Reviews
W.
Oliver Stone
Certificate 15, 129 mins
The phrase ‘It changed my life’ suffers from overuse, but imagining a world,or at least a USA, with and without George W Bush in the Oval Office can hardly fail to elicit such a response. Oliver Stone, the often melodramatic and bombastic director behind Platoon, JFK and Wall Street probably feels the same.
W., a kind of tragi-comic biopic, suggests that GWB fell into every job he’s ever done. Daddy got him into Yale, out of jail, into oilfields, into business, and eventually into the White House. The reason he went was to prove to Daddy that he could do it, even though his real aspirations began and ended with wanting to become the National Commissioner of Baseball. He did what people told him to, was intellectually incurious, and surrounded himself with people smarter and more venal than himself.
This is hardly a novel assessment, and W. plays more like a big budget TV movie than a penetrating psychological analysis, but it at least attempts to retell one of the key stories of our time. Bush emerges not as an ogre but as simply the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It’s a sympathetic portrait that aims not to caricature but to understand how hubris and emotional brokenness can lead to disaster for anyone standing nearby.
Josh Brolin does a pretty magnificent job on the subtleties of Bush’s demeanour, ably supported by Richard Dreyfuss’s Machiavellian Dick Cheney, and Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, played as a man without empathy for the human costs of his decisions. But the standout performance comes from the unlikeliest place: Stacy Keach, the 1980s TV detective Mike Hammer, almost eats the set in two short scenes, playing the pastor who led Bush to Christian faith. He is a recognizably human character, whose spirituality seems utterly believable.
The fact that this performance is so good is counterbalanced by disappointment at the superficial treatment of Bush’s faith in general. There is no room for theological nuance in this film – Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser don’t understand the difference between the two sides of Bush’s church, US Methodism: evangelical Puritanism (the kind that helps an alcoholic to give up drinking) and the social justice tradition (the kind that would stop an adherent from, oh, for instance, invading another country that hadn’t invaded you first).
The film fails to engage with Bush as a Christian president who divided the church between those who see him as one of the worst public examples of the Jesus way and those who believe he is God’s anointed man for the job.
This failure is one of many facets of W. that disappoint. It is an entertaining and sad movie, but suffers from being a rush job. Filming only began in May this year, and was speeded up to be released in time for the US election. There is little of the depth that Stone tried to bring to his film about Richard Nixon 14 years ago – which was possible then because enough time had passed for serious reflection on the inner demons that brought down a Presidency.
Perhaps there will be more films about Bush in the future, when the dust has settled – in his case, of course, the dust of death rather than the embarrassment of recording conversations in the Oval Office. In the meantime, W. serves as a representation of one of the most tragic life stories of modern times; and when compared to Stone’s Nixon, the most terrible contrast is clear: for in 1974, when a President was suspected to have lied about a tape recorder, and he had to resign. In 1998, when a President was suspected to have lied about a woman, he was impeached and had to grovel to stay in office. In 2004, when a President was suspected to have lied about a war, he was re-elected.
Gareth Higgins
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