Even with its subject still in office upon its release, Oliver Stone’s George Bush drama seems curiously out of time. In one of the first scenes, a reference to a 80% approval rating seems much farther away than 2003, when the scene takes place. With the president months away from leaving office, Stone has made not a political film but a biopic, like his 1995 Nixon. Richard Nixon was a complex figure who spawned his very own adjective, applied alike to his wavering conservatism, his petty paranoia, and his extra-constitutional affinities. Certainly Bush’s critics have called him Nixonian, but if it applies it is to the administration as a whole. The man himself (played by Josh Brolin) seems to lack the dimensionality that the term implies.
Or, at least, such depths haven’t been uncovered by Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser, whose credits include Stone’s Wall Street and the curiously titled Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story. In a series of flashbacks, Weiser and Stone hit the known highlights of Bush’s life—Yale frat boy with a gift for crafting nicknames of the 1960s, drunken fuck-up of the 1970s, religiously healed, newly married oil man/baseball exec of the 1980s, unexpected rising political star of the 1990s—meanwhile revisiting the run-up to the Iraq war. Hovering over all of this is Bush senior, imperious yet almost Lincolnesque as rendered by James Cromwell. Stone zippily hits all these highlights while never going much beyond the pop psychology of a 1980s telemovie. The story of a son struggling to live up to the family name, and earning the respect of a father.
The presidential scenes do a fairly good job of summarizing the Iraq debate, with Richard Dreyfuss a particularly spot-on Dick Cheney. In retrospect, these scenes underline the irresponsibility of the war planners, but I don’t think Bush’s supporters would have thought so in 2003. Even today, Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) practically comes off as a spoilsport on the Iraq war party. As for other aspects of Bush’s presidency, there is nothing at all. Bush bashers may wish for an exposé, but there are other sources for that, including the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Instead, Stone casts this tale, like Nixon’s, as a tragedy, with Bush in the end baffled, though only in bordering-on-corny fantasy sequences, at the way things haven’t gone as planned.
The most interesting thing about Bush is not the way he sees himself, but the way others see him, and how he became the chosen vessel for the Republican party. By focusing narrowly, Stone misses a story that seems richer with possibility. Despite his historic presidency Bush himself has spawned no adjectives—those existing seem sufficient—just a noun. The term “Bushism” has given rise to a popular feature on Slate.com, a couple of books, and its own Wikipedia entry. Weiser works nearly all of the best-known ones into the script, though frequently out of the precise historical context. (For example, he has Bush ask “Is our children learning?” during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign rather than his 2000 presidential campaign.) Sometime he says them with his mouth full, so there’s some humor. And Brolin, though he doesn’t look that much like the president, does a marvelous job with his voice and his manner. He helps to make the film as entertaining as it is. Twenty years from now, this will be a perfectly good introduction to our 43rd president and what sort of person he was. For now, it seems to have no raison d'être, making this W., like its subject, something of a lame duck.
IMDB link
viewed 10/17/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 10/26/08
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