BEFORE: This was my planned endgame on the political chain, though it took a little longer to get here than I thought it would. This is another film by Oliver Stone, director of "JFK" and "Nixon". Linking comes courtesy of Curtis Armstrong, who was also in "Revenge of the Nerds II" with James Cromwell (last seen in "Surrogates"). Please, don't ask me how I knew that.
THE PLOT: A chronicle on the life and presidency of George W. Bush.
AFTER: I'm kind of on the fence about this one - who am I, an ordinary citizen, to say who was a good president and a bad president. I'm reminded of a school project I had to do in U.S. History class back in 8th grade, where I was assigned 5 presidents to research and rate on a scale from 1 to 5. (Got an A-, I think) It's easy when you're dealing with Washington or Adams, a bit tougher perhaps when you get to the more modern ones. History hasn't fully decided on Bush, I think, even though he seemed completely inept to me during his two terms. Sure, his malaprops made him seem empty-headed, but if I want to be fair, I have to admit that maybe we're just too close to it to make the call.
Unfortunately, this film offers little advice on that point, outside of stating facts that we're all mostly aware of - things that came up during the campaigns, like Bush's drunk driving arrests, fraternity pranks or his status as a born-again Christian. What's worse, it relies on a structure similar to "Nixon", jumping around through the man's life and career like a political version of "Slaughterhouse Five".
If you've read my previous entries, you know this is a particular bugaboo of mine. I always imagine that this time-jumping technique is used to liven up a story that was found to be dramatically weak or just plain uninteresting when it spools out in a linear order. Under the best conditions, the scenes can be organized in such a way that the ones in the past are contrasted with the ones in the future, and some particular insight is gained. But with both "Nixon" and this film, it seems more like they're organized in a random fashion, perhaps by tossing the various film clips in the air, and picking them up off the floor one by one and splicing them right into the film. If there's a pattern or some kind of organization, some reason why THIS scene follows right after THAT one, I sure couldn't see it.
So, I'm left to draw my own conclusions about the overall meaning - maybe that's the point, the director didn't want to push the narrative in any one particular direction. If so, that's a copout. The story's not going to find itself, a film is like a car, in that it works best when the driver has a destination in mind.
I'm going to fall back on the other political films I watched, to see if that offers any insight into George W. Like Willie Stark in "All the King's Men", Bush has a distinct sense of right and wrong. He wants to "do good things" - but who decides what the good things are? Is war inherently "good", or is it "bad"? Discuss. Like Lincoln, Bush failed upward - we're all aware of his work history, failing in the oil fields and failing as the owner of a baseball team. Like Jefferson, Bush was... I'm going to go with "clueless about his own hypocrisy", and leave it at that. And like Nixon, Bush oversaw a war that became very unpopular over time.
Of course, Bush had his advisors, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, among others, and this film shows a number of top-level confabs between them, having conjectured conversations about WMDs and anthrax and whether (and how) to take out Saddam Hussein. But it doesn't really take a stand at any point about whose idea anything really was, or whose fault either.
The one metaphor used (outside of a dream sequence where he's tormented by an approval-withholding Bush Sr.) depicts W. in an empty baseball stadium, standing in the outfield, waiting for the ball to be hit to him, then running back toward the warning track, hoping to make the game-saving over-the-wall catch. I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to represent, but it seems fitting somehow.
I guess I'm ambivalent about George W. Bush. Some days I wonder why he wasn't brought up on war crimes, since ultimately he was proven wrong about the WMD's in Iraq, and therefore there was no justification for the invasion. Other days I wonder if he was the right idiot puppet in the wrong place at the right time, or something like that.
Starring Josh Brolin (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "Role Models"), Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "Moon Over Parador"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "Presumed Innocent"), Thandie Newton (last seen in "Jefferson in Paris"), Toby Jones (last seen in "Captain America: The First Avenger"), Scott Glenn (last seen in "Sucker Punch"), Bruce McGill, Colin Hanks (last seen in "King Kong"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Fountain"), with cameos from Jesse Bradford, Jason Ritter, Noah Wyle, Rob Corddry (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Ioan Gruffudd (last seen in "Black Hawk Down"), Stacy Keach (last seen in "Escape from L.A.").
RATING: 4 out of 10 pretzels
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