"I GOT OVER MY BUSH HATRED BY 2004," says Oliver Stone on the commentary track for W. This statement may well be the key to understanding his surprisingly sober biopic of George Walker Bush. Given that he started shooting the film in early 2008 in an
effort to get it out in time for last November's historic US election, many people – myself included – expected Stone's account to be a final, savage and cathartic excoriation of what has been one of the most catastrophic and damaging presidencies in the history of America. Instead it's a much more restrained and refined attempt to get beneath Dubya's easy-to-mock exterior and understand who Bush really is.
In limiting its focus to Bush's adult life up to and including his first term in office, W also serves as a reminder that this was the man Americans overwhelmingly returned to office in 2004, despite all the information that was available about what his administration was up to. The age of Obama might be encouraging people to pretend the previous eight years didn't happen, but the uncomfortable question that Stone's film repeatedly returns to is: why did the electorate give Bush a mandate to continue his ruinous reign?
Stone partly answers this by homing in on the dangers inherent in Bush's folksy affability. Josh Brolin's initially crude, but increasingly believable portrayal of Dubya shows how the over-privileged, book-hating, detail-detesting, malapropism-spouting black sheep of a wealthy political dynasty managed to exploit his failings and present himself as the kind of good ol' boy who could connect with voters. As Stone sees it, this was motivated mainly by the sense of inadequacy and resentment he felt towards his father (James Cromwell). His repeated attempts to prove himself over the years fuelled an anger that drove him to get one up on George Bush Snr, whose questioning, deliberative approach to politics he increasingly viewed as a sign of weakness.
This marks Bush out as a shrewder political operator than he's often given credit for. Nevertheless, the film doesn't hold back on showing how insidious a force Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) was and, as much as he liked to think of himself as "the Decider", the film suggests that behind Bush's beady eyes was crippling doubt and uncertainty. Stone's typically lucid and informative chat track provides a wealth of additional information on all the choices he made and the DVD comes with annotations and a bibliography for his sources. True, W may still disappoint those who wish Stone had made a film reflecting our freaked-out times in the more freaked-out style of JFK or Natural Born Killers, but his more thoughtful approach here has plenty of value and in the long run will probably work in the film's favour.
Actually, if you want to see how badly a film like this could have gone had it been made in a rage, just check out War Inc, a garish, broad-strokes satire in which co-writer and star John Cusack rails against the war in Iraq and the kind of "disaster capitalism" brilliantly exposed in Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine. Basically an attempt to transform Cusack's sublime comedy Grosse Pointe Blank into a Dr Strangelove-style absurdist goof, the film casts him as a hitman posing as a trade-show producer for a giant corporation who wants him to take out an oil minister. While no Cusack performance is ever a waste of time, this one comes close, thanks to a wildly inconsistent tone that gives the whole endeavour a self-righteous air of extreme smugness.
