Lately there’s been a rather frantic effort in rather closed-minded quarters to try to salvage what’s left of George W. Bush’s “legacy” by attempting to shift responsibility for his litany of failures onto any number of Democrats or circumstances. With the blamestorming focused on Barack Obama these days for his inability to solve eight years’ worth of fuckups in less than half a year, Bush has quickly faded into memories. One imagines that he spends his days doing pretend golf swings, practicing Word Jumbles in the mirror, polishing Dick Cheney’s shotgun and throwing rocks at small Hispanic children, snickering all the while at the havoc he has wreaked on everyone but himself.
So seeing Oliver Stone’s “W” recently only served as a reminder of just what a colossal failure this piece of shit was in so many ways. I’m not fan of Stone (his career demise came about after he stumbled his way through “JFK,” then threw up the mockery that was “Any Given Sunday”) and the movie feels more like a missed opportunity on many levels, but it is revealing for those not privy to the true story of W’s ascension to becoming the most powerful “man” in the world. As a history lesson, “W” isn’t inclusive enough; as a retrospective, it relies a bit too much on caricature (though the tagline of “A life misunderestimated” is simply stellar); but as a work of theater, it is scary and real enough to seize your attention.
Josh Brolin continues with his career resurgence that began with his work in "No Country for Old Men" (though some might say his true resurgence began when he landed Diane Lane, but that's a story for another day) by doing a tremendous job in depicting Bush. He captures less the mannerisms of W. than the essence, giving voice to the very crude way he carries himself and the way he related to people. Brolin brutally showed how very disgusting Bush is in his personal habits, his excesses, his racism and his misogyny, and there were times in the flick when you felt he truly lost himself in the character. It would have been easy to resort to simply doing an impression of W (which has been done better in many other arenas), but Brolin forces himself to dig deeper.
The surrounding cast is full of highs and lows, with the highlight coming from the creepily brilliant rendering of Karl Rove (Toby Jones) as a creepy, serial-killer-looking mentor who lurks in the shadows and pulls the strings. James Cromwell was also excellent as George H.W. Bush (it’s easy to imagine the elder Bush threatening to beat the shit out of his son on multiple occasions) and Cheney as the contradictory puppet master was also very well done by Richard Dreyfuss. Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) was a bit of a throwaway character and Scott Glenn was a bit understated as Donald Rumsfeld (two lost opportunities), and Thandie Newton was eerily robotic as Condoleezza Rice. Her facial expressions and resemblance to Rice were amazing, but her actions made her into more of a giggling, yes-man caricature of herself than anything else.
The movie shows Bush’s “evolution” from spoiled frat boy to lost alcoholic to overcompensating baseball owner, all the way up until he basically falls into the presidency. Unfortunately, Stone decided not to touch on the pains taken by Bush to steal two elections or the travesty he unleashed upon New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,. Even though there are obviously many, many, many, many other mistakes made and crimes committed by Bush, and you couldn’t cover them all unless this was a 72-hour film, electing to omit those two criminal acts was a bit unforgivable in any retrospective of W’s reign of error.
Perhaps the defining scene is when this cadre of degenerate bastards sits around eating pie as they calmly discuss the mistakes made in the deception to go to war, chewing slowly as they attempt to shift blame around the room, never losing their appetites even as the reality of the untold numbers of lives that they threw away sets in. There were also a lot of allusions to the role that Bush’s brand of religion played in his time in the White House, the frightening over-reliance on false prophets and evangelists with agendas.
Usually, after a really good movie, you wish it wasn’t over. You don’t want the lights come on; you don’t want the dream world you were in to fade into nothingness; you don’t want to go back to real life. But this film was about real life … a stark, depressing reminder that this menagerie of a human being drove our country into the ground for eight years.
And that’s what made it a horror movie to me.
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