奥立佛·斯通谈《W》

From The Sunday Times
August 10, 2008
Oliver Stone's George Bush biopic W.
Oliver Stone's Bush biopic plays it for laughs, but it's every bit as controversial as JFK and Nixon

You have to admit it’s a great question: “How did George W Bush go from alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” That’s what the American film-maker Oliver Stone says he wants to explain in his forthcoming movie biopic, entitled, simply enough, W.

Not surprisingly, Texas-sized dust storms have already blown up in Hollywood and Washington over the film, which is being rushed through production so it can be released in America on October 17, just three weeks before the presidential election. Starring Josh Brolin as George W Bush, James (Babe) Cromwell as former president George HW Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as vice president Dick Cheney, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, the film will be the first big Hollywood biopic of a sitting president since PT 109, the 1963 hagiography about the heroic wartime exploits of John F Kennedy. The most recent president to be subjected to the Hollywood movie treatment was Bill Clinton, in a thinly veiled way, in Primary Colors.

Although Stone insists that he intends to paint “a fair, true portrait of the man”, many doubt that the director of extremely controversial films about the lives and deaths of two previous presidents — JFK and Nixon — and an avowed Democrat who is fiercely opposed to the war in Iraq, has any intention, or even the ability, to be objective. “His saying he is going to be fair to Bush is like Donald Trump saying he is going to be modest,” says Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy. Some believe Stone, 61, may even have a deep-seated personal animus against Bush. Born in the same year, he and Bush were briefly classmates at Yale, although they didn’t know each other there. Stone dropped out to fight in Vietnam, a battle-scarred journey that eventually led to his radicalisation and to two Oscar-winning films born of the experience, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Bush, of course, managed to avoid going to Vietnam by somehow winning a cushy noncombatant job at home with the National Guard.

The first trailer for the film has only confirmed the fears of those who think Stone is Bush-bashing. It opens with the young Dubya whooping it up, drunkenly table-dancing in a bar. Cut to his father: “If I remember correctly, you didn’t like the sporting-goods job. Working in the investment firm wasn’t for you, either, or the oil-rig job. You didn’t exactly finish up with flying colours in the Air National Guard, Junior. What are you cut out for? Partying? Chasing tail? Driving drunk? What do you think you are, a Kennedy? You’re a Bush — act like one!”

After another drunken fight, the elder Bush threatens: “You want an ass-whipping?” Cut to Dubya’s cowboy boots, propped on his presidential desk in the White House. An unlikely journey, indeed — but how close to the truth?

The script was rejected by all the major Hollywood studios when Stone approached them at the beginning of the year. The director claims they were scared because the film is “too much of a hot potato politically”. Others say the studios were worried about recouping the $30m budget when movies about politics and the war have been faring so poorly at the box office. And Bush is remarkably unpopular right now. In the end, the film was financed partly from outside America.

Having seen the lively trailer and caught a glimpse of an early draft of the script, I suspect the studios may have completely misread Stone’s intentions and underestimated the film’s commercial appeal. The script has been written by Stanley Weiser, who wrote Stone’s Wall Street. Within a few pages, it’s clear that W is going to be not a dry, serious biopic, but a spirited, often hilarious and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Dubya. He is painted as a kind of hapless everyman, “not a bad guy, just an amiable buffoon”, as New York Magazine puts it. While the script was being developed, it had the working title Misunderstood.

Although Stone believes that “history is going to be very tough on [Bush], that doesn’t mean he isn’t a great story. It’s almost Capra-esque, the story of a guy who had limited talents in life, except for the ability to sell himself. The fact that he had to overcome the shadow of his father and the weight of his family name — you have to admire his tenacity”. Yet it’s really the tone that will surprise people. Stone describes it as “tragic-comic, in the vein of Network or Dr Strangelove”.

The script is in three acts, the action cutting backwards and forwards in time, but centring mainly on the White House in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq in 2003. The first act focuses on W’s drunken, rabble-rousing, skirt-chasing early years. On just the third page, in his Yale fraternity, “the young George Bush pours cheap vodka into a large garbage can” before leaning over and taking a “snoot-full”. He then “belts out a chorus of the Yale Whiffenpoof Song: ‘We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way,’ W sings. ‘Baa! Baa! Baa!’ ”.

