There are times when you’ve got to wonder if this young century that no longer feels young anymore, more specifically the eight years that have followed that famously fraudulent 2000 presidential election, hasn’t been some sort of prolonged bad dream from which America and all the rest of us are about to wake from with one wicked-ass hangover. George Walker Bush will soon be making his departure from the White House, the last stretch of what has proven to be one very long and wearying walk indeed. Some may argue that a preemptive strike on summarizing his presidency is unlawful, but such temperance has no firm place in the dictates of movies, and certainly not the movies of Oliver Stone, whose W. arrives in theatres just in time to greet the appointment of a new American president—though the film might be best viewed as a melancholy parting gift for the outgoing one.
Stone and Bush—could one ask for a more delightful contrast of names?—are exact contemporaries. They attended Yale at the same time, though apparently never met on the student party circuit. But Stone has never shied from identification with the great demons of recent history regardless of their political stripes, thus his portraits of both Nixon and Castro have been strangely tender in their way. As W. gets underway we find Bush (Josh Brolin, who when wearing a cowboy hat bears a striking resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton) circling the oval office, pivoting round an axis in precise opposition to Stone’s camera, as though the two are in a formal dance or are a pair of boxers sizing each other up. And all the while our supporting characters sit in heated discussion over how to characterize their nation’s nebulous post-9/11 enemy, settling, finally, on “axis of evil.” It’s a rousing opener, introducing our protagonist just when his confidence is at the highest it’ll ever be, setting us up for the stumbling ascension to power that led up to this moment and, we presume, the terrible downfall to follow. Curiously, over the next two hours, we’ll witness a great deal more of the former than the latter.
Written by Stanley Weiser, who co-scripted Stone’s Wall Street, W. needs to be viewed more as portraiture than polemic, even if it seems at times to want to be both. This character study is founded above all in Bush’s contentious, approval-seeking relationship with his father (James Cromwell), whose own presidency and its misadventures in foreign policy now look to us like an exercise in centrist moderation in comparison. Having succeeded as a frat boy and failed miserably as a student and labourer, we hear Bush Jr. berated by his dad for hi-jinx and aimlessness, ordered to stop behaving like a Kennedy and respect the family name. Bush Jr. will never fully heal from these wounds, exacerbated by his suspicion that brother Jeb’s the unspoken favourite. It is these wounds that’ll slowly give him the gumption to go into politics and later still become so embroiled in Iraq, convinced of his mission to finish the job dad abandoned back in 1991.
The familial grievances offer Weiser and Stone a classical, dramaturgically sound framework to build on, and they’ve tailored the chorus of advisory voices so as to heighten the sense of their protagonist as tragic fool: Richard Dryfuss as Cheney, condescending, shamelessly savouring the word “empire” like a fat lizard; Thandie Newton doing a fun, blood-curdling Condoleezza Rice; Scott Glen as a glinty-eyed if perhaps not sufficiently callous Rumsfeld; Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, the defeated, lonesome voice of reason and morality; Toby Jones as Karl Rove, seen here as nothing less than a Satanic puppet master. Each has their moment to carry the torch of flamboyant disgrace, though none rise above the level of strict support for Brolin, whose performance here is virtually flawless, all the more effective and troubling for being somehow perfectly sympathetic, as amiable a good ol’ boy as we always suspected Bush must have been before he was granted fearsome powers. When Rove questions his strut, Bush replies, “In Texas we call that walkin’,” and it’s clear that the man might have seemed refreshing when the peril of his incompetence was still abstract and distant. W. is more than allegory and Brolin finally too complex in his characterization to seem merely a product of a flawed system, though in the end his confusion alone seems the absolute measure of his character.
Given all this, all these factors begging to add up to something, how strange that W. seems to be lacking a last act. This absence of resolution is perhaps fitting given the absence of exit strategy that’s so hounded the occupation of Iraq. Yet however eloquent this structural parallel between reality and art, you couldn’t be blamed for desiring more when the credits suddenly appear, be it the long, draining road to the present or our sad hero’s final surrender to the knowledge of his true historical role as widely loathed blunderer on the world’s greatest and more consequential stage. Stone would seem up for at least one of these jobs, and spends much of the film building up to it with a welcome lack of directorly affectation, save a few oddball close-ups of belt buckles or ladies’ shoes smooshing corn cobs and a regrettable, entirely redundant dream sequence offering only one more confrontation with poppy. How Stone and Weiser came to decide on their abbreviated ending is ambiguous, but I suppose we at least can give them credit for leaving the final judgment on their subject up to us.
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