Unless between the time I’m writing this and a certain mid-January day he decides to tie a bandana around his head, place a buck knife between his teeth, parachute into the hinterlands of northwest Pakistan and return with a certain tall Arab’s head in a burlap sack, it’s hard to imagine that history will offer much in the way of absolution for poor George W. Bush. Too much bad faith, too much blood spilt, too many My Pet Goat, killer pretzel and “Insurgency? What insurgency?” moments for any self-respecting historian to conclude that his two terms as leader of the free world were anything other than an utter failure. With approval ratings lower than Nixon’s when the buzzards were circling, an opposition which it seems will only be mollified with him either dead or in jail, and his own party already giving him the Trotsky treatment, it’s hard to imagine there will be many who will argue with such an assessment.
So it is with great trepidation that Oliver Stone releases W., his much ballyhooed Bush biopic.
“I don’t know if anyone is going to show up for the movie,” he says sheepishly from his edit room in September. “A lot of people say, I hate this guy, I hate what he did to this country, I don’t ever want to see this fucking guy again. You know what? That’s not the right response.”
Stone believes that coming to terms with Bush is a national imperative and hopes that W. will provide such an opportunity. The film, which focuses on Bush’s complicated relationship
with his father and chronicles his days as a blotto-black sheep through his stunning rise to power, ending in 2004 just as the Iraq War devolves into prolonged debacle, Stone insists, is not a piece of Michael Moore agitprop.
“You get to see how that mindset came to be. Not just in W., but in the people around him, you see the mindset—a mindset that is very American. Americans can deny it all they want, you can hate Bush, but for Christ’s sake, it’s in us also.”
This is Stone in full “movie as national service” mode. Not that he ever left. From Wall Street to Platoon to Natural Born Killers, through JFK and the weirdly sympathetic Nixon, to Any Given Sunday and the 9/11 clunker World Trade Center, much of Stone’s varied oeuvre has sought to cut to the core of our collective experience, to slice off some kind of underlying truth that lies at the heart of what it means to be an American.
The material presented a daunting challenge—how do you create an original, compelling work about a man who has already been lampooned, psychoanalyzed, mocked, imitated and reviled by so many? The answer for Stone is to condense time, to create composite characters, to instruct his lead, like in Nixon, not to offer an SNL impression, but to search for some sort of deeper truth.
Few remember it was W. who came to his father’s aid in 1988. When Bush Senior finished in third in the Iowa primary, W. convinced him that the future of the Republican Party and the viability of his own candidacy lay in the religious Right. W.’s battles with recklessness and addiction and his powerful conversion to evangelical Christianity enabled him to recognize that traditional messages of limited government weren’t going to cut it—Americans craved moral vision that spoke to their innermost frailties. The plan worked, but when the father came up for re-election in 1992, the son was boxed out of the campaign. This rejection, one among many, sealed his fate, Stone seems to argue. As W.’s ambition to prove his father wrong grew, he became locked in a vicious circle of self-deception and denial of his own failings.
The film, Stone insists, however, is not a tragedy.
“You need self-awareness for tragedy, and I don’t see anything like that,” he explains. “It’s a comedy in the sense that the central character doesn’t change. That’s what comedy is. It is a challenge to make a movie that is circular in that way, but at the same time has to drive forward with the same tension a drama would.”
For Stone, finding meaning in Bush’s life seems to have become something of a Zen quest.
“Life is satirical, life is quite beyond definition. In the saddest moments we’re laughing and vise versa. . . .Bush can do the most awful things to the country and at the same time be goofy and awkward and kind of loveable,” Stone adds, almost wistfully. “It’s bizarre—the human capacity to forgive.”
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