This wastrel earns his father’s constant disapproval. They even get close to a fist fight when W downs a bottle of bourbon after being accepted at Harvard Business School and drunkenly crashes his car on the front lawn of the family home. “I’ve had enough of your crap,” Bush Sr tells W, who screams back: “Let’s go mano a mano! Right here! Right now!” “My advice to you — go to an AA meeting,” says Bush Sr. “Thank you, Mr Perfect. Mr War Hero. Mr F***ing God Almighty,” W responds.

The psychological drama of the script hinges on W’s relationship with his father, whom he calls Poppy. It’s clear that Stone feels W is driven, even haunted, by his need for his father’s approval. For Stone, W is a modern-day Prince Hal, desperate to please his father, waiting for his Agincourt — the Iraq war — to prove himself. In the second act, when his father is elected president, W is disconsolate, telling Laura, his wife: “I’ll never get out of Poppy’s shadow. I wish he had lost. No matter what I do, it’s never going to be good enough.”

The relationship between father and son begins to shift when W gives up drinking after waking up with a huge hangover the day after his 40th birthday. He also has a religious conversion. On a walk with the Rev Billy Graham in 1985, he says, “There’s this darkness that follows me. People say I was born with a silver spoon, but they don’t know the burden that carries.” In 1992, Bush Sr loses to Bill Clinton after one term in office. As the Bush family watches the election results at a hotel in Houston, Bush Sr bursts into tears. W suggests he would have won the election had he deposed Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf war. “Maybe if you had clobbered the SOB. Gone all the way to Baghdad. Cleaned his clock.”

It’s in the White House, though, that the real fun starts. W has nicknames for his cabinet members, advisers and others. Karl Rove (played by the British actor Toby Jones), the political adviser who helped to persuade him to run for president, is “Turdblossom”, Tony Blair “Tones”, Condoleezza Rice “Guru” and Colin Powell “Balloon Foot”. As they are planning the war on Iraq, Bush locks Balloon Foot out of the conference room as a joke and says to the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz: “Trim your ear hairs.”

Bush and his advisers discuss what to call Iraq, Iran and North Korea. “Axis of hatred?” suggests his chief speech-writer. “I don’t know. Something about it. . . just misses.”

“Well, then, what about axis of the unbearably odious?” Rove says. “Don’t get cute, Turdblossom,” snaps W. “This is serious.”

W worries Tony Blair when he suggests painting an American plane in UN colours and flying it over Baghdad, hoping Saddam will shoot it down, thus providing an excuse to go to war. “Plan B is assassinate the sonofabitch,” W tells the startled Blair. And he gets furious when Jacques Chirac, the French president, makes it clear he doesn’t support war with Iraq: “I’d like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of shit’s throat.”

Other scenes are pure farce. As he practises a parachute landing in the pool of the White House, W forgets to pull the release harness and sinks to the bottom. He interrupts a meeting that has been called to inform Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, about plans to go to war in Iraq because he wants to see the end of a football game. He also tells Bandar he has given up sweets as “my personal sacrifice to show support for our troops”. There are the usual Bushisms, such as when he tells a group of teachers: “Rarely is the question asked, ‘Is our children learning?’ ”

Perhaps surprisingly, four presidential historians who were sent copies of the script felt that most of the historical incidents happened more or less as described. Stone and Weiser say they have tried to anchor the film in historical truth, basing it on some 20 books. The experts, however, seem appalled by the tone.

“It leaves you with the impression that the White House is run as a fraternity house, with no reverence for hierarchy, the office itself or the implications of policy,” says the presidential historian Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush. “Everybody calling everybody else nicknames and chatting about going to war as if they were chatting about how to bet on a football game . . . The notion that his schedule is driven by what’s on ESPN [the cable sports channel] is ridiculous.”

Stone says he’s beyond caring what people think. “I’m tired of defending the accuracy of my movies,” he says. “JFK was a case to be proven, Nixon was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I’m not bound by those strictures any more. Bush is not a complex and dark man, so it’s different. This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He’s awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He’s not your average president. So, let’s have some fun with it. What are they going to do? Discredit me again?”

Sure, if they can.

W opens in the UK on November 7