Seacoast History Blog #36
March 8, 2009 

Get it Just for DVD Commentary

Bush is gone, but his wreckage still engulfs us. The economic crisis is ubiquitous. Everything is about this recession. President Obama is handing out the band-aids for the economy, struggling to deal with the Iraq War, taking on Afghanistan, closing down Guantanamo, and attempting to rebuild relationships around the world.

So why, in the middle of all this, watch "W"? That is the title of Oliver Stone’s movie profile about George "Dubya" Bush. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Because, that’s not what artists and historians do. Our job is to prevent the next train wreck by looking at what caused the last one.

Stone, for my money, is ultimately very kind to Bush. He even likes him, if pity is a form of affection. Stone went out of his way not to turn to the dark side or unload a wild conspiracy theory as he did in his film JFK on the Kennedy assassination. As in the movie Nixon, Stone tries very hard to strip away the events to find the man beneath.

Stone does not, for example, go after Bush’s failure to show up for military service. He does not track the rumor that the Yale grad left a pregnant girlfriend behind for his father to deal with, or that his wife Laura killed a pedestrian with her car, or focus on Bush’s early DWI arrests or suggested cocaine use.

Like Shakespeare plotting one of his history plays, Stone condenses time, conflates characters and searches for themes. Critics can point to a zillion inaccuracies of fact, place, and time, but the history play is 50% poetry. Stone uses every artistic tool to squish four decades of Bush into a two-hour tragedy. It is, as he explains eloquently on the DVD commentary, an Icarus myth. Using the wings built by his father, George Jr. flew too close to the sun, the wings melted, and he came crashing down. We need to mythologize the past to understand it. Later, decades later, historians will unwrap the myth for a new generation.

This is what good art does. For almost a decade, we’ve been trying to sort out the details. Many of us were stunned that America twice elected a failed business owner, alcoholic-gone-born-again, inarticulate, C-student, prodigal son of the Bush dynasty to the Oval Office. All the flaws were there from the get-go. But as Karl Rove, the Iago of this tragedy, so cleverly divined, America was in the mood for a president whom they could have a beer with. And so, we got him, a man whose ultimate skill was ordering another round.

Stone says he stopped hating Bush when he began to understand him. Reading every book and article published during the Bush years, Stone crafted a "dumbed down" version of W, if such a thing is possible. We get to see the former Yale cheerleader, failed oilman, poker playing, likeable Bush in a three- act drama. We watch as the poor kid continually disappoints his father, finds his soul-mate Laura, gives up booze, locates Jesus, locates Karl Rove, discovers the Neo-Cons, and strikes out on his own. After an early political defeat Bush learns to "out-Texas Texas" and becomes governor, then leaps quickly into the White House before anyone is the wiser. That mistake of history, is likely Bill Clinton’s fault. Bush, once married, was apparently no philanderer. After Bill, America was leery of brilliant men who lied and cheated. They wanted a guy in a cowboy hat and holding a chainsaw who would tell you straight and take no guff.

It is all, Stone believes, about junior taking on daddy. And the Iraq War is all about finishing the job that daddy failed to do in the Persian Gulf. W wants to wipe out Saddam, who he sees as the embodiment of evil. But Bush is completely out of his element as president; the world is more complex than he imagined. The wheels are already falling off when the terrorists hit the World Trade Center in 2001. Suddenly it is a new game. America turns to its president, who turns to his hawk cronies (many of them former advisers to his father) and they cook up the revenge war in Iraq. Fearful, angry, and in shock, America turns itself over to a man who seems, from every book ever written on the topic, not to have had a single original idea in his life.

But Bush has plenty of friends and lots and lots of baggage, and he allows himself to be manipulated into becoming the "war president". With trumped-up facts and no clear plan, Bush avoids all diplomatic talk and plunges into action. Eventually he even tracks down and kills the man whom his father had left in power. It seems, for a moment, like a win of epic proportion. But, of course, it is exactly the opposite. The sun comes out, the wax wings melt, the son falls to earth and the planet suffers a meltdown. One weak, likeable, unqualified man -- instead of rising to his moment in history -- has screwed up the whole planet. Now we are all, every one of us, forced to mop up the mess.

Those of us who saw the whole thing coming (and I even wrote about it in the NH Gazette and here) find it hard not to gloat. But Oliver Stone is beyond that. What I expected to be a Bush-bashing film is perhaps the only truly humanizing portrait of the former president ever produced. We actually feel his pain, thanks to Stone’s script and Josh Brolin’s portrayal. Given every advantage and weapon on Earth, Bush still manages to screw up, and in Stone’s mind, turns his family hard-found legacy to mud. This is the stuff legends are made of, Stone knows, and people will be telling this tale around the campfire eons from now. Bush is a cautionary tale that our children must hear.

Certainly this is not a perfect movie. The ending assumes too much, and collapses too quickly. Stone skims right over the hanging of Saddam, that would seem a critical element of his theory. But it is a good movie, and more than that, it is an honest movie. Stone did his homework, and backs up his dramatic presentation with research listed on the DVD.

And perhaps, even better than the film itself, are Oliver Stone’s comments on the DVD. I almost always watch a good movie twice, clicking the commentary button ON under "Special Features". Usually the results are disappointing. Directors, actors, producers can be downright inarticulate while talking about their own work. But Stone is brilliant, kind, witty, and insightful. He talks seamlessly for two-hours, explaining and backing up every decision made on the film. Although he insists on calling Donald Rumsfeld "Rumsfield", I found Stone’s comments alone worth the price of the DVD. If anyone knows Bush, he does. And if we are to swerve from the next train wreck in history, we all need to know Bush better than he knows himself.  

Copyright © 2009 J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.