Oliver Stone (2008)
Many of Oliver Stone’s films concern major political issues in modern America and, in some cases, have the particular draw of big names and places (JFK, Nixon, World Trade Center). To that extent, W may seem a natural addition to the list but Stone’s approach to this biopic of George W Bush is so confused that it’s hard to work out his level of engagement with his subject – or why he made the film now. Although it was released in the US a few weeks before the presidential election, W obviously wasn’t aiming to influence how Americans voted in the way that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 tried to do in 2004. Is this the first cinema treatment of an incumbent president? If so, W has a place in film history and Stone may have had an eye on that. I think you’re bound to ask these questions about his motives because Stone has form as a maker of films that will get noticed in a crudely compelling way. (Even if the films turn out not to live up to their subject: apart from its affecting opening scenes of New York early in the morning of 9/11, World Trade Center, once the heroes were trapped in the rubble, turned into a pretty standard will-they-get-out suspense picture.) W fails but I liked it more than other Stone films that I’ve seen – the direction is less coercive than usual. And perhaps seeing the film a week after the 2008 election is the time to feel most benign about it: the euphoria of Obama’s win is making the Bush era seem to recede in a way that wouldn’t have happened if the same combination of interests that brought Bush to power and kept him there had prevailed again.
W reminds me – in concept and partly in execution – of the 2002 BBC TV film Jeffrey Archer: The Truth. In one respect, the issues facing the filmmakers are similar. How do you present a life in such a way as to appeal to an audience politically hostile to the subject of the story, without treating that subject with reductive contempt? If you resort to that kind of contempt, what’s the value or the purpose of the film you are making, beyond preaching or pandering to the converted? The makers of the Archer piece solved the problem neatly. Taking off from his reputation as a pathological liar, they constructed his biography as a series of invented episodes – expressions of his self-aggrandising fantasies – which saw him in the thick of the action at key moments in modern British history (and not just political moments: it turned out that England had Archer to thank for winning the 1966 World Cup). Damian Lewis made Archer very engaging, unlike the original; Josh Brolin achieves something similar in interpreting Bush; W, like Jeffrey Archer: The Truth, is entertaining. But the differences between the two biographies are much bigger than their similarities – and W is much more problematic. Jeffrey Archer, in terms of political influence, was always small fry: Guy Jenkin (the writer-director of The Truth) and Damian Lewis succeeded in making him a hero in the film and – because you knew this was nonsense and, as a result, kept the actual and utterly different Archer clearly in mind – all the more ludicrous a figure in real life. (The film was transmitted while Archer was in prison.) Oliver Stone, by comparison, needs a way of juxtaposing Bush’s lack of qualifications for high political office with the world-shaking events that his administration was first on the receiving end of, then managed to aggravate and generate.
Black humour seems the obvious solution and there are structural and thematic elements of the film that seem promising. Moving mainly between the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and flashbacks to Bush’s earlier life, Stone also cuts occasionally to Bush’s fantasy of himself in a baseball stadium (alone but not alone: the stands are empty but he and we hear an audience cheering him on). In the course of the picture, we learn that Dubya really wanted to be baseball commissioner rather than leader of the free world. (In the period between working on his father’s presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992 and his own successful run for the governorship of Texas in 1994, Bush co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team.) The screenplay for W, by Stanley Weiser, presents Bush as motivated by a doomed-to-failure ambition to impress his parents, in particular his coldly antipathetic, disdainfully proud father. (It’s a remarkably hostile portrait of the first President Bush and James Cromwell is suitably unpleasant, almost sinister, in the role; although he doesn’t physically resemble the original, he’s acceptable as an expressionist study of – as seen through George W’s eyes – an emphatically Freudian father figure. We barely see the favoured son, Jeb; his invisibility is actually an effective way of heightening Dubya’s sense of exasperation.) Trying to win over an implacably unsympathetic parent is a time-honoured biopic tradition (from Walk the Line backwards) – and it has considerable (horrifying) comic potential here, given that ‘Junior’ is working out his troubled relationship with ‘Poppy’ on the world stage. But the theme isn’t properly followed through. Bush senior and his wife (Ellen Burstyn is exuberant and amusing as Barbara) react with incredulity when Dubya announces he’s going to run for governor. (His pastor/spiritual adviser (Stacy Keach) does the same – in a more concealed way – in response to the news that God has told Dubya he should stand for the presidency.) Yet the film doesn’t cover his election in 2000 and what his parents felt about this, let alone (and even though this is excusable given the timeframe of the story W tells) his re-election in 2004.
