Oliver Stone's W came out over the weekend and I found the movie to be hugely entertaining. According to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, viewers were mostly liberals and that is truly a shame because Stone was surprisingly fair to Bush and I think the film would have been enjoyed even by the 25-percenters. In fact I wonder if there weren't some disappointed progressives who had gone to watch it hoping for a good Bush-Bashing.
Stone's Bush was a good guy who did his best, but basically found himself overcome by circumstances and world events. Even the Neocon argument for War is presented plausibly. Stone could have taken a cheap shot at the Bush-Cheney relationship, presenting Cheney as a Svengali-figure, but he doesn't. Instead he paints a nuanced picture of the relationship that shows that Bush knew exactly what Cheney was up to, and though he often agreed with Vice's (Bush's nickname for the Veep) conclusions, at one point in the film Stone has Bush remind him that he's the "decider" an that Cheney is not to speak at meetings.
Stone even presents Bush's conversion to Christianity respectfully and except for a dream sequence, from what I could tell, the film was a meticulously accurate portrayal-right down to Bush's allegedly having passed out after choking on a pretzel.
I emerged from the film not feeling angry at Bush, but with sadness for a good guy who tried his best, but perhaps wasn't ready for the difficult job that circumstances handed him.
But what is even more interesting to me is trying to figure out what Stone is up to with W.
In a recent interview he talked about the first time he met George W. Bush at a breakfast of entertainment executives in 1998. I was there that morning at the Beverly Hills Hotel along with Stone, Erik Estrada, one of those kids from Saved By The Bell and 300 others to hear the Texas Governor speak.
Stone recalled that Bush had talked to us about having carried out executions as Governor and while I don't recall that, what I clearly do recall was what Stone didn't mention: Speaking a few miles from where most of the world's porn is produced, Bush told us that the best social policy a nation could have would be for each person to have one lifetime sexual partner. You can imagine how that went over in Beverly Hills. There was no applause, only stunned silence.
In W Stone advances the theory that Bush's presidency was really all about working out issues that he'd always had with his father, having spent most of his life living in his shadow. His attempts to one-up Dad included invading Iraq, an attempt to finish the job that Poppy Bush never properly completed in the Gulf War. It's an interesting and compelling theory, but since turnabout is fair play, I wonder if W might not also be a venue for Stone to work out some of his issues with his own father, and if Bush's comments that day in Beverly Hills might not have triggered in Stone a deep resentment for Bush that even he may not fully understand.
Stone's biography notes that the director's father helped his son lose his virginity by taking him to a prostitute when he was a teenager, and engaged in numerous extramarital affairs with the wives of several family friends which led to the breakup of Stone's parents marriage.
Perhaps somebody should make a biopic of Oliver Stone's life, examine his relationship with his father and explore this question: Is W the movie, really Stone's way of expressing anger at his own father for the havoc he wreaked on his life and whose destructive sexual habits destroyed a happy family and set a son on a course of equally destructive behavior that has produced two broken marriages and counting?
Was Bush41 the father Stone never had, but wishes he did? And does he wonder how different his life might have been had he had a father like W's?
And was this father-son angst triggered by those comments from George W. Bush that morning in Beverly Hills, causing Stone to, in some weird example of displacement, channel his anger for his father toward a hapless lame duck President?
