W.
W.
LIONSGATE UK
RELEASED 7 November 2008
Timed for release just three days after a new US President will be elected, ending eight years of George W. Bush, this Oliver Stone movie about the life of the second President Bush is possibly the most topical movie I can remember.
The film takes us on a snapshot tour of ‘Dubya’s early years, which mostly consisted of failure, and flashes forward to the second year of his presidency, and the hatching of plans to invade Iraq. The early years see a college fraternity initiation involving cold water, alcohol, and towel slapping, at which ‘our hero’ excels! There’s a drunken incident that sees ‘Poppy’ (George Bush Snr.) bail out his ‘disappointing’ son. Another time Bush Jnr. (Josh Brolin) drives up to the family residence late at night and knocks over the dustbins, with younger brother Jeb (and underage drinker) in tow. Dubya quits a job in the oil field, gets a girl pregnant, meets Laura (future wife, played by Elizabeth Banks) at a barbeque where she tells him how important education is to the US, and runs a baseball team in the eighties where he decides to run for Governor of Texas, which he fails at the first attempt. As the timeline catches up to the recent events depicted, we see Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) and President Bush (James Cromwell) celebrate the successful liberation of Kuwait, but Dubya is enraged that Saddam Hussein hasn’t been captured and Iraq invaded, which he says is why Bush loses to Clinton in 1992, in front of his family at the White House as the result comes in. George W. Bush seems to make it a matter of principle to make up for his dad’s error and ‘get’ Saddam, which he eventually does of course.
As a portrait of George W. Bush, ‘W.’ paints with large brush strokes. Most of the incidents and stories in the film are common knowledge, and of course Dubya’s relationship with his father, which plays a major role in the film, is all fictional and can be taken with a pinch of salt. I’d say the more recent events are possibly more accurate, seeing as so much more information is made public these days (and so much leaks out). There are a string of scenes in the movie where Dubya is alone in a baseball field, imaging he’s catching a long pitch. In one scene, he says it’s a place where he comes to clear his head, and the movie actually ends on one of these scenes. I presumed the film was suggesting Dubya would have liked to have spent his life in baseball rather than have been born a ‘Bush’ and all the pros and cons that name brings.
The movie is great entertainment in regard to spotting famous actors playing real-life American politicians. Richard Dreyfuss plays a slimy Dick Cheney, Toby Jones plays Karl Rove, Scott Glen is Donald Rumsfeld, an almost unrecognisable Thandie Newton plays ‘Condi’, Ellen Burnstyn dons a white wig as Barbara Bush, and a slightly bizarre-looking Ioan Gruffudd plays our own Tony Blair. Josh Brolin gives a tremendous performance as the pretzel-choking President, a performance which is a fully-rounded creation rather than an impersonation. By the end of the film, Brolin has completely become Bush, and I really do think he deserves all the award nominations that should come his way. After the career-making appearance in ‘No Country for Old Men’, Brolin is looking like one of the most exciting actors on the scene.
‘W.’ is a serious attempt at chronicling perhaps the simplest man ever to have been US President. It does bounce around between black comedy and parody, but there are quiet moments where Bush comes over as very sympathetic and well-meaning, which I’d say is probably way off the mark when we’re talking about a man that has given the United States of America such a bad name over the last eight years.
THREE OUT OF FIVE
