The Hollow Man: A review of W.
I saw Oliver Stone's latest movie, W. -- a surprisingly balanced account, for a Stone film, of our current president's life and career from his fraternity hazing in 1966 up to the early summer of 2004 -- at a midnight showing the day that it opened (Friday, 17 October), in an auditorium that might've been as much as one-third full. (To be fair, the prior showing looked to be nearly sold out.)
While W. isn't as bad as Stone's Alexander (I missed his last movie, World Trade Center), it's a far cry from being his best. Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser put all their faith in Dubya's daddy issues and love of baseball to explain his missteps and his successes (and "successes": "Mission Accomplished," et al), which is overly limiting and disappointing, although perhaps necessary for a reasonably coherent movie clocking in at a little over two hours. His born-again epiphany is sketched out respectfully enough (thanks in no small measure to an utterly believable Stacey Keach as the fictional televangelist Earle Hudd), but relatively little weight is given to "Bush 43's" reported insistence that he was anointed as President of the United States by God. (Weiser does trot out Bush's dismissal of his father's advice on Iraq -- "I appeal to a higher father" -- but it falls utterly flat.) This elision over Bush's faith is likely to irritate viewers on the left as well as on the right, albeit for different reasons.
Ultimately, W. plays as a series of overlong, underdeveloped, and mostly unfunny Saturday Night Live skits, with the only pleasures as such being the level of amusement that one can derive from the various actors' mimicry. Josh Brolin, on the heels of his triumph in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men, makes a fine and balanced "Dubya" (called "Geo" and "Bushie" by his spouse, played by an entirely too cutesy Elizabeth Banks [Betty Brant in the Spider-Man movies; a run on the TV sitcom Scrubs; The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Zack and Miri Make a Porno]), but James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential; The Queen) never quite sold me as George H.W. Bush, "Bush 41." Ellen Burstyn's turn as Barbara Bush was not, contrary to Manohla Dargis' review in The New York Times, terribly funny (the phrase that Dargis used to describe Burstyn's performance was "comically mean," which I perhaps foolishly took to mean that there would be at least a couple of chuckles to be had from observing her impersonation). Richard Dreyfus' Dick Cheney is fun to watch, although he doesn't attempt a vocal impersonation; then too, seeing Dreyfus alongside Toby Jones' oddly Hobbit-ish Karl Rove, one is reminded of Dreyfus' superior turn in a Rovian part in an altogether superior political satire based in part on "Dubya's" career, John Sayles' brilliant Silver City. (It's both funny and sad to hear Sayles' longtime professional and personal partner, Maggie Renzi, predict, on the DVD commentary track to Silver City, a victory for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election: Sayles and Renzi recorded the commentary track on Election Day 2004, which made me marvel that two such politically active people could be so wrong at sensing which way the wind was blowing. Hell, I called the election on 3 August 2004; why couldn't they?) But far and away the most amazing celebrity impersonation of a celebrity was Thandie Newton's turn as Condoleezza Rice: Newton played her as a little old lady in waiting, with a series of murmured phrases (usually repetitions of something that "her husband" has just said, or glosses on it, or maternal/wifely responses to it), bird-like twitches of her head and the paralytic smirk of a stroke patient that managed to be at once both "comically mean" satire and a horrible transfiguration of Ms. Newton (Thandiwe! Thandiwe!) for her fans.
While W.'s main focus is the run-up to the war in Iraq -- with a series of flashbacks to the development of a restless scapegrace scion of a political and financial dynasty into an instinctually shrewd and winning political animal (it's telling that Jones' Rove at one point describes himself as a student of "political horseflesh"), and brief flash-forwards to the breaking news of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the undeniable development of a quagmire in Iraq -- it is astonishing, and frustrating, how much is left out: 9/11 is barely mentioned (Stone probably felt that his World Trade Center addressed that), as is the "war on terror"; Scott Glenn's Donald Rumsfeld is notable here principally for his undisguised, even Dickensian, enjoyment of a slice of pecan pie that Brolin's Bush foregoes, as his personal sacrifice in show of support of the U.S. troops in Iraq (a gesture here that comes off as childishly touching rather than absurdly detached or arrogantly contemptuous, as it has sometimes been portrayed in the press); Afghanistan is barely mentioned even as a supporting factor in the White House's casus belli for Iraq; and one is left to infer the loss of status that the U.S. suffered on the international stage in its relentless push to attack Iraq and the subsequent absence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) over there. (Ioan Gruffudd's portrayal of a gobsmacked Tony Blair, utterly at the mercy of the tag-team of "Dubya" and "Condi," made me sorry that we didn't get to see more of him.) Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell carries far less weight here than he did in the news accounts of the run-up to war; far from trading on his impeccable military credentials earned in the first Gulf War, the White House power players here clearly view Powell as a barely tolerated token. (Indeed, Newton's Rice at one point refers to him as a "nudzh" -- Yiddish for "one who persistently pesters, annoys, or complains" -- before grudgingly conceding that his speech before the UN is the best he's ever given.)
