OPINION:Oliver Stone's Bush film angers viewers by refusing to portray its subject as an idiot, writes John Waters
LAST SUNDAY, I went to see the new Oliver Stone movie, W. It was a biting cold day and, in the end, the cinema in Dún Laoghaire was half full, mainly with people who seemed to have taken Stone's name on the poster at face value. As the audience trooped in, juggling fizzy drinks and large popcorns, I had a flashback to 1991 and the first Gulf War, when, each evening while the battle lasted, there was a run on the off-licences because people were stocking up on beer on the way home from work, in preparation for a night in front of the war.
A majority of Sunday's audience would have been among those armchair warmongers, although there was a sprinkling of couples who had then not yet been born. Most seemed to have come to gloat. I heard a middle-aged woman behind me exhort her male companion: "Let's bury the bastard once and for all!" Though historiologically suspect, Stone's previous movies, JFK(1991) and Nixon(1995), made him the darling of the conspiracy theororising, left-liberal generations whose politics were forged by the Vietnam war. I avoided Nixonbecause of a queasiness about the creative abuse of fact in JFK, but was reassured to read that Stone is setting up a website to provide frame-by-frame verification for all but a handful of invented dream scenes in W.
A movie or theatre audience is often at least as interesting as what happens on screen or stage. The ohhs and ahhs, the intakes of breath, the banal repetition of obvious jokes, gives you an often pathos-laden sense of the needs, prejudices and vulnerabilities of an audience. The laughter, spontaneous or cultural, can tell you a lot about your neighbours.
This audience had come for laughs, to chuckle away the bitterly cold afternoon at the expense of this idiot those stupid Americans had allowed to be president for eight years.
But that is not what you get. What emerges from W. is an engaging portrait of a wounded and complex man, warm-hearted, funny, idealistic and, in a very specific sense, innocent. Stone loathes the Bush administration as much as any Guardianreader - in one interview describing its policies as insane. But in this movie he has passed up the easy option of giving his audience the trite answers it seems to want.
W. is neither hagiography nor savage satire. It is a faithful and workmanlike film that makes its artistic statement more in its engagement with its audience than in the pursuit of dramatic climax.
Stone forges his drama out of the turmoil of the Middle East and the Bush family romance. The first Gulf War, with its Scuds and popcorn, provides the focus of both elements. Beforehand, Stone sketches the relationship between the father and son who would serve as US presidents on either side of Bill Clinton, proposing the conflict in this relationship as the main formative influence in the character of the younger Bush.
As a young man, George W is driven by the desire to please his father, but doomed, always, to disappoint him.
Stone presents the invasion of Iraq not as the hubristic bloodthirstiness of popular myth, but as the culmination of a process characterised by mistakes, misinformation and misplaced idealism. He challenges popular assumptions about the relationship between Bush and Dick Cheney and deftly draws this psychodrama into a web of ideological manipulation with no distinct centre, while also sketching in the background of George jnr's belief that his father made a serious military and political error by not finishing Saddam off in 1991. What emerges is a personal tragedy for George W, as his desire to outdo his father comes to grief yet again, this time with global consequences.
Josh Brolin's George W is not a buffoon, at least not after he stops drinking, but a man of intense sincerity and charm, whose greatest defect seems to be his ordinariness. The portrayal of Bush's alcoholism is insightful and sensitive, and his Christianity is presented with disarming respect.
The Dún Laoghaire audience tried to latch on to a couple of early laughs, but found the humour drying up as Bush emerged as the kind of guy who knows what the joke is. After that, they harumphed a bit and got stuck into their popcorn. It is interesting to observe an audience with fixed prejudices about events being drawn into the logic of a drama that obeys the rules of story. Because of Stone's skill as a filmmaker, the onscreen character of Bush becomes separated from the public prejudice and the audience is forced, in spite of its politics, to identify with him. As they emerged, people seemed in a kick-the-cat mood, as though realising how they had been played.
With W., Stone confronts a culture which, while imagining itself sophisticated, is reduced to juvenile smirking at the mention of a single initial, suggesting a form of mass hypnosis that, were this culture capable of self-criticism, might provoke a discussion about the nature of thought in a mass media society. My guess, however, is that when the word gets out that W. doesn't deliver what was expected of it, Stone's movie will simply bomb.