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I came home from a much-deserved vacation last week to discover my roommates had, in my absence, drawn more than 70 clowns on my bedroom walls.
I think that mixture of shock, dismay and amusement would be about the same for anyone who went into a coma 10 years ago, when the country was peaceful and prosperous, and just woke up to find we're slogging through two wars, descending into a recession no one really understands, and with a president whose approval rating is the same as Nixon's right before his resignation.
No, none of that's a joke, except in the sense that it is.
Unlike walls full of clowns, it takes more to change a political landscape than a bucket of paint and punching your friends in the nose. Just understanding what happened could take years, even decades -- so it's no major surprise that Oliver Stone's W., a biopic of President George W. Bush, is here before the man's second term has ended.
W. tells two parts of the same story: the buildup to the second Iraq War and the life that led Bush (played by Josh Brolin) to the position to declare it.
As a young man, Bush, standing in the shadow his congressman father (James Cromwell), doesn't look like much: an alcoholic tail-chaser who can't hold down a job and needs his dad to get him out of ceaseless trouble.
His ascendancy takes time -- and doesn't really begin until he's already lost a congressional election and become a born-again Christian.
Writer Stanley Weiser hits a lot of the key moments of Bush's life, including a couple transformational ones, but in terms of understanding how Bush went from a drunk-driving screwup to a sober screwup in charge of the entire damn world, the explanation sometimes comes off shallow. Almost inevitable in a movie that covers 40 years of a man's life, maybe, but it rarely feels revelatory.
W. is stronger when it comes to the relationship and rivalry between Bush Jr. and Sr. In there, Cromwell finds a deep sympathy in the elder Bush -- a man who's a thoughtful and effective politician, but can never find the emotional strength to reach out to his son -- while Brolin drops so deeply into the role of the president that I often caught myself scowling and saying very mean things inside my head before remembering it's only a movie and I should save my anger for what's truly important, like how now that Elizabeth Hurley's apparently stopped making movies, I might never see her naked.
The first-term cabinet's just as good as Brolin. Richard Dreyfuss channels his inner Emperor Palpatine to capture the intelligent menace of Dick Cheney; his simmering rivalry with Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) throws much-needed tension onto the administration's insular ramp-up to war.
The fun of a pitch-perfect cast can only carry it so long. W.'s chief problem is it just doesn't dig that deep into its subject.
Anyone who's existed this millennium is probably already familiar with Bush's boozy extended boyhood (I'm presently trying to duplicate that part myself) and that, when they told us Iraq had uranium and WMDs, they might not have been telling the whole truth. Given the chance to delve into the human side of the man who -- love him or hate him -- is responsible for such a drastic change in the national course, Stone and Weiser don't strike very far into uncharted territory.
Bummer, because the moments when they do are pretty special.
Otherwise, W. isn't all that insightful or provocative. (In fairness, when so much of your material already reads like a farce -- "Is our children learning?" springs to mind, as well as that whole manipulating us into war thing -- there might be some outrage-exhaustion at work here.) Without that, W. feels more like the start of a discussion than a conclusion.
Grade: B-
