With a little more than two months remaining in the presidency of George W. Bush, Oliver Stone is quick off the mark to offer what will surely be but the first in a long line of post mortem analyzes. The surprising result is a movie that avoids a number of consistent weaknesses across Stone's oeuvre, but it is also one that fails to deliver some of the best things we have come to expect from an Oliver Stone film.
The enduring strength of W. is the performance of Josh Brolin, of course. Although he does appear to be the world's oldest Yale freshman in flashback scenes, and although he slips into caricature during the dramatization of a press conference that is supposed to act as the film's climax, he carries admirably a film in which he appears in virtually every scene. That is no small achievement. But the best part of W. for me is the examination of George W. Bush's relationship with his demanding father. James Cromwell's portrayal of the first President Bush is careful to avoid any caricature. He never slips into Dana-Carvey-like "didn't wanna do it" folksiness, and the viewer comes away with a new respect for the steadiness of Bush pere. Cromwell's performance contrasts with that of, say, Thandie Newton as Condie Rice, an impersonation that could have been pasted in from an SNL sketch. The desire to mimic historical figures is never so pronounced elsewhere, but it does occasionally infect much of the rest of the cast from time to time. Luckily, they seem able to shake it off before the whole drama slips into parody.
Oliver Stone has never before been so hamstrung by a self-consciously ironic soundtrack, by an inability to frame his story properly. Although I am thankful that he resisted giving this story the epic treatment, it clearly suffers from the exclusion of Bush's second term. But building on the construction of a family dynamic so often lacking on his broadest canvases, Stone is able to interrogate the empty ideology of Karl Rove, shown as the "genius boy" who makes Bush fils by narrowing his message and keeping him on it. I can accept that Rove is the political Al Davis - "just win, baby!" - but, unfortunately, Stone is less able to communicate the geopolitical strategy of true believers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It is simplistic to suggest that these men thought only that seizing oil in the middle east would reestablish American power for a century, and yet this is partisan conclusion drawn from interminable scenes of cabinet room debate. I much prefer the subtlety of the scene showing W. in Crawford, Texas, leading his cabinet through the brush in a shot eerily similar to that of Death leading the actors away at the end of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.
If George W. Bush led his people astray, it has surely not been as a result of his misunderstanding the politics of oil. More interestingly, and not fully considered in spite of all the bluster, is the question of W.'s faith. One gets the sense here, as one does from the last eight years, that Bush fils feels his faith profoundly. Undoubtedly, he is surrounded by some people who feel similarly, but he is also surrounded by others who see religion as a wedge issue, something Mr. Rove could fashion and refashion in order to manipulate the media. The United States and the world at large has suffered religion under George W. Bush's presidency, and our collective inability to cherry pick the best of faith in the face of heightened religious intolerance should, I suspect, have played a larger part in Mr. Stone's analysis.
