There’s an argument to be made that W., Oliver Stone’s Josh Brolin-starring sorta-biopic on our sitting but barely-standing president, has been thrust on the culture too soon. What kind of perspective could Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser possibly have on the Commander in Chief with George W. Bush still bumbling along in office, still a regular fixture on cable news and a constant target for Saturday Night Live? And wouldn’t the real W’s minuscule approval rating suggest that interest in dramatization of his presidency would be slim? But maybe a better argument is that W. has hit at exactly the right time — in fact, maybe the only time when this oddly argument-free work of trompe l’oil comedy could possibly slip seamlessly into the media diets of average Americans. Almost unbelievably, Stone has John McCain to thank for this accident of timing: W. would look much more freakish as a bizarrely idea-light folly if it had been released into a world that hadn’t ever seen (or even conceived of) Tina Fey’s dead-on impression of Sarah Palin.
Fey came back to her late night alma mater to play Palin because of her unignorable physical resemblance to McCain’s running mate; her performance has become a sensation not because it’s so comically inventive, but because it’s such an exact mimicry. Very little of what Fey actually does as Palin could be construed as a joke. Mostly, the comedienne does stuff Palin does, exactly the same way Palin does it, except more so. This is pretty much the same tactic that Stone and his ensemble apply to the story of George W. Bush: Stone and Weiser collage real events and known quotes into a plausible “loser makes good, but remains a loser” chronology, and their stars, many outfitted with hairpieces and other cosmetic enhancers for maximum authenticity, aim for Fey-like verisimilitude turned up to 11.
But there’s a paradox: Fey’s Palin might be the most accurate political impression in modern cultural history (it’s almost surely the funniest), but the lack of air between mocker and mocked renders the impression incapable of delivering any insight as to who Sarah Palin really is. Fey is able to turn this farce of mimesis into a triumph because no one expects sketch comedy to say anything. No one worries about Fey’s intentions, nobody asks what it all means. She acts, we laugh, game over.
But it’s okay to expect more depth from a work of cinema than we’d expect from a five-minute bit on a sporadically funny late night comedy show, no? Rightly or wrongly, one does expect an Oliver Stone film –– especially an Oliver Stone film about an American president — to say something, to make an argument, to reveal something we didn’t know or to advance a theory that’s so out-of-nowhere that it seems to momentarily stun before it sparks a heated dialectic. W. doesn’t. Its entertainment value (which is not inconsiderable) is based fully on a kind of laughter of recognition. “Look,” it wants us to say. “Josh Brolin is walking just like George W. Bush walks!” “Look! Richard Dreyfuss is smirking, just like Dick Cheney smirks!” It all makes for a strangely shallow, self-congratulatory viewing experience: catching one reference after another makes you feel so smart that you only vaguely realize that the film isn’t actually engaging your brain.
As a monster caricature created by Stone and Weiser and played by Brolin (who nails the voice and body language, but never even attempts the goofy grin), George W. Bush isn’t a complete doofus, nor is he exactly smart. He’s enthusiastic, but impatient. He has no eye or need for detail. He’s forgetful, and easily confused, and extremely imprecise in his use of language. The film begins with its subject pledging a frat at Yale, and ends a few months after the declaration of Mission Accomplished in Iraq, with no end to the war in sight. Stone jumps back and forth in time in between, to show the major life moments that led a boozy ****-up with a desperate need to impress his cold, powerful father (James Cromwell) to finally manage to do just that. Then, after a few all-too-brief moments of triumph over the father’s sworn enemy, the son finds himself ill-equipped to sustain his success, and loses sight of the ball. Literally.
Very, very literally. W.’s production was famously rushed, compressed into a breakneck 10 months in order to ensure release before the election, and the film plays as though its afraid to stop and catch its breath. With a lot of bases to cover in a scant two hours, Stone rushes from year to year, from one vaguely famous line or incident to another, spelling out virtually every thought and theme without a shred of ambiguity. This is especially problematic in the film’s first half, when illustrations of Bush’s hard-partying youth (and battles with Bush the Elder, who is always quick to sign the check that will make his son’s mistakes go away, keeping a strict ledger of disappointments in the process) are contrasted with scenes from the run-up to war in Iraq in 2003. In one scene from this section, W marches in front of his constant crew of advisors, pondering a justification for an invasion of Iraq while simultaneously getting the group lost on his own ranch. The symbolism after the fact seems head-slappingly obvious –– Get it? He can’t even lead his own team, in his own back yard! — but it actually plays as an unusually subtle moment in context. I’ll take bad subtext if it’s the only subtext I’m gonna get.
In fact, all of W.’s most entertaining moments involve Bush surrounded by his advisors, although much of the pleasure to be had here is of the ironic variety. Bush will sit at the head of the table in the Oval Office or Cent Com, snacking in confusion, while Condi Rice (Thandie Newton) chirps in affirmation, Cheney barks doomsday scenarios, Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) occasionally tosses out a bit of Yoda-level philosophy (”The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” he reminds, almost dreamily) and Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) quietly but firmly protests. With such a large cast, most of the actors have fewer than a dozen lines, and everyone seems to have been coached to make the most of their time on camera. Thus, there’s a a lot of vamping going on. Newton’s performance is over-the-top hyper-accurate, and it’s almost spooky, like something that belongs in a David Lynch film; it’s total camp, but irresistibly so. Other bit players play it straight to set up the ensemble. Tom Kemp gets one scene as David Kay. He shows up and announces that “our system has broken down completely”; Karl Rove (Toby Jones) takes a mournful bite of pie. Not a minute later, Kay resigns; Rumsfeld eats his pie triumphantly. End scene.
The exception to this rule would be Wright, whose performance doesn’t always feel vocally true to Powell, but who benefits tremendously from the fact that his character seems to be a surrogate for the voice of the director. If the question is, “What is Oliver Stone trying to say about George W. Bush?”, then the answer seems to be bound up in Powell’s take on the man, as presented here: Bush II is fundamentally a decent man, but he’s in over his head. He doesn’t understand the weight of war (”I AM a soldier,” Powell fumes at one point, and this seems like it could have come straight from the mouth of Stone). He’s blinded by his single-minded faith and its ideological antecedents, and is incapable of thinking beyond the current crisis moment, beyond his own conception of himself as heaven-sent savior. The tragedy is that he probably would have been happier as baseball commissioner, but he had to go work out his daddy issues on the world stage.
This is not exactly the stuff of groundbreaking revelation, but it’s the closest Stone gets to insight or argument. It’s not enough to drown out W.’s easy-bake parade of impressions, and that’s depressing. 17 years ago, Oliver Stone made a movie that made such bizarro claims about the fate of an American president that the government actually had to pass a law to dispute it. Now, he’s content to create a live-action version of DC Follies. If history remembers W. at all, it’ll be as a monument to the erosion of Oliver Stone’s balls.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth