Beating the Bushes

After being battered for nearly eight years by the delusional and/or incompetent actions of the current administration, reality seems to have finally caught up with Bush, Cheney, their enablers on both sides of the aisle and the Republican Party in general. (Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of guys and gals.) As Bush heads toward the exit of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he is being garlanded with superlatives ... superlatives like Lowest Approval Rating in Decades, Highest Disapproval Rating in Even More Decades, and maybe even the really big one —Worst American President Ever.

It isn’t clear whether this bodes well or ill for Oliver Stone’s new biopic, “W.,” which — though not the ideological lambasting many probably expected — is nonetheless not a portrait the subject himself would find flattering. However, those who consider Bush a war criminal may be more angered by Stone’s hints of sympathy than will the still faithful 20 to 30 percent by the film’s view of Dubya as a cross between Oedipus and Forrest Gump — a incredibly shallow man, way, way out of his depth.

Stone’s narrative structure leaps around in time a lot: For the most part, it intercuts between an apparent “now,” roughly 2002 to 2004, and the previous 35 to 40 years, from a creepy fraternity hazing through a creepier public ascent. By college, George (Josh Brolin) is already the family disappointment, committing all the transgressions typically seen among rich kids acting out: public drunkenness, womanizing and the inability to hold down a job. At every turn, George Sr. (James Cromwell) sighingly pulls his son’s bacon out of the fire.

The son is rebelling against his father’s low opinion of him, but it’s unclear which came first. All we know is that, by the time he’s entering real manhood, Dad is continually favoring his better adjusted, more successful little brother, Jeb — in essence, making George play Fredo to Jeb’s Michael.

But things turn out differently with the Bushes than with the Corleones. Having gotten his act together (kind of) — thanks to the love of a good woman (Elizabeth Banks’s Laura) and a newfound relationship with the Big White-Bearded Guy in the Sky — this Fredo manages to pull ahead of his smarter kid brother.

Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser (“Wall Street”) make the father-son conflicts the central throughline, as good a focus as any, even though any such analysis is necessarily a simplification — and nobody, not even George W. Bush, is that simple. And, while the gist of this view is supported by the historical record, Stone may have gravitated toward it out of some sense of identification. I’m not saying he has his own daddy issues, but conflicted father/son and mentor/student relationships do seem to recur throughout his work.

Brolin pretty much inhabits the role, even though he’s physically not ideal. That is, he’s just a little too big, hunky and handsome even for the earlier, brazen Bush, let alone the deflated figure who nowadays pops out of the White House occasionally to assert his leadership to a skeptical nation. In the midst of the financial crisis, apparently even Bush hasn’t had the nerve to publicly utter what he reportedly has said within the White House: “It’s a good thing I’m in charge.”

It’s a perfectly self-deluded assessment: How many people are less qualified to be president?
Well, besides Sarah Palin ...

Stone doesn’t view Bush as evil in a Cheney-esque way. Nor does he seem to regard him as — to use Paul Begala’s recent characterization — “a high-functioning moron.” The film suggests that Bush has certain positive traits. Unfortunately, they’re exactly the wrong positive traits for the most powerful job in the world.

Richard Dreyfuss unsurprisingly plays Cheney as a much more sinister character, sometimes disclosing an edge of almost insane arrogance, as though he’s channeling George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson from “Dr. Strangelove.” He’s not in that many scenes, but he’s really terrific, making Cheney almost satanic as he craftily misleads and manipulates his nominal boss.

Likewise, Jeffrey Wright and Bruce McGill nail Colin Powell and George Tenet, respectively. (It’s always a joy to see McGill, and his inherent physical resemblance to Tenet made him mandatory casting.) Scott Glenn’s portrait of Donald Rumsfeld is less successful. Thandie Newton fares worst of all; her impression of Condoleezza Rice, while almost perfect, is nonetheless exactly that — an impression, the only portrayal that feels like a “Saturday Night Live” caricature.

In contrast, Cromwell doesn’t seem the least bit interested in replicating George H.W. Bush’s voice or accent, yet he captures the sense of an old-money WASP, chilly and emotionally distant, too absorbed in upholding the family name and with little clue how to love his eldest son.

The ads for “W.” suggest a much wackier, more surreal film than Stone has crafted, in large part thanks to their use of the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” which, sadly, doesn’t appear in the movie. The only song that shows up repeatedly in “W.” is, inexplicably, the theme from the ’50s “Robin Hood” TV series. Maybe it’s meant to reflect some crazy self-image Bush has, but I didn’t get that. It’s just one of Stone’s weird choices, like an emphatic close-up of Bush stepping on an ear of corn at the barbecue where he meets Laura. What was that about?

As in “Nixon,” Stone seems to take minimal liberties. Of course, he has to invent the domestic conversations in the Bush household. But his most frequent departures from the record involve transplanting famous Bush statements and gaffes into different settings — which seems well within the bounds of dramatic license. Most or all of the statements themselves are genuine (or at least straight from insiders’ memoirs) and will be instantly recognized by those who have been unable to turn away from the slow-motion train wreck of the last seven years. In some ways, “W.” could be considered a compilation — “George Bush’s Greatest Hits,” if you will, except they’re awful, not great, and they’ve proved to be flops, not hits. (Stone can’t bring himself to omit the pretzel-choking incident, even though it feels jammed in, with little connection to the rest. But who can blame him?)

The story necessarily winds up without a natural ending, since the train wreck is still happening (and cleaning up the tracks is likely to take longer than either Bush’s life span or my own). But Stone and Weiser suggest that somewhere in the shallow depths of Bush’s consciousness lurks the knowledge of his abject failure ... and worse. In a nightmare, George Sr. is mocking and taunting him for his screw-ups. When Dubya tries to counter by listing the ways in which he has surpassed Sr., the latter laughingly reveals that the younger Bush achieved nothing on his own, that Sr. was still quietly pulling the strings that led to those successes. For a personality trying to prove his worth to dad, that’s a more horrifying possibility than mere failure.