Where in the world is George W. Bush? With mere days remaining before America selects its next president, the current one has become harder to find than a WMD. He has been almost entirely absent from the campaign trail, emerging from his bunker only when certain circumstances (like, say, the global financial meltdown) demand an obligatory sound byte.
Some have suggested that this vanishing act is an attempt at political quarantine; Bush's approval ratings have reached historically unprecedented lows and may yet prove the undoing of his preferred successor. But I prefer to view this recent disappearance as a goodbye present to the American people. Having spent the last eight years defending his litany of catastrophic blunders, the most considerate thing he can do right now is shut up.
Hollywood, it seems, has other plans. At a moment when the public's tolerance for Bush has reached an absolute nadir, along comes "W." (2008), a fictionalized biopic of our 43rd president from director Oliver Stone.
The film aims to rattle the skeletons of the Bush closet in hopes of scandalizing the voting populace just in time for Election Day, but it's hard to imagine that Stone's movie will influence the opinion of a single voter since the film amounts to little more than a trivial political cartoon. As an effort at social commentary, "W." is a statement of the obvious; as a work of drama, it's as blank and insubstantial as its protagonist.
The film opens on Bush in 2002, plotting the invasion of Iraq with his White House cronies. The role call is depressingly familiar: there's Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), the grizzled, combative Defense Secretary; Condoleeza Rice (Thandie Newton), Bush's former National Security Advisor; Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), the Secretary of State, whose voice of reason has grown increasingly hoarse; and Karl Rove (Toby Jones), who lurks in the corner whispering hopeful prophecies of war. Above them all stands Dubya (Josh Brolin), whose swaggering gusto and eager rhetoric suggest a goofy man-child who has discovered that the engines of governance make an amusing plaything.
Just as the scene begins to settle, the film flashes back to Bush's fraternity initiation at Yale, a bacchanal full of flesh and booze. Watching the future president guzzle Vodka through a funnel, I began to sense what Stone is trying to accomplish. "W." is less interested in exploring the intricacies of Bush's presidential tenure than the cosmic improbability of his ascent. How, Stone seems to ask, could this drunken buffoon wind up the most powerful man in the world?
The answer, as it turns out, is not particularly interesting. The film follows Bush through his early years, from his collegiate misadventures to his days as an oil-rig worker to his romance with Laura (Elizabeth Banks).
It's not a very flattering narrative; Bush's pre-presidential life was apparently characterized by screw-ups, failed business ventures, alcoholism and worse. This vexes George Bush Sr. (James Cromwell), then a Texas Congressman, who looks after his errant son with an attitude of chilly disappointment. Cromwell doesn't bear much resemblance to Poppy Bush, but he has the frame and bearing of an elder statesman, and his embodiment of presidential authority makes his son look like a pale imitation.
It seems that paternal disapproval may have been the driving force behind the Dubya phenomenon. A desperate urge to prove himself leads Bush to run for Congress in 1978 -- he loses the election, but garners the respect of his father, who hires him as a political advisor for his Presidential campaign. The job introduces him to Karl Rove, played by Jones as a sycophantic worm who remolds the younger Bush into a political dynamo. Dubya goes on to win the governorship of Texas, and the rest, unfortunately, is history.
Faced with the task of assigning character motivation to an inscrutable subject, Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser have decided to fashion Bush into the Prodigal Son of presidential politics. Dubya's decision to invade Iraq is portrayed as an act of misplaced filial devotion ("I don't like guys that try to kill my dad!" he explains).
In his zeal to outdo his father, the younger Bush does what the elder refused to do -- he marches American troops into Baghdad, plunging Iraq into years of chaos. Stone tries to summarize these actions by suggesting that Bush is driven by latent daddy issues, but it feels like an oversimplification of historical fact. Worse, it's lazy screenwriting, a facile abridgement of a complicated public persona.
Then again, maybe there's less to Dubya than meets the eye. "W." lingers on the comical subtext of Bush mythology -- an incident when the President nearly choked to death on a pretzel in 2002 becomes the defining scene of the film -- but ultimately the character proves too dramatically flimsy to bear the weight of Stone's intentions. Josh Brolin offers a fine impersonation of Bush's mannerisms, but he lacks the President's effortless likeability, that cowboy charm that enabled his improbable rise to power.
For that matter, why bother making a movie about President Bush when the most interesting figure in the current administration is standing right next to him? Dick Cheney is played by Richard Dreyfuss as a Machiavellian puppet master who stares into Bush with cold, calculating eyes and recognizes the usefulness of his vacant charisma. It's a chilling, emotionally resonant portrayal, wasted by a film that feels casual and silly.
Indeed, the fatal flaw of "W." is its fretful inconsistency in tone. Stone can't seem to decide whether he's making a broad satirical comedy or an operatic tragedy. There are a few great moments of high drama -- listen for Colin Powell's hopeless, impassioned plea for sanity on the eve of the Iraq War -- but they don't quite fit into the rest of the movie.
"W." offers too many cheap laughs, too many regurgitations of Bush's countless verbal gaffes ("Is our children learning?") for the story to carry any real weight. It's hard to imagine a Bush biopic that doesn't include a little necessary humor, but given the mess he has made of our country, showing the President choke on a pretzel or soliloquize on the toilet may not be the most productive response.
Stone has made movies about Presidents before (1991's "JFK," 1995's "Nixon"), but I suspect that "W." is less likely to influence our national discourse than his earlier efforts. I couldn't shake the belief that, beyond Bush's disastrous ineptitude as commander in chief, there is little in the story of this soft, sad man that is worth remembering. History may yet revive the legacy of the Bush Administration, just as film scholars may someday look back on "W." as something more than a pointless political doodle. But in both cases, I'm not holding my breath.