Given all that Stone and Weiser did manage to shoehorn into W. (including Rice's break with her mentor, Brent Scowcroft -- who was "Bush 41's" national security adviser -- over an editorial he'd published in The Wall Street Journal in August 2002, as well as Cheney's "one percent doctrine"), it's puzzling what they've left out: there's no mention of Ron Suskind's report that Bush coldly dismissed a CIA analyst who came to warn him of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda in August 2001; televangelist Pat Robertson's aghast incredulity over Bush's blithe assertion at the painlessness of the U.S.'s impending operations in Iraq ("Oh no, we're not going to have any casualties"); or of a Bush family member telling a pair of biographers (Peter and Rochelle Schweitzer, authors of The Bushes: Portrait of Dynasty), "' George sees this as a religious war...He doesn’t have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.'"
Ultimately, W. feels as empty (if not empty-headed) and deflated as Bush's unrealized dreams of baseball or presidential glory. That W. is likely to please nobody on any side of the debate over "Bush 43's" legacy and role and motivations in the push to war with Iraq is perhaps testament to its relative even-handedness; but it doesn't make for a movie that very many people are going to want to watch more than once, if even that. W. calls to mind something that Gore Vidal reported John Kennedy telling him, in Vidal's memoir Palimpsest (1995):
"'In this...uh...job you get to meet just about everybody. You get to know all the big movers and shakers, and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.' He said this with some wonder, even wistfulness -- as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn't."
-- p. 378
I suspect that, one day, we'll come to realize that this is true of much of the "big movers and shakers" of the Bush presidency, and of "Bush 43" himself, as well as of the characters in their imagined interactions in W. the movie.
While W. isn't as bad as Stone's Alexander (I missed his last movie, World Trade Center), it's a far cry from being his best. Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser put all their faith in Dubya's daddy issues and love of baseball to explain his missteps and his successes (and "successes": "Mission Accomplished," et al), which is overly limiting and disappointing, although perhaps necessary for a reasonably coherent movie clocking in at a little over two hours. His born-again epiphany is sketched out respectfully enough (thanks in no small measure to an utterly believable Stacey Keach as the fictional televangelist Earle Hudd), but relatively little weight is given to "Bush 43's" reported insistence that he was anointed as President of the United States by God. (Weiser does trot out Bush's dismissal of his father's advice on Iraq -- "I appeal to a higher father" -- but it falls utterly flat.) This elision over Bush's faith is likely to irritate viewers on the left as well as on the right, albeit for different reasons.
Ultimately, W. plays as a series of overlong, underdeveloped, and mostly unfunny Saturday Night Live skits, with the only pleasures as such being the level of amusement that one can derive from the various actors' mimicry. Josh Brolin, on the heels of his triumph in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men, makes a fine and balanced "Dubya" (called "Geo" and "Bushie" by his spouse, played by an entirely too cutesy Elizabeth Banks [Betty Brant in the Spider-Man movies; a run on the TV sitcom Scrubs; The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Zack and Miri Make a Porno]), but James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential; The Queen) never quite sold me as George H.W. Bush, "Bush 41." Ellen Burstyn's turn as Barbara Bush was not, contrary to Manohla Dargis' review in The New York Times, terribly funny (the phrase that Dargis used to describe Burstyn's performance was "comically mean," which I perhaps foolishly took to mean that there would be at least a couple of chuckles to be had from observing her impersonation). Richard Dreyfus' Dick Cheney is fun to watch, although he doesn't attempt a vocal impersonation; then too, seeing Dreyfus alongside Toby Jones' oddly Hobbit-ish Karl Rove, one is reminded of Dreyfus' superior turn in a Rovian part in an altogether superior political satire based in part on "Dubya's" career, John Sayles' brilliant Silver City. (It's both funny and sad to hear Sayles' longtime professional and personal partner, Maggie Renzi, predict, on the DVD commentary track to Silver City, a victory for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election: Sayles and Renzi recorded the commentary track on Election Day 2004, which made me marvel that two such politically active people could be so wrong at sensing which way the wind was blowing. Hell, I called the election on 3 August 2004; why couldn't they?) But far and away the most amazing celebrity impersonation of a celebrity was Thandie Newton's turn as Condoleezza Rice: Newton played her as a little old lady in waiting, with a series of murmured phrases (usually repetitions of something that "her husband" has just said, or glosses on it, or maternal/wifely responses to it), bird-like twitches of her head and the paralytic smirk of a stroke patient that managed to be at once both "comically mean" satire and a horrible transfiguration of Ms. Newton (Thandiwe! Thandiwe!) for her fans.
