White House. Downright lies, I thought to myself as I
witnessed them unfold on celluloid.
But then I began to mull over W. as days passed
after the press screening. I posted my thoughts about the movie
on a few online discussion forums and the response I got was
more illuminating than anything I saw in Stone’s film itself. I
had back-and-forths with liberals who can’t even comprehend how
one could find Bush relatable, let alone likable.
And then it hit me. The problem with W. is not that
it undoubtedly gets some of the facts wrong on Bush’s life, it’s
that it does so within the structure of a biopic. In telling
their story in straight-laced biography form, Stone and
screenwriter Stanley Weiser have put a movie in front of
audiences that audiences must take as an article of objective
record. The result is laughable in that many of its assertions
about its subject are entirely improvable.
Had Stone presented his film in a more experimental
structure, its discrepancies would have been more forgivable.
Whether you like Bush or not, there’s no doubting that history
has yet to judge him as a president—he’s not even out of Office
yet, for goodness sake—and as a result absolute objectivity
regarding he and his Administration is not ascertainable. The
closest thing to truth that Stone and Weiser could have achieved
would have been a product that showed Bush through each of the
many personas he takes on for different people with different
perceptions of modern politics and history. Poster Joel over at
Living in Cinema suggested to me that the movie could’ve
only accomplished this by presenting Bush in the same fractured
manner that Todd Haynes did Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. I
think he’s right.
Or Stone could’ve simply waited ten or twenty years to make
W. But he didn’t want to do that because he saw the
(misguided) opportunity to use the film to influence the 2008
presidential election in favor of Barack Obama. This fact is
indisputable given that production was rushed and completed in a
mere nine months (unheard of for such a high-profile project) to
ensure a pre-election release and that the movie prominently
features archival footage of Obama-rival John McCain applauding
a no-longer-favorably-received speech Bush delivered on the
Senate-floor.
The rushed nature of the project also brings up another big
issue related to its lack of objectivity: it settles for a
hard-left-talking-points version of Bush’s Presidency. Because
their subject cannot yet be viewed through a lens of historical
absolutism, Stone and Weiser settle for the version of the
events portrayed that best supports their personal political
persuasions. This would be fine if the context was more
subjective and/or experimental. But the pair defies the
established standard of objectivity for a biopic when it
attempts to suggest that Bush provably went into Iraq for oil,
knew there were no WMDs before the invasion, and was a victim to
the iron-fist of Cheney on just about every
foreign-policy-related decision. More disturbing is the fact
that uninformed audiences like the one I sat through the film
with will blindly accept all of these assertions as fact.
Stone and Weiser make even lower blows, like their subtle
but outrageous suggestion that Bush may have taken drinking back
up after many years of sobriety when he found out that Iraq
wasn’t going so well. Or that the Bush cabinet prays in a
dumbfound manner after every policy meeting (this is presented
as metaphor, but still…). Or that Bush’s reason for running for
Public Office in the first place was to compete with brother Jeb
for his father’s respect. Bullshit.
Yes, I will confess, it’s probably true that Stone honestly
believes everything he has put in the W. But mere belief
in the material didn’t mean it was right to include it in a film
he intended to market as an objective assessment of Bush.
Again I return to the suggestion that the picture should’ve been
made in a different style, although Stone would probably
arrogantly feel that this change would’ve sucked the veracity
out of his various indictments of the President.
Even with all of the aforementioned condemnable features at
work throughout its duration, W. still manages to be a
rather dull movie. This is because Stone operates off of an
incredibly generic laundry-list of left-skewing ideas about the
Bush Presidency. For a picture that exceeds two hours, it’s
amazing how glib W. is. The film covers all of the
highlights of Bush’s first term, but it shows the viewer nothing
they couldn’t hear in recordings of Keith Olbermann’s
“Countdown”. (Those looking to expand their thoughts on Bush
while watching the film will find themselves out of luck.) Other
than Iraq, the movie’s main focus is a re-occuring
near-“Saturday Night Live”-impersonation-style portrayal of Bush
Cabinet meetings. Instead of getting to the meat of Bush’s
initial election and re-election or his stances on issues
separate from foreign policy—apparently Stone didn’t have the
foresight to realize that the U.S. economy would tank and that
looking into Bush’s role in this would be a worthy cinematic
pursuit—Stone seems more content in indulging Thandie Newton’s
ability to talk like Condoleeza Rice and Richard Dreyfuss’ take
on Cheney’s famous grimace. Shall I return to my suggestion for
Stone regarding experimentalism or have I hammered it home
enough already?
I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t good things about
the movie. There are, even though they are admittedly few and
far between. For starters, one would be hard-pressed to find a
better actor than Josh Brolin to play Bush and, despite the
ineptitude of the material, Brolin achieves a solid mix of
impersonation and interpretation. Also, W.’s technical
qualities are marvelous for those of a project completed in only
nine months. (Phedon Papamichael’s distinguished cinematography
is particularly worth nothing.) But the picture on the whole is
largely boring, isn’t thought-provoking, settles for a
disappointingly glib assessment of its controversial anti-hero,
and makes quite a few unfair accusations. There’s no excuse for
these flaws, even if the only two scenarios under which they
could’ve been fixed were if Stone had taken a radically
different stylistic approach or if he had waited awhile to make
the film.
I wish I could say to count W. as an ambitious
failure, but calling the picture ambitious would be giving it
too much credit. Then again, you could look at a review written
by a critic who agrees with Stone and likely find yourself
reading about an entirely different movie. Such is the
subjective nature of sociopolitical bias.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 10.18.2008
Screened on: 10.14.2008 at the Landmark in West Los
Angeles, CA.