The movie W., despite the worst intentions of its makers, succeeds in making George W. Bush more likeable. Reviewers keep remarking on the strange phenomenon. They hated Bush going in — and kind of liked the guy when they came out.
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That the movie doesn’t intend you to like George W. Bush is obvious from the cheap shots it revels in. You can tell a director (in this case Oliver Stone) and a writer (Stanley Weiser) want you to dislike a lead character if they have him:
Chew in your face. For much of the movie, Stone stages dialogue such that Bush is chewing and talking with food in his mouth — hard to watch in person; revolting on a 20-foot screen.
Deliver lines from the toilet. Stone stages a scene such that Bush is handling toilet paper while sitting on a toilet preposterously close to his bed, where Laura converses with him.
Arrange the Willie Horton commercial. The ad about the early release of a rapist helped defeat Dukakis, and conventional media wisdom considers it the biggest sin of the 1988 campaign. The movie makes Dubya the perpetrator of the ad.
Be a friend of cartoon villains. Stone insultingly makes Tommy Franks and the other military leaders who lead the Iraq invasion into callously dim redneck stereotypes, people who chew tobacco while briefing the president.
How can skilled filmmakers who clearly want to make Bush look bad end up making him likeable? Maybe it’s just by comparison to the other characters in the movie, whom they clearly hate much more.
Stone and Weiser
really hate Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. The excellent Toby Jones plays Rove like a Herblock caricature of him, and Richard Dreyfuss plays Dick Cheney the way Tilda Swinton played the White Witch in
Narnia: as a soulless being who will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s always winter but never Christmas.
But Stone and Weiser
really really hate Condoleezza Rice. The actress Thandie Newton is truly awful in this role. She was much better (and looked much more like Condoleezza Rice) in
Crash and
Pursuit of Happyness. Her performance here insults more than imitates, like a middle-school boy mocking his teacher. Maybe the filmmakers hate Condi with the kind of hatred Democrats have been directing at Sarah Palin. They object that she’s not behaving the way a woman (a black woman, no less!) is
supposed to behave.
Stone and Weiser love Colin Powell, but might as well hate him. They couldn’t do any more damage to him if they did. In the movie, Powell woodenly predicts everything that will go wrong with Iraq (in words provided by a screenwriter with 20/20 hindsight), then goes ahead and makes the case for invasion to the United Nations anyway.
But the hatred Stone and Weiser have for those characters isn’t enough to explain why Bush seems so likeable in this movie. Here are a few theories.
