Beating around the Bush

W
15, Nationwide

W, which should be pronounced ‘dubya’, the Texan way, as in George ‘Dubya’ Bush — but never as in, for example, Dubya. H. Smith — is Oliver Stone’s dramatised portrait of the 43rd American President and it’s pretty much neither here nor there; neither sympathetic enough to be one thing nor, alas, deadly enough to be the other. I don’t know what held Stone back, why he beats around the Bush, why he didn’t just grab an iron bar and thrash the living daylights out of whatever is in there. What is in there? If there is something, this film doesn’t tell us, and if there isn’t, if Bush is just a hollow shell of nothingness, how did he manage to become top dog of the world’s top nation? It doesn’t tell us that either. Consequently, it isn’t illuminating and it isn’t interesting. Not having a point of view is fine — I don’t have a point of view about most things, points of view being quite tiring — but to not have a point of view in the cinema isn’t helpful. It just makes you think: so what?

The film, which stars Josh Brolin as Bush — Brolin is rather wonderful, as it happens; capturing enough of Bush’s mannerisms to make it work, but never lapsing into a caricatured impersonation — doesn’t cover the full eight years of the presidency. Instead, it focuses on 2002/3, when Bush finally decides to go to war with Iraq, ostensibly over those DubyaMDs. (Did he try looking under the sofa cushions for them? That’s where we find most things in our house.) The rest, the story of Bush’s life until then, is told, quite choppily, in a series of flashbacks, beginning with him as a dumb boob of a heavy-drinking fratboy, which is basically what he was right through until he was 40 and found God. He didn’t find God under a sofa cushion or even behind the radiator — you’d be amazed what can slip behind radiators — but out running one day, when he falls, looks up at the sunlight filtering down through the tree-tops, and seems to have an epiphany. Some say the trouble with born-again Christians is that it’s hard not to wish they hadn’t been born the first time, but I disagree. Faith is a wonderful thing and I, personally, wouldn’t ever warmonger without it. I think Blair would say he feels the same.

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