Last night, I went to the wonderful Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar and attended a screening of Oliver Stone’s new film, W.. As is usually the case with Drafthouse, there were various related bits of media shown before the film, to entertain the audience.

If you’re uninitiated, Drafthouse is a great chain of theatres here in Austin that serves great meals during your moviegoing funtime and has strict ’shut the hell up and keep the kids outta’ here’ policies that make it one of the best places to watch movies. One of the things they do is find interviews, televisions shows, web videos, etc. that are related to the feature, and play them before the movie starts for the audience as they’re sitting there waiting.

So last night we were treated to Colbert’s Presidential Roast from 2006 (I think that’s when it was), as well as the web video for “Oliver Stone’s P.” - a flash trailer that jokingly shows us what an Oliver Stone biopic about Palin would be like. I’d seen it online, but it was interesting to see it on the big screen. All in all, that’s Drafthouse.

The main show came on, and I sat there, enjoying Brolin’s turn as George W. Bush, Dreyfuss as Cheney, not loving Tandy Newton as Condoleeza Rice (but not hating it either) and just soaking in Stone’s particular viewpoint on what the life of GWB must have been like. As a film, it did it’s job. It entertained me, it made me laugh, it gave me a protagonist I could sympathize with, and while it didn’t give me an ending, that was okay, because the ride had been good enough.

But something about the movie didn’t sit right with me. I’ll confess I was a W. supporter in 2000 and 2004. In fact, in 2000, I was a John McCain supporter, but when he lost the bid, I became a Bush backer. I lived in Texas, our surplus was high, the state was in a good position, and everyone loved W. Most of all, the guy was likable, and while he fumbled his words on occasion or maybe made up a few of his own, he seemed to understand the problems the country was facing and had an idea of how to fix them.

Imagine a film about your life, where the director & writer ignored how you got to where you were, what you had done right, and the good about you - and focused only on the mistakes, and hid your journey. This is W.

Short Term Memory

Now, if you’re too young to have really been paying attention during the 2000 election (and maybe the 2004 election), and your only exposure to GWB was the film W., then this would all come as a shock to you.

The truth is, as dumb as Bush may seem to be now, he didn’t seem that way in 2000 or even 2004. The guy had ideas, the guy was relatively quick witted, and he beat the pants off of Al Gore and John Kerry in debates. Bush had specific plans, specific goals, specific ideas and he wanted to implement them. There wasn’t just the broad talking about ‘we need to make America great!’ or that sort of talk, he spoke of No Child Left Behind (which seemed better on paper than in reality), he spoke of a plan to fix Social Security, he had ideas about having the US no longer nation-build, etc. Bush had ideas, he had goals, he had plans, and they were tangible, well thought out, and he delivered his desire to make these plans a reality with a likability and gravity that many who don’t remember 2000 would have a hard time believing.

But the portrayal of George W. Bush shown in Oliver Stone’s film isn’t real. By any means. I didn’t by it for a minute, I couldn’t find myself to ever actually believe this is what the man was like, because the truth of what he’d shown us was so vastly different. And I think it was this left-wing opinion of Bush, this “Bush is a total idiot who doesn’t know anything” concept that caused the Democrats to lose 2 elections in a row to this guy.

Because that’s not who he was. W. has never really seemed to be a guy that would just go out there and say whatever people wanted, not believing them himself. Bush very clearly knows what he wants to do, knows what he wants to happen, but just doesn’t know how to actually make it happen. And that’s where he gets in trouble.

Bush wants to go to war with Iraq. He wants to stop terror. Bush doesn’t really know how to do that, so he surrounds himself with people he trusts, and says, ‘Okay guys, I want to accomplish this goal, and I’m going to trust you to do it.’

At least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten from Bush. The film showed something different - it showed a GWB who didn’t know what he wanted to do, had to have people tell him, and then he just let them do whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place.

According to Oliver Stone, GWB was barely more than a silly, likable guy who had other people fill his mouth with words, and his head with whatever they wanted, and then let him be the one out in front of the world. I just don’t think that rings true. At least, not at first.