While W.'s main focus is the run-up to the war in Iraq -- with a series of flashbacks to the development of a restless scapegrace scion of a political and financial dynasty into an instinctually shrewd and winning political animal (it's telling that Jones' Rove at one point describes himself as a student of "political horseflesh"), and brief flash-forwards to the breaking news of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the undeniable development of a quagmire in Iraq -- it is astonishing, and frustrating, how much is left out: 9/11 is barely mentioned (Stone probably felt that his World Trade Center addressed that), as is the "war on terror"; Scott Glenn's Donald Rumsfeld is notable here principally for his undisguised, even Dickensian, enjoyment of a slice of pecan pie that Brolin's Bush foregoes, as his personal sacrifice in show of support of the U.S. troops in Iraq (a gesture here that comes off as childishly touching rather than absurdly detached or arrogantly contemptuous, as it has sometimes been portrayed in the press); Afghanistan is barely mentioned even as a supporting factor in the White House's casus belli for Iraq; and one is left to infer the loss of status that the U.S. suffered on the international stage in its relentless push to attack Iraq and the subsequent absence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) over there. (Ioan Gruffudd's portrayal of a gobsmacked Tony Blair, utterly at the mercy of the tag-team of "Dubya" and "Condi," made me sorry that we didn't get to see more of him.) Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell carries far less weight here than he did in the news accounts of the run-up to war; far from trading on his impeccable military credentials earned in the first Gulf War, the White House power players here clearly view Powell as a barely tolerated token. (Indeed, Newton's Rice at one point refers to him as a "nudzh" -- Yiddish for "one who persistently pesters, annoys, or complains" -- before grudgingly conceding that his speech before the UN is the best he's ever given.)
Given all that Stone and Weiser did manage to shoehorn into W. (including Rice's break with her mentor, Brent Scowcroft -- who was "Bush 41's" national security adviser -- over an editorial he'd published in The Wall Street Journal in August 2002, as well as Cheney's "one percent doctrine"), it's puzzling what they've left out: there's no mention of Ron Suskind's report that Bush coldly dismissed a CIA analyst who came to warn him of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda in August 2001; televangelist Pat Robertson's aghast incredulity over Bush's blithe assertion at the painlessness of the U.S.'s impending operations in Iraq ("Oh no, we're not going to have any casualties"); or of a Bush family member telling a pair of biographers (Peter and Rochelle Schweitzer, authors of The Bushes: Portrait of Dynasty), "' George sees this as a religious war...He doesn’t have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.'"
Ultimately, W. feels as empty (if not empty-headed) and deflated as Bush's unrealized dreams of baseball or presidential glory. That W. is likely to please nobody on any side of the debate over "Bush 43's" legacy and role and motivations in the push to war with Iraq is perhaps testament to its relative even-handedness; but it doesn't make for a movie that very many people are going to want to watch more than once, if even that. W. calls to mind something that Gore Vidal reported John Kennedy telling him, in Vidal's memoir Palimpsest (1995):
"'In this...uh...job you get to meet just about everybody. You get to know all the big movers and shakers, and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.' He said this with some wonder, even wistfulness -- as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn't."
-- p. 378
I suspect that, one day, we'll come to realize that this is true of much of the "big movers and shakers" of the Bush presidency, and of "Bush 43" himself, as well as of the characters in their imagined interactions in W. the movie.