If these omissions are disappointing, the exclusion of the events of 9/11 is a complete loss of nerve on the part of Stone and Weiser. It makes no sense to present Bush as grotesquely out of his depth without pitting him against an event the magnitude of which would have made more substantial politicians feel out of their depth too. It would have been worth including a 9/11 episode even if – perhaps especially if – Bush’s limitations left him less fazed than a more thoughtful president might have been. George Bush senior’s derision of his older son’s efforts to prove himself is built up in such a way that seeing him ensnared in 9/11 should have provided a comic climax to this theme. Stone, having so recently made a square, sentimental melodrama about the 9/11 attacks, may have felt that what happened that Tuesday was simply too traumatic a subject to deal with satirically – but, since the longer-term aftermath of the attacks is obviously essential to and salient throughout W, deciding that the day itself is taboo seems evasive. Stone probably wasn’t helped by the fact that the black humour in Stanley Weiser’s script comes and goes, alternating with a more conventional biopic perspective on the protagonist and a more sober treatment of the political discussions of the Bush cabinet. This would have made it doubly hard to assign 9/11 to the comic-satiric side of the proceedings.
This more straight-faced aspect of W may reflect honourable intentions but they’re misconceived and self-defeating. You sometimes hear people say (incredulously) that there must be more to Bush than meets the eye and Stone, well known for his anti-conservative views, may have set out anxious to avoid the charge of facile ridiculing of his subject. But there’s no point in aiming for a surprisingly revealing character study without the material to justify it – and Weiser’s script can’t illustrate clearly what political talents it sees Bush as having, let alone suggest hidden depths. (For example, you can infer from a scene between Bush father and son during the 1988 presidential campaign that Dubya had the shrewd nastiness to dream up the Willie Horton commercial that damaged Michael Dukakis; what we see elsewhere in the picture implies no less strongly that Karl Rove had the idea, and that it’s merely Dubya’s retentive memory that allows him to remember, and relay to his father, Rove’s explanation of why the ad will be politically effective.) Because the director and writer basically despise Bush, the plot threads that aim to humanise him – especially his relationship with the future First Lady and in spite of the fact that the scenes between Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks as Laura are among the highlights of the film – are dead ends. It’s completely convincing that the couple are – and remain – strongly attracted to each other, both physically and emotionally, and in spite of their initial political differences (Laura confesses to voting for Lyndon Johnson in 1964). But, having set up an interesting relationship and presented Laura as feisty and independent-minded, as well as loyal, Weiser gives her nowhere to go. There’s never a suggestion that she’s angry on her husband’s part with the scornful way in which his parents treat him. In the closing stages, as the fiasco of the Iraq invasion expands, Banks is asked to do nothing but smile inanely, so that Laura’s loyalty is made to seem despicable. The fact that she seems hardly to age over the quarter century of her time on screen reinforces a sense that the director has more or less forgotten about her in the course of the film.
The behind-closed-doors political debates – and the election night bits – would play better if Stone and Weiser had adopted a consistently non-realistic approach – so that we knew that conversations, issues and disagreements between the main players in the administration were being compressed and simplified for satiric effect. Written and played straight, the discussion within the inner circle of the pros and cons of invading Iraq has the dead weight of exposition; it lacks rhythm and any change in essential tone. Although they’re a physically striking bunch, the performances of the actors in these roles are highly variable not just in quality but in approach. Richard Dreyfuss is very effective as a viciously alert Dick Cheney. Jeffrey Wright, as Colin Powell, seems too openly defeated by the hawks in the government (and is somehow unconvincing as a military man – in a flashback to the 1991 Gulf War, when he’s riding high and in uniform, he looks no more authoritative than he does ten years later as a Secretary of State in civvies and losing the arguments). Thandie Newton is terrible as Condoleezza Rice – it’s one of those physical impersonations (and it’s not a very good one) which locks the actor into their role to such an extent that they can barely move, let alone develop a character. (Ioan Gruffudd does the same thing in a cameo as Tony Blair: taking his cue from the news pictures of a Bush-Blair meeting at Camp David, Gruffudd sticks his hands deep in his jeans pockets and that’s where they stay – removing them would mean that he’d need to think of something else to do with the part.) As Karl Rove, the diminutive Toby Jones is able to incarnate a poisoned dwarf in an amusingly meaningful way. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and George Tenet are played, respectively, by Scott Glenn, Dennis Boutsikaris and Bruce McGill.