I think we need look no fruther than the present financial crisis to get an idea on how Bush probably operates: Bush saw a problem with the economy. He goes to his guys, he goes to Paulson, and says, ‘Hey, there’s a problem. I want you to fix it’ and then he lets Paulson figure out how to accomplish that. Bush seems to trust the people he puts into power and positions, to a fault, and after giving them an assignment, he doesn’t check it to see if it’s right or wrong, he just goes with it. Because that’s his leadership style - Delegation to the point of obscenity.

But this film paints him as nothing more than a puppet at all times, falling from point to point, bit to bit, having people tell him what to do, and Bush just choosing to do that. And it’s important to note:

Stone doesn’t show much of Bush’s life - only big moments Stone thinks are important. We don’t see Bush decide to stop drinking, we only see him 6 months later, when he’s praying. We don’t see Bush winning an election, we see him relying on Rumsefeld and Cheney on what to do with Iraq. Because whenever he can, as a director, Stone does not want to show us Bush actually being the decider, the guy in charge - because that doesn’t fit into his vision for Bush. And as a filmmaker, making art, that’s fine. But as a representation of what the man is probably like, it’s a failure.

Sarah Palin

Now, for the W = P thing. My girlfriend Angela, when we were driving from the theatre, mentioned how she thought this film gave us a glimpse into a Palin presidency. I’d never thought of that before. I never thought this was the case, I was just watching the film, thinking how off-the-mark it was when it came to representing the GWB we’d all really seen. But her comments rang very true to me - and very much, I see that Palin is that figure we see in Oliver Stone’s film.

Do you want to see what it’s like when you take someone out of their element, take someone out of their world they understand, and thrust them onto the national stage, fill their head with phrases and try to make them spout stuff they don’t necessarily believe? Look at Sarah Palin at the debates. Or in interviews. Or on the stump. That’s a good indication of what someone looks like when they don’t really believe or understand what they’re being asked to spout.

If you compare Bush’s performance in the debates to that of Palin’s against Biden, you won’t see any similarities, unless you’re looking for winks and likability. Except that Bush is genuinely likable, or at least, he was back then. He was smiling, he was funny, the country wasn’t in a war, and Bush seemed to be just as good of a guy to give the reigns to as Al Gore had been.

But Palin doesn’t perform that way. Because as much as people would like to say Palin is another GWB, Palin isn’t. She’s far, far, far worse. Because Palin has had no interest in the national stage, she’s had no experience with international politics or running domestic issues on a truly large scale. GWB had his father’s campaigns to help him understand these things, and that’s probably where (as the film shows seemingly accurately) that Bush got bit by the bug to go into big-time politics again. And when GWB realized he could probably win the whole thing.

Rambling

I’m rambling some here, so I hope you’ve been able to follow my thought process. It’s scattered, because it’s all very interesting and strange to me, for me to be sitting here, defending GWB, who I feel betrayed me as a voter and an American citizen, but when it comes down to it - I don’t buy Stone’s portrayal at all. I don’t think it’s real, I don’t think it’s accurate, I don’t think it shows us how GWB operates or how smart the guy is.

But I do think it’s very, very clairvoyant as to what a Sarah Palin Presidency would be. And that alone is a reason you should see it.

W. glosses over most of the man’s life: how he got elected to the governorship, how Texas loved him as governor and he did great things for the state financially, how he was able to out-debate and out-campaign Al Gore in 2000, his marriage to Laura, the raising of their daughters, the failures and successes he had as a business man. On and on.

The film stops before the 2004 election, which leads me to believe we’ll be getting a companion film to this one. But considering what Oliver Stone left out, I don’t have much desire to see it, because it’s going to be more of the same: ignoring most facets of the story, and focusing only on the one that paints the portrait you want the world to see.

And painting one that looks far more like Josh Brolin than George W. Bush.

As a film: 6.0
As a representation of GWB: 3.5