Ames Progressive

The George W. Bush that we know today is an irrelevant figurehead, a leader leading no one, a placeholder with a highly anticipated expiration date. He has less-than-zero influence in the international community, he is thoroughly disapproved of in his own country, and his own political party pays little attention to his pronouncements and makes every effort to disown him. His coolly received speech “at” the Republican National Convention this year was delivered from afar and communicated by way of a gigantic screen behind the podium. For almost all the rest of the convention, Bush was carefully ignored. John McCain, for his part, has made a desperate, and unsuccessful, effort to distinguish himself from Bush in the past few months of the 2008 presidential campaign and has promised, echoing his opponent, that “change is coming.” In the third presidential debate, McCain said plainly, and rather peevishly, “I am not George Bush.” Hell, no one wants to be George Bush now, and especially not a political candidate. But the most telling instance of Bush’s political impotence came when the House Republicans rejected the first proposal of the bailout bill, in spite of Bush’s apocalyptic warnings about the financial crisis and his desperate plea to congress for the 700 billion dollar bailout.

The bailout will be one of the central and most consequential legacies of the Bush administration and this fact testifies to the depth of Bush’s failures. Bush’s rise to power was made possible by a generation-long conservative movement premised on the twin beliefs that big governments are ineffective and morally objectionable and that markets must be left to follow their own logic, free of government intervention. And now Bush has presided over – and demanded – the greatest socialization of financial markets in American history. Through Bush, the conservative movement has erased itself.

So, this is the state of the Bush administration as it comes to an end; but, how did we get here? Oliver Stone’s film W. attempts to answer this question by providing a portrait of the man that follows him from his college years until the end of his first term in office, by which time the Iraq war has begun its descent into chaos. Stone’s story does not offer a revisionist version of the events but rather reinforces common perceptions of Bush’s development and political career. The film mirrors the standard perception of Bush’s personality, as well. He is depicted as a charming but dim-witted man whose swaggering self-confidence is not matched by his abilities.

Stone tells Bush’s story by jumping back and forth from Bush’s presidency to his earlier years of boozing, networking, meeting Laura (Elizabeth Banks), getting saved, finding and losing jobs and, finally, getting into politics. Near the start of the film, Bush (Josh Brolin) and his legendary first-term cabinet are in the midst of a meeting and are busy discussing the language they could use to sell the Iraq war to the American people; they eventually coin the phrase “axis of evil” which, as we know, was often repeated by Bush and his surrogates in the build-up to the war. The film then cuts back to Bush’s college years at Yale, showing the young man as he is subjected to his fraternity’s hazing ritual. The hazing scene has strong undertones of torture and, later in the film, Bush recalls the hazing ritual when he is briefed on his administration’s position on the use of torture by Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss). Jumping through time allows Stone to easily extract the symbolism from Bush’s biography.

As the film cuts from young W. to President Bush and back, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser emphasize W.’s relationship with his father, George H.W. Bush (James Cromwell). The dynamic of this relationship has been a theme among Bush biographers and political pundits for years and the film embraces this approach to understanding Junior’s development. Bush Sr. is rather viciously portrayed as an angry, self-heroizing man who manipulates his son by withholding approval and respect. The young W. is simultaneously devastated and enraged by his father’s repeated disappointment in him. W. seeks his father’s approval and respect but he also wants to surpass George Sr. and the film depicts some of W.’s key decisions as attempts to out-do the old man. In the film, W.’s determination to topple Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq is motivated, in large part, by a deep need to prove to his father that he had misplayed his hand by not going into Baghdad and taking out Saddam in the first Gulf War. The elder Bush, for his part, disapproves of his son’s war plans. In a fascinating scene, Bush Sr. and Barbara Bush (Ellen Burstyn) watch the iconic toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue on TV and the former president coolly observes that toppling a statue of Saddam is not the same as capturing the man. The film suggests that Bush’s disapproval of his son is so great that, deep down, he wants his son to fail.

And fail he does! The story of George W. Bush is a spiraling series of failures and Stone is eager to find the interpersonal and psychological sources of Bush’s destructive and deceptive presidency. The sources are not to be found in Bush’s life alone, though, and Stone dramatizes the power of Bush’s first term cabinet in determining the course of the administration. Bush is most powerfully influenced by Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and Karl Rove (Toby Jones), who manipulate Bush and shape his policies while simultaneously making the president feel that he is in charge. These figures, more than Bush himself, receive the film’s harshest treatment.

Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Bush’s first secretary of state, is exempted from the treatment given to the rest of cabinet. On the morning of the day I saw the film, the real Colin Powell had burst back into national headlines by endorsing Barack Obama on Meet the Press. Though the former general has not been in public service for four years, his endorsement has been one of the most widely discussed in the whole campaign, which testifies to Powell’s enduring influence over public perception.

In the first Bush term, Powell was often cited as a positive influence within the administration and his presence in the cabinet was, for many, a source of confidence. Bush and his cabinet members understood the deep respect for Powell among the public and they exploited it in the build-up to the war. In the film, Bush watches Powell on television as he testifies before the United Nations on the evidence of weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein’s government. Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton) watches the scene with Bush and they are pleased with Powell’s performance; they know that people take the man at his word.

Of course, there were not weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: Powell lied. He had resisted the more hawkish members of the administration in the build-up to the war and had argued against unilateral military action. In the end, though, he determined to follow the president and the rest of the cabinet in their plans to attack Iraq. His testimony at the UN was a crucial moment in shaping public opinion about the necessity of the war. Powell has expressed regret about his contribution to the pre-war propaganda and misinformation and he has acknowledged that it is a stain on his career.

In his endorsement of Obama, Powell – a moderate Republican – took the time to condemn the campaign tactics of John McCain, many of which were taken straight from the playbook of McCain’s old rival, Bush; Powell’s endorsement of the Democratic candidate was also a dis-endorsement of the GOP as it exists today.

W. is a fun film to watch and will be fascinating for viewers who are already fascinated by President Bush, the world’s most comical war criminal. But the film adds nothing new to our understanding of W. or of recent history. Stone makes an entertaining show of Bush’s personal and public history without ever straying from common, even stereotyped, perceptions of the events. The actors, for their part, do excellent impersonations of their subjects but make no effort to go past the televised surface of their subjects. It is as though everyone involved in the film wants to say something important about the Bush administration, but no one wants to contradict any one else. The result is a well-made political biography with no heart and no heat.