From the sound of it, the most interesting thing about Oliver Stone's
W. may be what's
not in it. According to Richard Berke in
The New York Times, among the sequences that Stone filmed but cut from the finished movie are a dream sequence showing Saddam Hussein sitting with Bush in the White House when Bush chokes on that pretzel, and a scene in which "Mr. Bush flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet as the bombs rain down." Stone also cut a scene that documents a real but weird event, "where Mr. Bush was flying a faltering Cessna over Texas with his friend Don Evans, who was later commerce secretary." Has Stone been spooked a bit? Back in the days when he made movies about how, as Berke puts it, "President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of gay anti-Communists", Stone was one of those guys, like Rush Limbaugh and Spike Lee, who demanded an extra degree of respect because of the "impact" they were trying to have on American politics and history, but who, once their accuracy was questioned, would start insisting that they were just trying to entertain.
W. was made in a quick 46 days: Stone began work on it after his long-in-the-planning My Lai movie was cancelled and completed it in time for a pre-Election Day release date, the thinking being that
after Election Day, nobody's going to give a rat's ass. Since Stone doesn't have the benefit of contemplative hindsight with regard to Bush's presidency--the movie was in the can before the Wall Street meltdown, sure to be remembered as one of the two or three major events of the Dubya era, even occurred--his handling of the subject might have benefited from some flights of fantasy and a loose, dirty political cartoonist's approach. But Stone has indicated that he tried to veer away from that sort of thing, in part because he felt burned about the scolding he got from historians for
JFK. He doesn't seem to understand why satirical fantasy and fictionalized conjecture about a sitting president fall under a different heading of "artistic license" than treating Jim Garrison's bug-eyed conspiracy theories as a legitimate grounds for going on
Nightline to talk trash about Lyndon Johnson and the Warren Commission. Perhaps the strangest omission is Stone's explanation that, because he wanted to make a movie focused on the Iraq war, he didn't want to get into 9/11. That's bound to strike a lot of people as (oh, say) like saying that you want to find a way to solve the problem of global warming without determining what caused it in the first place.
The current issue of
Texas Monthly includes a restaurant-dinner round table discussion (not available on-line) of the movie that includes feedback from pop historian Douglas Brinkley, Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram movie critic Christopher Kelly, fabled indie movie agent John Pierson, and Screenwriter Anne Rapp--none of whom had of course actually
seen the movie when they were invited to gab about it. Dowd contends that a movie that tried to depict the "real" Bush as someone more intelligent and complicated than a trigger-happy self-made bumpkin would be fascinating, and he and everyone else seem to agree that they don't expect Stone to have made that movie. It's telling that the panelist who confesses to most having been affected by Stone's movies and their hyperthyroid take on recent history is Kelly, who seems to be the youngest person at the table, and whose admission that
JFK, which he saw when he was in high school, strongly affected his take on the events it covers almost causes Brinkley to keel over. (Pierson steps in to remind Brinkley that
JFK isn't actually about John Kennedy, "it's about Jim Garrison." Neither he nor anyone else bothers to point out that on the subject of Jim Garrison, it is completely unreliable.) The discussion may be most alive when the participants speculate on what effect the movie might have on the presidential election. (The general consensus is that it might hurt Obama and help McCain, but this discussion, took, took place before the Wall Street meltdown.) Others who see the movie only in political terms and who also have taken care not to see it have started weighing in too. Karl Rove, played in the movie by Toby Jones, says, “I don’t think they made any attempt to have this conform to any reality except that which exists in the cerebral cortex of Oliver Stone, which is a brain with only a functioning left side.” You have to give it to Oliver Stone: not every self-styled political artist has managed, even inadvertently, to provide the world with such a perfect demonstration of irony in action as Karl Rove whining about someone's distortion of reality.