W.
Directed by Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone accused Lyndon Johnson of killing John F. Kennedy in one film, and Richard Nixon of killing John F. Kennedy in another film. He portrayed a typical Vietnam platoon as a bunch of crazed rapists and pillagers who finally kill their evil lieutenant. And now, in the capstone of his bizarre career, Oliver Stone takes on George W. Bush, the figurehead of a thousand conspiracies as deep and dark as any of the ones Stone has spun over the years.
Surely, Stone’s W. would prove to be the dream film of every Kos diarist, every obsessive follower of the monstrous injustices done to Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV and Valerie Plame, not to mention every boy and girl who ever hooked up at a MoveOn.org meet-up.
Stone’s tinfoil hat constituency is going to be gobsmacked by W. The movie, dull as dishwater and twice as tepid, is a pointless portrait of a perfectly decent, somewhat dim, well-meaning fellow who sincerely believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, wanted only to bring democracy to the suffering peoples of the Middle East, is loved by his wife, not loved enough by his father and mother, and never meant anybody any harm.
Considering the sorts of things that have been said, written, and put on film about George W. Bush over the past few years, W. is astonishingly anodyne. Stone’s Bush may be a boob, but he’s not a bad man by any means. He’s not much of anything, really. As a kid, he’s a party boy who doesn’t seem to be enjoying the party all that much. He’s shiftless, but he has reason to be, as he is oppressed by the arch disappointment expressed toward him by his patrician father.
As an adult, he finds he can’t escape his father’s shadow. He does, however, find solace in sobriety and religion, as a celebrity preacher (Stacy Keach, in a spectacular turn) guides his path toward Jesus. Then he meets Karl Rove (the unctuously dwarfish Toby Jones), who tells him he is a star and guides his political career. Eventually, in the White House, he bumbles along cheerfully, hungry for Saddam’s hide, very focused on getting his three-mile run in, and allows himself to be guided by his vice president (Richard Dreyfuss, whose Dick Cheney is about as Wyoming-born as Sholom Aleichem).
The portrait of George W. Bush offered in this movie will, I would wager, prove as tiresome, obvious, and boring to the Kos Kids as it did to me. They knew all this years ago: Bush choking on a pretzel, Bush calling himself “the Decider,” Bush asking “Is our children learning.” Stone’s Bush, aided by Stanley Weiser’s screenplay and Josh Brolin’s exceedingly superficial performance, is basically a humorless version of Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live caricature.
It’s a perfectly terrible movie, obvious and overly deliberate in the manner of a biographical picture made for television in the 1970s. Stone does more than allude to Bush’s drinking problem; he photographs every scene in the years leading up to W.’s renunciation of alcohol with a bottle of Jack Daniels prominently featured either right next to the camera or right next to Bush. W. travels across decades, with bad makeup and hairstyle alterations used to suggest the passage of time. Weiser’s screenplay is embarrassingly “on the nose,” as the Hollywood cliché has it–rife with dialogue that comes out and says with exclamation points what ought to be understood.
“You’re not a Kennedy, you’re a Bush!” shouts 41 to 43. “Act like one!”
“Why don’t you love me like you love Jeb?” George W. says to his father.
“Tell him what you think,” Barbara says when 41 is awake at Kennebunkport at three in the morning just before the Iraq war. “This thing is eating you up inside!”
“Here’s the real target,” says Dick Cheney in the Situation Room as the map in front of him magically changes color and Cheney is cast into shadow. “IRAN.”
“You have besmirched the family name!” the father Bush says to the son Bush in an empty Oval Office. “Two hundred years of work up in smoke because of this . . . fiasco!” (Of course, just as when Dallas jumped the shark, the Oval Office scene is only a dream.)
And on and on it goes, so much so that for the first time in my movie- going life, I longed for the old Oliver Stone, the one who would have turned George W. Bush into a Machiavellian maneuverer who only plays dumb to gull the liberals into a stupor, and goes to war in Iraq to help the FBI and the CIA hide evidence of JFK’s assassination, for which his father was responsible, somewhere in Falluja, with the secret assistance of Osama bin Laden. W. proves there’s nothing more boring than a wild man who goes straight. That’s true of its protagonist, and even more true of its director.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
