Oliver Stone's Muddled 2008 Manifesto W. Was Dated When It Was Released and Feels Like Ancient History Now
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The rise of Donald Trump as a political force was one of the worst things to happen to our country in decades, if not centuries. But it’s the best possible thing that could have happened to the reputation and legacy of George W. Bush.
The disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president has such a stranglehold on the public imagination that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to see our forty-third president outside the prism of our forty-fifth.
When W left office his reputation was at a low ebb. Republicans seemed eager to forget W and his sometimes embarrassing presidency and move on to more dynamic, less bumbling leadership.
W cunningly kept a low profile after he left the White House. That afforded the public an opportunity to forget about all the war crimes and focus on what’s truly important: that W. seemed like a nice guy it’d be fun to share a drink with if he wasn’t famously sober.
Trump’s almost inconceivably vast sins don’t just make W look good by comparison. They make him seem like a God among men. That’s because while the second Bush in the White House has many shortcomings he also possesses something that Trump did not called “strengths.”
#SquadGoals
W. seemed sincere and committed in his faith. He seemed like a decent human being. He did not seem like a hateful monster who took great joy in the misery and suffering of others. He was polite, a real Southern gentleman.
Also, he’s apparently a relatively proficient painter. Compared to Trump, W. is a cross between Ronald Reagan, Mahatma Gandhi and Mr. Rogers, a paragon of kindness, decency and Christian love.
We felt very differently in 2008. In his role as our country’s preeminent polemicist Oliver Stone felt the need to make a movie about how W was a well-intentioned boob with daddy issues and also Republicans were bad.
The Republicans are, in fact, bad, and W does seem to be a well-intentioned boob with daddy issues but that doesn’t make the film’s fierce commitment to stating the obvious and limply recycle conventional wisdom any less obnoxious.
In a performance that grows less impressive and more cartoonish with each viewing, Josh Brolin plays the former president as a genial good old boy and goofball under-achiever who is the shame of his family, particularly impossible to please daddy George H.W Bush (Cromwell).
Cromwell acts as if refraining from continually expressing how disappointing he finds W, particularly in comparison to his golden god of a brother, Jeb, is so difficult that it causes him physical pain.
He’s not alone. Throughout W, everyone around the title character looks at him with an expression that combines pity with wide-eyed disbelief that anyone could be that fucking stupid.
he likes dogs! that’s a moderately positive quality Donald Trump lacks
W. portrays the never-impeached two term ex-president as a colossal fuck up everyone felt sorry for so they made him the most powerful man in the world for close to a decade.
The protagonist is born with every possible advantage in the world and a gift for mindless, boozy, bleary self-destruction remarkable even for the son of a powerful politician.
No matter what the child of privilege tries to do he fails on account of being an incompetent idiot who doesn’t know how to do anything, unlike his renaissance man brother Jeb.
W. hilariously depicts the man who became an icon of low-energy loserdom by imploring a deeply unimpressed world, “Please clap” as the stunningly accomplished world-beater his brother could never hope to surpass.
Rumor has it a Director’s Cut exists where Jeb makes passionate, masterful love to Laura while his brother sobs uncontrollably in the corner, masturbating sadly. In this deleted scene Jeb maintains intense eye contact with his brother the entire time while hissing, “I wouldn’t need to fuck your wife if you did it correctly. You’re as incapable of satisfying your wife sexually as you are of effectively leading the nation.”
He’s a good time Charlie drinking and carousing his way through a life devoid of achievement until he decides he’s had enough and turns his life over to faith and family.
Sobriety, Christianity and politics provide an aimless, directionless loser with a sense of purpose. A lifelong loser begins winning but nothing he says or does impresses his perpetually aghast dad.
W. shares with Stone’s other films a violent disregard for verisimilitude and realism.
It’s as if the screenwriter bought one of those cheapie books compiling all the dumb things W has said over the course of his public life and made sure to randomly insert them in every other scene, regardless of context or historical accuracy.
The problem with making a movie about very recent history is that folks like myself, whose memory is microscopic due to decades of nightly marijuana consumption, can call you out on your bullshit and inaccuracies because they remember what happened.
I’ve blocked out much of the past but I remember W’s presidency well enough to be continually annoyed by the pointless liberties the film takes with the historical record.
It doesn’t matter to Stone that time and time again, a notorious “Bushism” is bizarrely shoe-horned into an inaccurate context. All that matters to Stone is that the subject of his confused and underwhelming biopic said a bunch of things that were egregiously dumb and consequently fit into the film’s conception of him as a dumbass who wasn’t good at his job nor prone to self-reflection.
As Dick Cheney, Richard Dreyfuss looks at his president throughout the film as if he would like to dislocate his jaw and devours his head for a snack.
The only actor who emerges from this mess unscathed is Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. The dignified and qualified general turned Secretary of State knows what he should do morally but is flummoxed because his job in the cabinet is to do the wrong thing on behalf of terrible people.
It’s an overwhelmingly flattering portrait of Powell as a man of honor defeated by an impossible job but it’s the only performance with any real depth or layers to it.
Time has been predictably cruel to W., the way it has been to so many of Stone’s messy manifestos. Then again, the present was appropriately harsh on it as well. We knew back then it was a complete whiff. In has only gotten worse in the interim.
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