I blow hot and cold on Oliver Stone, admiring his capacity to orchestrate images and actors with electric fervour, but I’m sometimes turned off by his reductive sense of psychology and recourse to often obvious symbols and dramatic devices. In spite of his starting out as a screenwriter, he’s never been in the least a felicitous or subtle storyteller, and many of his works, like JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994), are totems to overheated technique dressing up total balderdash. Nonetheless, when he gets his mixtures right, they can be compelling, as in The Doors (1992), a film so spaced out on its own efforts to recreate a drugged-up, hysterical atmosphere of self-indulgence and shamanistic vision that it almost succeeded in blowing apart most Hollywood ideals of good taste and narrative shape. Stone’s sympathy-for-the-devil sensibility, always imbuing people he considers wrong but interesting with a certain roguish, compelling nobility – Gordon Gekko, Jim Morrison, Richard Nixon, Alexander of Macedon – would seem to have found his most immediate and divisive embodiment in George Walker Bush Jnr, still a sitting president when Stone made his film. But W. shuffled in and out of theatres rather unexpectedly without much heat from any direction. Everyone was tired of Dubya’s regime and of filmmakers kicking it around.
The result proves one of Stone’s most restrained, straight-laced movies, which unfortunately means that his best artistic qualities, his bravura technique and electric madness, are huddled into a quiet corner and forgotten. W. is an odd mixture, chiefly a stolid bio-pic, emphasising Dubya’s unruly, self-destructive energy exacerbated by familial conflict, finally channelled with undeniable potency but dubious final effect into religion and politics. This doesn’t blend too well, however, with sections that seem more suited to a TV-movie historical re-enactment, and passages that lean half-heartedly towards Michael Moore-esque satire, with mocking pop songs interpolated over goonish portrayals of Dubya’s high-policy meetings. The long interlude for rumination that allowed for Stone to construct a thorough portrait of Nixon was obviously lacking here, and the film never suggests a meticulously composed sense of where it’s aiming for, a problem that becomes particularly obvious in the last half-hour. Nonetheless, a coherent concept of Bush’s presidency as being fuelled by forces in his life apparent long before he took office emerges, thanks chiefly to Josh Brolin’s strong central performance.
It’s not an imitation of Bush, however, so much as an attempt to present, in a tighter bundle than the real man ever came in, all the capricious energy and desire for validation in spite of an innate confusion as to why his body and mind won’t obey the logic the world sets for them, spilling out in the verbal gaffes that made him a figure of fun, and other, deeper manifestations of a troubled soul. Brolin exudes far more concise, vibrant charisma than Dubya ever has, and Stone’s characterisation of the man finally seems to channel less the stalwart yet comparatively logy individual we all saw so much of for eight years, than a blue-blooded Elmer Gantry. That’s not so bad a pitch, especially considering that the Gantry-fication of American conservatism has become even more apparent in the past couple of years as it did during Bush II’s terms. It’s odd that the film’s Bush seems both more compelling and less facetious, and yet less canny, than the real one, and yet viewed on its own terms Brolin’s acting is nothing short of marvellous.
Around him, interesting but undeveloped, fragmented scenes fly by, as his contentious life flows by in a series of scrappy vignettes: here’s Dubya proposing to a girlfriend (Marley Shelton, who needs more parts) who’s obviously never going to pass the family try-outs; there’s Dubya pressuring Tony Blair (Ioan Gruffud) to join his crusade. A lot of material might have been left on the cutting room floor. Ellen Burstyn, flinty and eye-catching as Barbara Bush, barely appears in the film until the second hour. Brolin and Elizabeth Banks as Laura strike sparks in their first meeting, but their relationship is described in only the most functional terms, and Stone’s sloppy symbolic streak emerges all too badly in repetitive dream sequences, most of which find Dubya imagining himself as a baseball hero, leading to a coda in which, not only does he fail to catch a fly ball, it disappears altogether. James Cromwell, as George H. W. Bush, is extremely good in conveying first a difficult, reprehending patriarch and the later, shaken, detectably ambivalent but officially proud father, but the figuration of Dubya’s anxieties being inextricably based in an inability to live up to his old man gets a bit shop-worn. Equally odd is the absence of any depiction of Dubya’s reaction to 9/11, the moment that turned a potentially humdrum presidency into an all-or-nothing attempt to remake contemporary geopolitics.
An immediate, documentary style would have invigorated proceedings, but Stone’s filmmaking is smooth and finally even stagy, much more so than his orchestral adaptation of Talk Radio (1988), still my favourite of his films, and his capacity to present grand social narratives in mosaic portraiture, a la JFK and Any Given Sunday (1999), is barely apparent. His split instincts, to either make a kind of on-the-run Yippie screed on one hand and an elegiac study of a dying dynasty on the other, finally leaves the film stranded in the outfield. Richard Dreyfuss goes directly for a note of shark-like self-importance in his impersonation of Dick Cheney, and whilst his lecture to his fellow chieftains about the necessity of controlling Iraq to place a control valve on the world’s oil is probably far more explicable than any real-life equivalent, it’s likely not too exaggerated. A centrepiece of the film is an extended quarrel between the yin-yang pairing of Cheney and Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright, characteristically excellent) over the efficacy of the Iraq War, Powell’s grounded, purposeful perspective failing miserably to deter Cheney’s assertive drivel about “Islamic fascists” in stirring Dubya’s messianic sense of life and death. It’s an uneven and unsuccessful work, but one worth watching all the same.