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W.

Yearning Bush

Hey, did you know that George Bush is still the president? You might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the mainstream media’s relentless focus these days on the upcoming election. And up against that, this week brings to movie theaters Oliver Stone’s W., the kind of biopic that tends not to get made until at least a few years after the subject is out of office and the historical dust has started to settle.

Josh Brolin and Richard Dreyfuss in W.

Sure, there was PT-109, made in 1963 while John Kennedy was still in office, but it only dealt with his war years. And Primary Colors, released during Bill Clinton’s second term, used fictitious names and only dealt with the 1992 election.

But Stone hasn’t limited his focus. Nor, as you may be expecting, has he made a parody or satire, a la the TV series That’s My Bush or the Nixon-era Milhouse. W. is more or less in the vein of Stone’s Nixon, an exploration into the career and psyche of a much-despised political figure.

Given that this is opening a mere 18 days before the election, you might also be expecting W. to be an attempt to influence the voters of America. That would have made much more sense in two or four years ago, when Bush was an issue. Apparently Stone struggled for awhile to get financing for the movie, eventually getting it from a number of foreign sources. And while I don’t know this for a fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the financing only came together on the condition that the movie (which didn’t start filming until five months ago) be ready for theaters by mid-October, as if they were expecting a politically incendiary firebomb.

If that’s what distributor Lionsgate Films was expecting, though, they couldn’t have been more wrong. That they are unhappy with what they got might be inferred from the fact that they only did limited screenings of the movie, deciding only a few days ago to preview it in Buffalo.

Bush fans, assuming there are any left, are unlikely to be much offended by W. It’s the Bush haters—the only potential audience for this, really—who are likely to be upset. Because although Stone has been making the circuit of TV talk shows explaining how much harm he feels Bush and his administration have done to the US and to the world, his film is not a political screed but rather an empathetic character study.

Stone and scripter Stanley Weiser, with whom he wrote Wall Street, structured it into three loose acts: Bush’s early wild days, when he was more interested in carousing and drinking than to sticking to any given job; his middle years when he found God and started to try to make something out of himself; and his decision to invade Iraq during his first term as president.

On the CBS Morning News, Stone was careful to make a distinction between empathy and sympathy in his treatment of Bush—the distinction between understanding the man and looking at him favorably. Bush is played by James Brolin with some of the brutishness but none of the cunning of Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan’s classic film about a Southern demagogue (you can see it on October 28 at the Buffalo Film Seminar). W.’s psychoanalyzing largely blames a bad relationship with his father (played with proper patrician imperiousness by James Cromwell) and his family heritage leading him to go to great lengths to “prove” himself. It may well be an accurate assessment, but it’s a simplistic one.

(On the other hand, credit Stone for creating a subtle scene of Bush being “born again,” albeit with a fictitious minister, that captures the yearning for religious faith in a believable and even affecting manner.)

Stone expanded to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that America needs to understand why we elected Bush to see how we have arrived where we are to today and hopefully to be able to move on. And that’s where his movie fails to have the impact it should have had. Brolin’s portrayal largely lacks the “I’d have a beer with him” charm that won over too many voters who couldn’t be bothered to look beneath the surface. And though no film can embrace all of such a revolutionary time as the Bush administration was, Stone leaves out an awful lot of things that we remember all too well. There’s little or nothing about Bush’s Texas Air National Guard stint, the bitterly contested 2000 election, the win-at-all-costs maneuvering of Karl Rove, Bush’s oil industry career and ongoing connections that helped him raise an unprecedented amount of money for his first election—the list goes on and on. W. may be more easily viewed by audiences in the future who have less firsthand memory of the man who may well be remembered as our worst president. But will they recognize the movie, as we do know, as a hugely incomplete portrait?


Watch the trailer for W.

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