The Column

Dubya: The Movie

Stone casts Bush in father-son melodrama

I hope I won't be labeled un-American for quoting Karl Marx: "History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

I wish Karl could have met George W. Bush, who managed to do both at the same time.

Thus it is inevitable that every film ever made about the Bush presidency will be imbued with an outsized comic presence, a testament to the fact that our 43rd idiot-child, bumblefuck president was a dreadful executive, a divisive, narrow-minded, intellectually pitiful leader—and goddamn goofilarious all at the same time.

Who better then to make the first movie about Bush than the equally grandiose, outsized ego of Oliver Stone? Say what you will about any of Stone's films (the historical inaccuracy of JFK, the hit-you-over-the-head moralizing of Natural Born Killers), he is the perfect director to give it a stab.

The portrait he creates is a tragic-comic marvel. Josh Brolin's performance as Bush is dead-on, even occasionally eerie, and lends the film enough gravitas to make it more than just an entertaining walk-through of the man's bewildering life story, complete with Hollywood staples dressed up as the Bush team (Dreyfuss as Cheney and Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell stand out particularly well, though). The film succeeds because it acknowledges the sheer bizarre nature of its own intentions: A film about a sitting president so outrageous and unlikely that if it had been pitched as fiction in, say, 1996, no one would buy it. Reviews would pull an Obama and call it "erratic" and perhaps "implausible and silly," and they would be right. When a film sets out to be as purposefully audacious as this one and succeeds, it is no small feat.

I could have done without the Daddy Complex, but Stone insists on envisioning Bush's entire life as a struggle to get out from under the shadow of his distinguished and accomplished father. To be fair, there is a lot of evidence that this isn't all that far from the truth (see Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy), but as a device in a film, it's somewhat hokey (or maybe I'm just too much of an optimist to believe that we sent thousands of American troops off to Iraq to be killed and maimed just because George H.W. Bush failed to tell Junior that he'd done good once in a while).

People will wonder about the accuracy of the film's depiction of events, so Stone set-up this handy website to let viewers fact-check the film's veracity. I've said it before, but in the years to come�as more "loyal Bushies" run to save their own legacies�we're going to start hearing some fairly disturbing tales about how this crew operated that will probably make this movie seem quaint.

Because he's in the news right now, it's fair to mention Powell's portrayal in the film�which is that of a loyal soldier who doesn't see the purpose of the Iraq invasion. Powell's much-publicized dissent will be kindly regarded by history (as will his principled endorsement of Obama), but perhaps nothing will help his legacy more than when he snarls, "Fuck you," at Dreyfuss's smug Dick Cheney. It certainly helped me forget that he went before the UN with that vial of make-believe anthrax.

A danger in the coming wave of Bush biopics that we're sure to see will be to lend him the benefit of the doubt, to romanticize him, or to forgive him. Stone's portrayal�while definitely not flattering�is still surprisingly kind. In painting this epic, somewhat scattershot tale of an absurdly unimpressive figure, he has buffed off the hard edges. The film is essentially all prologue and ends in 2004, before Iraq truly began its spiral into chaos, before Bush's savage reelection campaign, before Katrina, before wire-tapping, before torture, before the financial meltdown, before�well, the rest of the laundry list of screw-ups he and his pals are responsible for.

Furthermore, it glosses over well-documented moments of his life that shed light on what a truly ugly person he is. From the time he mocked a woman on Texas death-row to his disgusting, vile smears against John McCain in the South Carolina primary that essentially set Bush on his path to the White House. Some of the most troubling moments of his life were omitted or redacted for dramatic purposes.

Yet, for the most part, the movie confirms what most of us knew in the early '00s: That George W. Bush was the fuck-up son of a prominent aristocratic Republican, who spent most of his life wandering from failed endeavor to failed endeavor until he woke up from an alcoholic stupor at age 40 and decided he wanted to be president.

That once in office, he was molded and manipulated by ideologues with their own agendas, that he wasn't smart enough or able enough to understand�let alone anticipate�the repercussions of his policies. That in eight years he has left the American people with not just one steaming pile of shit, but about twenty, and that the work of fixing what he has broken will fall on the shoulders of elected officials for a generation.

Therefore, for entertainment purposes, I recommend seeing W. If you're looking for history, though, prepare to be much less impressed.