Oliver Stone's "W'

“W” is for Wall Street, a name in onerous disrepute these days; it is also for “Walker,” the middle name of our 43rd president and familiar shorthand to distinguish him from George Herbert Walker Bush, his father and predecessor in the White House. What’s in a name, or the lack of one? Did a few genes go missing along with the missing “Herbert,” turning our passably bad 41st president (biggish recession, humongous deficit, gratuitous war with Panama, fateful engagement with Iraq) into the unqualified disaster of our 43rd?

This is the question that exercises Oliver Stone, also the director of Wall Street, in the character study of W. Stone seems to take the calamity of the second Bush regime for granted, and to assume that his audience needs no further rehearsal of it. What interests him is not the how and what of it, but the why.

He locates the latter in a textbook Oedipal complex. It’s hard to please Dad, especially when he's the censorious hard-ass portrayed by James Cromwell; and it’s hard to beat him, too, particularly when Dad keeps raising the bar: ambassador to China, director of the CIA, vice president of the U. S., and finally president.

Stone is not the only observer to descry Oedipal issues between Bush père and fils, and 43 has given credence to them in his famous reply to the question of whether he’d conferred with his father before invading Iraq: “I consulted a higher Father.” The elder Bush’s reaction to that remark has not as yet been revealed for history, but in 2006 he did famously break down in tears at a ceremony in the Florida House of Representatives marking the end of Jeb Bush’s tenure as governor. “No one who knows George H. W. Bush,” his former speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote in reporting the event in the Wall Street Journal, “thinks that moment was only about Jeb.” It is common knowledge that Bush Sr. had groomed Jeb as his White House successor, having passed over his elder son George as hopelessly unqualified.

Echoes of Fredo Corleone

Here was the material of Shakespearean tragedy indeed, if only the Bushes had met the standards of a Henry IV and Prince Hal. Instead, on the level to which they actually belong, one is reminded of Fredo Corleone in The Godfather, finally bursting out with resentment of his younger brother Michael at having been passed over in the family business: “I’m smart, Mikey! I’m smart!”

Oliver Stone, heaven knows, is no Shakespeare in any case, but an amusing cartoonist who paints in broad strokes and loves a good villain. That leaves him at a loss in dealing with Bush, who seems to have wrought far more evil than he was intellectually capable of. Stone deals with this challenge by relegating the actual record— 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and Katrina— to a few incidental shots and passing references (the tsunami of our Wall Street collapse, which seems to be rolling all these disasters into one, came of course too late for the film).

Stone portrays Bush (Josh Brolin) as a frat boy and ne’er-do-well whose various escapades, sexual and commercial, constitute a desperate if unacknowledged bid for paternal attention. Each one puts W. deeper and deeper in the doghouse, until Cromwell’s stiffly Ivy League H. W. administers the coup de grace: “You’re a disappointment to me, Junior.”

The father’s goofy side

Bush Senior, as those of us who endured his own presidency will recall, is a man with his own goofy side, and, like his son, with no mean flair for mangling the King’s English. Cromwell’s version of the elder Bush is rigidly one-dimensional, a performance Steven Weiser’s scrambled script leaves this fine actor no alternative to delivering. The only human interaction between the two men comes in their shared affection for baseball, which acts as a leitmotif in the film for W.’s fantasy life. (Could W. have been a worse commissioner of baseball than Bud Selig? One wonders.)

Oedipal dramas have a female component, too, and one suspects that the steely Barbara Bush had as much if not more to do with W.’s lack of self-worth than his father did. But Ellen Burstyn has only a walk-on role as the First Mom and displays nothing of the remarkable personality who could remark of the Katrina victims stranded in mass shelters that it was an upgrade in their standard of living, and who could dismiss the prospect of coffins coming back from Iraq because she did not want to waste her “beautiful mind” over it. If we are thinking Shakespearean here, Lady Macbeth comes to mind; but if Barbara has ever found blood on her hands that won’t wash off, there is no mention of it in the record.

This pretty much leaves us with W. himself. Josh Brolin captures his nervous energy and jocular charm (Fredo had the same qualities) and the quite intense frustration that led W. to the bottle when he failed at one venture after another. The transformation of this dead-end kid into presidential timber is given shorter shrift, however, and the deft theft of the White House in 2000 by family consigliere James Baker is passed over almost entirely.

A Saul of Tarsus moment

The result is that we are propelled from one biographical moment to another without much dramatic rationale. W.’s decision to give up drinking— staged as a Saul of Tarsus moment— is offered as one turning point, and the steadying influence of wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks) as another. We see W. find his political métier as his father’s campaign manager in the 1988 presidential campaign, which set the modern standard for sleaze in the infamous Willie Horton ad, and vent his frustration when he was cut out in 1992 by the aforesaid Baker, who of course failed his client then. W. would never make the mistake of not dealing from the very bottom in his own presidential runs, though the same magic failed John McCain.

We learn little of W. the president either. In one scene, he leads his sweating cabinet on a forced march through the heat of a Texas summer, only to discover himself lost. That, I suppose, is a parable for the Iraq quagmire, but it does little to explain the arrogance and idiocy of it. A very brief shot has the hands of Bush and Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton, wearing a prosthesis) crossing over some papers on a table, presumably to suggest erotic tension. Well, it isn’t that we haven’t wondered just a bit about the Great Decider and Madame Secretary. But that, too, goes nowhere, a throwaway shot in a throwaway film.

Who ran this presidency?

Was there really a Bush presidency? Yes and no may be the closest thing to an answer. A neocon mafia, the so-called Vulcans, rode into power on Bush’s coattails, determined to finish off Iraq and throw America’s weight around generally. Their point man was Dick Cheney, who in the Stone version— possibly not inaccurate— learned to play Bush with a combination of deference and flattery. The real presidency, I suspect, went on in the bowels of the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and in the vice president’s basement. Bush knew what he needed to. He was never, as all observers agree, a very curious man.

W. was shot in 46 days, and it looks it. The Bush presidency will have lasted for 2,922 days before it mercifully ends, and America looks it, too. In a recent poll of 109 historians, 61 rated the Bush presidency as the worst ever. The runner-up? No, not Richard Nixon, but James Buchanan. Say what you will of Nixon (who had no very high regard for Bush Senior either), but he would not have sent George W. Bush out for a pack of cigarettes.