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kitchen_kinkTonight, after a day mostly consisting of long term food preparation (two pots of stock and apple butter), I went to see Oliver Stone's new biopic, W.
To sum up: meh.
First off, I question the wisdom of making a movie about a president while he's still in office. True, this followed not only the first four years of his presidency but his misspent youth and subsequent bizarrely meteoric rise, but it still seems strange to make a film like this without there being a major ending: JFK gets shot, Nixon resigns, the first black president ever gets into office by a landslide...ya know. Something. Not to mention that all the things that might shock an audience about a major public figure are things that 1) we all already know about, and 2) we just saw on TV in the past eight years. Yes, the earnest, slack-jawed idealist/spoiled brat Stone presents us with is terrifying as a president. But watching it in a movie is no more horrifying than watching it on CNN.
Structurally, what I was hoping Stone would do he shied away from, whether by design or oversight I can't say. The film follows two linear timelines, alternating: the lead-up to the Iraq War, and the time from Bush's hazing into a Yale fraternity to his election as governor of Texas. The big missing piece, here, is his election into office, and the first few years of his presidency, including 9/11. My hope was that Stone would eventually have the two timelines meet, and climax the movie with Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks. Instead, we don't see the presidential election at all (something I was very interested in), nor, in spite of Stone's including the minor pretzel incident, do we see the incident with the goat book and the kindergarteners.
So what does Stone focus on? It's a little hard to tell. At moments, I almost expected there to be a laugh track: there are plenty of points where Stone shows the stupider moments of Bush's attempts at speech, highlighting all of the classic gaffes we've all heard by this point. But instead of being funny, it just feels kind of uncomfortable. The discomfort is understandable in a way, since the other thing Stone seems interested in is making his Bush sympathetic: he's not very bright but he means well; he's the neglected scion of a great man; he's just trying to live up to his father's hopes; he really has been born again and believes everything he says. Yet this sentiment doesn't go quite far enough to make up for the feeling that Stone is taking feeble shots at Bush; it seems he couldn't decide whether to go for the jugular or put his politics aside and tell a story. The result is funny moments that aren't funny, and touching moments that aren't touching: nothing quite sticks in this film.
Which is a shame, because Stone and his marvelous cast are throwing a lot of good stuff against the wall. The marvelous and still mostly-unsung actor Jeffrey Wright turns in a fantastically noble Colin Powell; Ellen Burstyn knocks Barbara Bush out of the park; the always excellent James Cromwell makes George H.W. Bush quite likable, and Richard Dreyfuss nigh-disappears into his portrayal of Dick Cheney. In the middle of all this is Josh Brolin as an affable but temperamental, earnest young man who just can't find his feet but somehow finds himself in the White House.
Stone seems to be trying to address the question: how did this happen? How did we get here? But in the end, with Bush himself on his fantasy baseball field, losing the fly ball in the glare of the lights, I found myself just as lost on that question as ever. The gratifying thing was that the end of the movie actually contained the classic, screen printed words, "The End." I could only sit back in my seat and breathe, "Thank God."
To sum up: meh.
First off, I question the wisdom of making a movie about a president while he's still in office. True, this followed not only the first four years of his presidency but his misspent youth and subsequent bizarrely meteoric rise, but it still seems strange to make a film like this without there being a major ending: JFK gets shot, Nixon resigns, the first black president ever gets into office by a landslide...ya know. Something. Not to mention that all the things that might shock an audience about a major public figure are things that 1) we all already know about, and 2) we just saw on TV in the past eight years. Yes, the earnest, slack-jawed idealist/spoiled brat Stone presents us with is terrifying as a president. But watching it in a movie is no more horrifying than watching it on CNN.
Structurally, what I was hoping Stone would do he shied away from, whether by design or oversight I can't say. The film follows two linear timelines, alternating: the lead-up to the Iraq War, and the time from Bush's hazing into a Yale fraternity to his election as governor of Texas. The big missing piece, here, is his election into office, and the first few years of his presidency, including 9/11. My hope was that Stone would eventually have the two timelines meet, and climax the movie with Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks. Instead, we don't see the presidential election at all (something I was very interested in), nor, in spite of Stone's including the minor pretzel incident, do we see the incident with the goat book and the kindergarteners.
So what does Stone focus on? It's a little hard to tell. At moments, I almost expected there to be a laugh track: there are plenty of points where Stone shows the stupider moments of Bush's attempts at speech, highlighting all of the classic gaffes we've all heard by this point. But instead of being funny, it just feels kind of uncomfortable. The discomfort is understandable in a way, since the other thing Stone seems interested in is making his Bush sympathetic: he's not very bright but he means well; he's the neglected scion of a great man; he's just trying to live up to his father's hopes; he really has been born again and believes everything he says. Yet this sentiment doesn't go quite far enough to make up for the feeling that Stone is taking feeble shots at Bush; it seems he couldn't decide whether to go for the jugular or put his politics aside and tell a story. The result is funny moments that aren't funny, and touching moments that aren't touching: nothing quite sticks in this film.
Which is a shame, because Stone and his marvelous cast are throwing a lot of good stuff against the wall. The marvelous and still mostly-unsung actor Jeffrey Wright turns in a fantastically noble Colin Powell; Ellen Burstyn knocks Barbara Bush out of the park; the always excellent James Cromwell makes George H.W. Bush quite likable, and Richard Dreyfuss nigh-disappears into his portrayal of Dick Cheney. In the middle of all this is Josh Brolin as an affable but temperamental, earnest young man who just can't find his feet but somehow finds himself in the White House.
Stone seems to be trying to address the question: how did this happen? How did we get here? But in the end, with Bush himself on his fantasy baseball field, losing the fly ball in the glare of the lights, I found myself just as lost on that question as ever. The gratifying thing was that the end of the movie actually contained the classic, screen printed words, "The End." I could only sit back in my seat and breathe, "Thank God."
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 12:02 pm (UTC)Of course, I ask this as someone who doesn't get to the movies much, but there several movies that I really want to go see, and given that I'm unlikely to get to most of them, I am very unlikely to see something that isn't appealing.
What were you hoping to get out of this - what made me decide to see W instead of, say, My Name is Bruce or Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist?
no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 05:46 pm (UTC)What types of movies does it seem worthwhile to you to see on a big screen?
follow-up answer
Date: 2008-11-13 06:17 pm (UTC)In a way, I think even Stone himself wasn't ready for this in-depth story, which is why it comes off so uneven and puppetlike. Even Stone can't step back far enough to give us the story that explains, if not excuses, what happened. He can only give us that story on the surface, with all of his derisiveness and rage seething underneath and, ironically, gelding the picture. So to the viewer, at its best W. comes off as pathetic, and at worst, patronizing.
So I guess the answer is: I'm not sure why I thought I would enjoy it. :)