From Man to Mockery, and Back Again

The president's dwindling body of admirers will likely resent the portrayal of Bush's occasional scrapes with the law. ("Who do you think you are, a Kennedy?" the senior Bush asks contemptuously as he deals with one of W's many screw-ups.) While Stone may respect Bush's ability to overcome alcoholism, he dismissively notes that "the drinking stops, but the recklessness stays." Bush cements his relationship with Laura by ramming his car into a garage door because she has criticized a weak campaign speech in his first, unsuccessful campaign for Congress. And some loyalists will take umbrage at Stone's merciless portrayal of a highly vulnerable Bush at a White House press conference, trying and failing to answer a question about what mistakes he had made—stumbling, hesitating, evading and later reproaching himself for his inarticulateness.

In one of Stone's dream scenes, W confronts his own failure in Iraq and faces once again his father's withering disappointment; and toward the end of the film, Stone occasionally portrays Bush much as he portrayed Nixon, as a depressed and lonely man tortured by his unpopularity. In the prevailing image of George W. Bush, nothing is more entrenched—and more admired by his supporters—than his serene self-confidence, his refusal to second-guess, his unwillingness to reconsider convictions or decisions. But Stone presents him as a man beset with insecurities. "I dug myself out of the depths of hell to stand on my own two feet," he shouts at one point in the film when things are going badly, as if his frustrations and failures were somehow unfair given how hard he had worked to redeem himself.

People on either side of this uniquely polarizing figure may be uncomfortable with the naive optimism that Stone attributes to Bush in his decision to go to war—his sincere belief that he is advancing "freedom," transforming the Middle East for the better and bringing peace to the world. In a scene portraying an Oval Office meeting, Colin Powell defends the containment doctrine that had shaped and restrained American foreign policy for more than 50 years, including in the 1991 gulf war that Bush's father refused to extend into Iraq. W dismisses containment, brusquely and almost contemptuously, as a doctrine of weakness and moves decisively and seemingly heedlessly toward the decision for war. Stone implies that this was all part of an effort to outdo his father, but he simultaneously suggests that the president was acting in response to his own deep convictions. "There's good and there's evil," the film version of W says as the war approaches. "Good always wins out, but you have to fight for it."

Stone insists that he was "not out to demean or hurt the man … We set out to show his reasoning for the Iraq War." And the film does make a plausible case that Bush himself conceived, promoted and justified the war, fought off objections to it and did not simply acquiesce to the arguments of others. In a particularly eerie scene with Dick Cheney (brilliantly played by Richard Dreyfuss), the Iago-like vice president ingratiatingly places an authorization to torture prisoners before Bush, confident that he will sign it without objection, only to be questioned sharply by the president before leaving empty-handed. As he goes, Bush tells him that in the future, when they are with other people, Cheney is not to talk. This imagined encounter between an almost pathologically secretive older man and his gregarious younger boss suggests a more complex and competitive relationship between the two men than the conventional vision of Bush as a passive enabler.

Stone, like most others trying to chronicle their own time, has undoubtedly made educated guesses about Bush that will turn out to be wrong. But "W." is, nevertheless, different from most earlier movies about presidents (including Stone's own). Whatever its qualities as a dramatic film may be, however its portrayal of Bush may fare in the light of history, it is on the whole an honest effort to find some truth in the blizzard of partisan battles over almost everything associated with this presidency. There are no conspiracy theories, no wild speculations, no paranoia. Stone's film is not hagiography. It is not propaganda. It is, surprisingly, more or less fair.

Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia.

© 2008