Oliver Stone's film "W." is an extraordinary referendum on our sitting president, George W. Bush. According to the film, Bush is a card-carrying born-again Christian (line of dialog: "I'll never be out-Christianed or out-Texaned again") who very much sees America's interests in the Middle East as a conflict between civilizations, a matter of good vs. evil. No surprises there.
But more excoriating portraits of Bush are easy to find, beginning with Michael Moore's brutal "Fahrenheit 9/11", which claim that Bush's primary motive in invading Iraq was control of the region's oil. "W." suggests that, though that Machiavellian master plan was certainly the secret motivation of Dick Cheney, the neo-conservative hawks, and the Pentagon, for Bush it was a simpler matter: plant the U.S. flag, watch democracy flourish, and let freedom reign.
This may not be the most felicitous time to humanize Bush, with his approval rating in the low 20th percentile (below Nixon after Watergate!). In fact, the timing of the film is all wrong; Americans are fixated on the economy, and are counting the days until the hated lame duck is swept out of sight. "W." was squarely trounced in its opening weekend by a film about a Chihuahua.
Stone, and his screenwriter Stanley Wiser (who gets an unusually significant nod in the credits) convincingly make the case that Bush was the wrong man to hold the highest office - ever. His silver spoon background, lack of hard knocks experience due to decades of drunken carousing and frequent bail-outs by the elder Bush, fuzzy grasp of issues like education and foreign policy, and general incompleteness (not weakness) of character made him unfit for the dizzying, complex demands of the job.
But never, ever does Stone suggest that Bush is a bad person. And at this time, some revisionist sympathy for the Devil feels right. Bush is humanized, in the film, largely through a depiction of a passionately loving relationship with the very wife he deserved (played by chameleonic Elizabeth Banks, never more gorgeous). Though he is certainly inarticulate, Bush is not portrayed as stupid, either ("Cs" at Yale? It's still Yale), though a combination of the Texas "plain talk" he strove for and his strict religion fostered dangerously black-and-white thinking.
Among his closest advisors are good men and bad. Dick Cheney, played by a very creepy Richard Dreyfuss, is a plotter and a snake in the grass. "Watch your ego - I'm the decider," W. verbally spanks him. Cheney skulks away, and in Dreyfuss's shoulders you can see countless sedimentary layers of impacted hate. Standing against Cheney, in a mutual arising of opposites, is the idealistic, battle-tested, wise sage Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright, lacking gravitas). This Powell is simplistically right about simply everything; but the self-immolation of an immaculate career, in the Yellowcake speech, is almost as painful as was the real thing.
The drama of whether Saddam's supposed search for uranium in Yellowcake from Africa would be included in Bush's speech before Congress is one of the defining moments of the Bush Presidency, and it's well vetted here. Again, surprisingly, though Bush is depicted with an itchy finger on the Iraq trigger, he never overtly asks for cooked-up intelligence. It is crystal-clear that he believed to his bones that Saddam was in bed with Bin Laden, was seeking a nuclear bomb, and had stockpiles of WMD's. When all of this proved to be mere shadows on the wall, Bush was hollowed out like a rotten tree, standing up dead in his shoes.
"W." should be palatable to viewers both red and blue, though both sides may be perturbed that it doesn't go far enough their way. But this is a thoughtful and entertaining movie that sometimes caricatures, but smartly ticks off the points we remember, orienting us to this particular fillet of a man's life. It's a point of view, all right, and pity the timing, because it actually stirs up a little hard-bitten compassion, a commodity in short supply during this electoral season.