W

W (**1/2)

Oliver Stone's Bush biopic W had a ton of hype when it was announced for a whole bunch of reasons. It would be the first movie to be made about a President still holding office and Stone's previous films Nixon and JFK have garnered huge notoriety for their controversial portrays of two of the most infamous events in American Presidential history. But, after seeing Stone's latest film about a man who will go down as perhaps the most infamous of Presidents, I came away with a feeling of mostly apathy. There are certainly moments in the movie that are enjoyable, but given that George W. Bush's presidency will most certainly go down as eight of the most important years in modern American history (and mostly for the wrong reasons), you would certainly expect a movie about the man to add up to more than what W is.

W jumps around in time constantly throughout its 2 hour and 10 minute runtime, starting with a cabinet meeting in 2002, going back to his days in a Harvard fraternity, and then continuing from there with two separate storylines: the story of his presidency and the story of how his presidency came to be. Both of these stories are incomplete, and really feel more like snapshots instead of complete storylines with beginnings, middles, and ends. In Bush's past he's shown as a guy who's sort of aloof and can't focus on the same job for more than a month, and seems most interested in perpetually hanging out and drinking. At the same time, he's constantly bothered by being in the shadow of his father, and his father's percieved slights against him in favor of his older brother Jeb. In the present, Bush is shown as a man who truly believes in his cause, but loses his way trying to achieve it, depending too much on Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and not enough on the more cautionary views of the rest of his advisers. Josh Brolin plays Dubya, both young and old, and his performance is incredibly accurate, aided by the make-up or whatever the hell they did to make him look uncannily like Bush throughout the decades. Brolin has all of his phraseology and mannerisms down to a science, and he manages to bring a certain humanity to Bush with a script that seems to accentuate all of his most cartoonish moments.

My main problem with the movie is that its tone jumps around just as much as its timeline. All of the nuances of the principal players are mocked to the fullest extent they can be. In particular, the portrayal of Condolesa Rice is totally ridiculous. She's almost like the female equivalent of Donnie from The Big Lebowski, as she once in a while offers a meek interjection in the middle of a heated conversation, but never seems to have anything to say that anyone else is particularly interested in hearing. As for Bush himself, all of his confounding Bush-isms make it into the film, their context often being changed so they can fit in to the scenes that make it on screen (Bush's butchering of the "fool me once, shame on you..." saying happens during a closed-door meeting instead of at a press conference). We see Bush on the Crawford ranch playing with his dogs as everyone else stands around him with a "how much longer do we have to be here?" on their faces. When a drunken Bush comes home in the middle of the night and tries to fight a fight with his father ("Let's go! Mono-a-mono!") its like the scene from the Seinfeld episode where Frank Costanza fights Elaine after she calls George dumb.

At the same time, though, we get scenes like one in which Bush attends an A.A. meeting and stays afterwards to talk to the reverend about the "tremendous weight" he feels constantly, as we get a bunch of soft-focus shots of the Jesus mural in the background. Later, we see Bush visiting wounded troops in the hospital and he speaks Spanish to a distraught mother of a Latino soldier. I have no doubt that these more sympathetic scenes are as real as the myriad of Bush's well-documented press conference flubs. But, after seeing what amounts to a montage of Bush acting cartoonishly empty-headed, its hard to take these scenes seriously or to have them have any real resonance. Watching the movie, it almost seems like Oliver Stone and writer Stanley Weiser set out to show Bush in a sympathetic light, but then which watching footage of old Bush press conferences kept getting sidetracked and saying, "Wow, look how stupid he looks in this one! How could we not put that one in?"

The half of the movie that focuses on Bush as president from 2002 to now isn't bad, but its sort of like a 101 course in the last eight years of history, not going much in-depth into anything. Dick Cheney explains his idea for the one-percent doctrine to Bush as he's eating a sandwich, mentions in passing the warrantless wiretapping programs they've put in place, and then hands him a sign-off to authorize enhanced interrogation techniques which Bush enthusiastically says he'll read through since its only three pages (again, cartoony). All of those things mentioned in one scene are huge reasons why a hell of a lot of Americans consider the Bush presidency to be an abject disaster and a national embarrassment. Exploring how presumably well-intentioned men came to put these things in place would make for an excellent movie; mentioning them in passing does nothing. Elsewhere in the movie, we see Bush Jr. screening the infamous Willie Horton ad for his father, explaining that it was made by a group led by Roger Ailes so as to distance the campaign from it. When the movie jumps to the junior Bush's presidency, it doesn't go back and explore what impact Roger Ailes has on the politics of today now that he has an entire network in the form of Fox News. Sure, bringing this up would've ruffled some feathers, but isn't that what Oliver Stone is known for doing? Isn't that kind of why he's so well-known as a director?

The points that the movie does try to make and not just gloss over are often too transparently obvious. In the opening scene, we see Bush being briefed in regards to Iraq and whether a legitimate case can be made for war, when Cheney (played pretty convincingly by Richard Dreyfuss) enters, sort of lurks by the door, and the entire mood of the meeting seems to change. Later on, we see Karl Rove literally lurking in the shadows as he points out to Bush that not going into Iraq might hurt his re-election chances. The best supporting performance is probably Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell, who in real life just endorsed Obama as he continues to distance himself from the new neoconservative movement in the Republican party. In the movie, Wright is really more of the voice of the whole anti-war part of the nation. He dissents more often and more strongly than he likely did in real life, as he constantly questions the need for preemptive
war and an abandonment of the country's entire post-World War II foreign policy strategy. Like a lot of the other characters, Powell's portrayal is pretty simplistic, but I think his part in the film resonates more than does anyone else's. Not to digress too much, but I also want to say that appreciate that Stone went out of his way to show the massive protests against the war that cropped up all across the country and all across the world before the war actually began, and not just when things turned south after the occupation. This initial outcry is something that seems to have been lost in the media after the big question about Iraq became, "is the surge working"?

I bitched a lot about the movie's flaws here, but I did give it two and a half stars at the top of the post, and I do have to say that Josh Brolin's uncanny rendition of Bush's folksy, "damned if I know what I'm doing, I'm going to do it" personality is undeniably entertaining. Some of the movie's lighter points are genuinely funny. But the movie isn't trying to be the Naked Gun of presidential politics, and it does try to give a real account of George W. Bush's presidency. Ultimately, W seems to come to no significant conclusions about why his presidency happens as it did and what it means, and I think Bush's presidency is too significant a point in history for a movie to fail to say anything important about it.