The Bush administration has produced some notorious phrases, from ‘axis of evil’ onwards, and the actors seem self-conscious in coming out with them: the effect is of the characters interrupting their normal speech with a quotation. This is obviously a particular problem for the actor playing Bush; Stanley Weiser hasn’t taken the trouble to make the verbal stumbles and malapropisms a part of the way Dubya usually talks – these seem to be largely reserved for his public performances. So it says a lot for (and about) Josh Brolin’s portrait of Bush that he can, for example, say of Saddam Hussein, ‘That guy’s always misunderestimated me’, and make it sound natural. Although he had probably the most screen time and was good enough in his role, Brolin – in the company of Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem – didn’t register strongly in No Country For Old Men; he didn’t leave much impression either in his role in American Gangster. In W, he has to carry the picture and he succeeds. The uncertainty in the script and direction about how seriously to take Bush inevitably shows in Brolin’s acting – which is the clearest expression of that uncertainty – but this is a thoughtful (without seeming too careful), sensitive and hugely likeable performance. If Brolin, who’s forty, looks a bit old for the mid-twenties Dubya, he’s fine as the man in his late fifties (and the make-up is good). This is a physical impersonation that does work because the actor uses it as his starting point rather than his destination. Brolin has got the swagger and finds in it an uneasy, eager-to-impress aspect of Bush. Wolfing down a sandwich or a burger, he conveys the appetite of egocentricity but seems to be comfort eating at the same time. Some of the things he does are marvellous: when Bush is undergoing the Yale fraternity initiation ceremony and it dawns on him he’s got what it takes to pass the test and avoid humiliation; when he first meets Laura at a barbecue, getting high on a combination of booze and the sexual sparks that fly from their joshing conversation; when he starts to cry in the presence of his pastor and they pray to a heavenly father who is so much more indulgent and encouraging than Dubya’s earthly one.
Stone decides to include the true episode of Bush choking on a pretzel while he’s lying on the sofa watching baseball on television. Josh Brolin’s panic in this sequence is brilliant – it only lasts a few seconds but he manages to suggest not just a frightened human being but a man saying to himself, ‘I can’t choke – I’m the President: oh God, I’ve screwed up again‘. Brolin is very good too at conveying Bush’s awareness of the double-edged cause of his isolation from the rest of his cabinet – which comes partly from their respect for his office, partly from their contempt for his mind. I was worried at one point at how much, thanks to Brolin, I was warming to Bush. This is one of those instances where you’re well disposed towards – and rooting for – an actor rising to a tough challenge; when that fuses with the situation of the character, as it does here, it becomes hard to separate your feelings about the actor from your feelings about the character. Brolin does convince you of – and make you feel – Bush’s personal charm (as with Damian Lewis as Jeffrey Archer, that’s an achievement in itself). His face kept reminding me of other screen faces – Nick Nolte and occasionally Clark Gable (who was played by Brolin’s father in Gable and Lombard in the 1970s) – but, by the end, he was reminding me of Josh Brolin. The performance is admirable in more ways than one, a revelation to me, and likely to be seriously underrated. I’m looking forward to Brolin’s next appearance, in Gus van Sant’s Milk.
As Bush gears up for the Iraq war, Stone finally loses patience with the more tolerant treatment which he’s gone along with in the earlier stages. It’s as if the director is saying to himself, ‘There’s nothing to excuse this man – let’s get on making the kind of film people were expecting from me anyway’. As Stone becomes more blunt and decisive, the tempo of the film increases and the tone suddenly gets bitter. Stone starts piling in news film – of dead and injured civilians and American soldiers in Iraq, of Bush’s speech to the US Senate making the case for war. It’s worth being reminded of the reactions of, among others, Hillary Clinton, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry and John McCain to that speech; as the House loudly applauds, Stone inserts a shot of an audience cue card ‘Loud applause’, a bizarre way of making the point that the Bush people fooled their political opponents as well as the public. This gets a laugh in the cinema and Stone is probably right that a laugh is what the audience wants. By the time he was editing the film, he seems to have convinced himself that this level of satire has been consistent throughout – he’s used a tiresomely obvious ‘ironic’ selection of songs for the soundtrack (‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, the theme tune from the 1950’s Robin Hood television series, ‘With God On Our Side’ for the closing credits). The music also gets a laugh but the damage of Stone’s earlier ambivalence – and it is damaging in terms of the film’s coherence – has already been done. In parts of W, I felt that the director wasn’t always telling me what to think because he wasn’t completely sure what he thought himself. That’s a rare and welcome experience at an Oliver Stone picture.
11 November 2008