By CATHERINE MOORE, camoore@bu.edu
BOSTON, Mass. (11/3/2008) -- George W. Bush is the type of guy you want to sit down and have a beer with. At least that’s the message Republican political strategist Karl Rove wanted to portray to the American public in the 2000 presidential elections.
Oliver Stone had that same idea in mind while directing Emperor Motion Pictures’ recent film, “W.” that was released October 17, 2008. The film illustrates the life and controversial two-term presidency of George W. Bush, giving the viewer a sense of the American president’s humanity, with a little more negativity than Rove would ever advertise.
President Bush (Josh Brolin) jumpstarts his political career in the same manner that he would get a cow moving on his ranch in Midland, Texas: a nice kick in the behind. Impulsive and flawed of character, Bush is just like any other run of the mill American—except that he’s in the public eye, he’s a Bush.
Elected governor of Texas in 1994 and son of one-term American President George H. W. Bush (James Cromwell), Bush Jr. has always been in the people pleasing game when it came to his father. Constantly striving to prove his worth to a disappointed Bush Sr., Stone shows Bush’s vulnerability in the presence of his father and his addiction to alcohol as a result of this pressure to live up to his expectations.
When Bush crashes his car into the front of his family’s home at the wee hours of the morning after a long night of partying and “carrying on,” Bush senior confronts his inebriated son. “My advice to you, Junior, is to get yourself to an AA meeting,” says Bush Sr.
Perhaps as a result of his alcoholism or the nature of his character, Bush seems to be going nowhere in life. “You disappoint me, Junior,” says Bush Sr. at more than one occasion throughout the movie. “You deeply disappoint me. You haven’t kept your word once, not once.”
Scenes such as these evoke a surprising degree of empathy from the viewer, causing him or her to question whether this emotion was what script writer Stanley Weiser intended when he chose to focus the bulk of the film on the dysfunction of the Bush father-son relationship.
Bush, after making it through Yale University by the seat of his pants, tries jobs as an oil worker, a salesman at a sporting goods store, a ranch hand, and a position in the Air National Guard. Bush Sr. pronounces them all failures. Comparing Bush to his older brother, Jeb, Bush Sr. is disgusted with his son’s lack of work ethic and, frankly, his lack of any sort of moral ethic whatsoever.
In one scene towards the beginning of the film, Stone shows Bush returning to his father’s office to ask for help in bailing himself out. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the film, as George W. Bush, patronizingly called “Jr.” by his father, consistently fails to live up to the Bush family name.
The epitome of Bush’s corrupt party life during his young adulthood is illustrated in one of these office scenes when Bush pays a visit to daddy. The morning after a carousing night at a bar, Bush wakes up and finds that he has proposed to a woman he has no intention of marrying. When he threatens to end it, she makes up a rumor that has impregnated her. “I use a condom, Pappy, I’m not stupid,” says Bush.
A less than pleased Bush Sr. responds to his son’s continual failures with accumulating frustration. After his son’s multiple mess-ups in the job market and academically, he is at a loss as to how to help him.
“Who do you think you are, a Kennedy?” Bush Sr. says. “You’re a Bush. We’ve always worked for a living and it’s high time you joined us.”
Unbeknownst to his father, Bush takes this advice to heart and after straightening out his life, he decides to make something out of it, or to at least try. In the office of Pastor Earle Hudd (Stacey Keach), Bush finds Jesus. With an over the top southern accent, the pastor instructs a crying Bush to let Jesus lift the weight of sin from his shoulders.
“Born again, W, that’s what you are,” says Pastor Hudd. With hymns playing in the background, Pastor Hudd repeats John 3:16 from the Bible and he tells Bush to “take the baton, reach out and treat everyone you meet like they are going to be dead at midnight.” To this perplexing advice, Pastor Hudd says, “Love without hope of reward.” To push the scene even farther, Stone has Pastor Hudd plant seeds in Bush’s mind that will one day lead him to the Oval Office. “We are a country of wounded sinners,” says Pastor Hudd. “We are a nation, a Christian nation.”
The next scene, go figure, Stone has Bush announcing his presidential aspirations. “What if I tell you that I’m ready to get into the family business?” says Bush to his family and friends one night at his parents’ home. Everyone assumes he means the oil business. Bush means politics. He then reveals his decision to run for President of the United States, to the chagrin of his shocked parents and advisors.
Barbara Bush (Ellen Burstyn), matriarch of the Bush clan, has a harsh reality she feels obligated to relay to her son. “The fact is you can’t win,” says Barbara. “Why do you say that?” says Bush. “Because you’re just like me,” Barbara says. “You have a big mouth and a short fuse.” Bush is not discouraged because he doesn’t see that as an issue.
“I’m in touch with real people everyday,” says Bush at the start of his campaign. He thinks that’s enough to get him to the White House, and it is.
Stone uses Bush’s time on the campaign trail to reveal the first glimpse of his complete lack of intellect. The scenes are shot from in front of Bush, with reporters and newsmen crowded around him, pelting him with questions. Bush’s young librarian wife and fellow Texan, Laura (Elizabeth Banks), follows behind him, pictured over Bush’s left shoulder on the screen. She pretty much keeps her mouth shut like a good southern wife, a slight smile at the corners of her mouth, as if she were humoring her husband.
In what many republicans would label “borderline criminal,” the film is filled with moments which highlight Bush’s ignorance, lack of tact, and plain stupidity.
Bush is shown to be incompetent in press conferences. In one scene, Bush is shown passionately answering a reporter’s question. He says, “Rarely is the question asked, ‘is our children learning?’”
In another scene, Bush just seems so flat out naïve that it is embarrassing for the American people to call him President. He visits a severely burned soldier, hospitalized from fighting in Iraq. He approaches him and immediately begins to speak in his choppy Spanish, assuming that he is Mexican because of the color of his unburnt skin. When he returns Bush’s questions in fluent English, Bush is taken aback. He then gives the soldier’s mother a T-shirt for her son, to commemorate his sacrifice to the country. On his way out, Bush squeezes the soldier’s puss-filled, bandaged thumb in what must have been an excruciating gesture for the soldier.
Highlighting only grammatically incorrect responses such as this, without also showing Bush’s positive leadership role on September 11, 2001, and at other times throughout his political career, leads the viewer to conclude that Stone is out to get Bush. Perhaps in showing the negative in Bush’s life, Stone intends to slander Bush, but his motives may go deeper than that.
It may be that Stone is making a political move. It seems like more than coincidence that a comedic mockery of the present Republican American leadership is released a week before Election Day 2008, an election that remains close between Democrats and republicans. Is it coincidence that the Democrats attack the Republican Party by deeming candidate John McCain, synonymous to Bush? The film makes one question whether he is synonymous to the Bush portrayed in “W” as stupid, incompetent, and flawed of character. Who would want to vote for him?
