Oliver's Story
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Oliver’s Story Josh Brolin plays Will Ferrell playing George W. Bush. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Oliver Stone accused Lyndon Johnson of killing John F. Kennedy in one fi lm, and Richard Nixon of...
...the father Bush says to the son Bush in an empty Oval Offi ce...
...Stone’s Bush may be a boob, but he’s not a bad man by any means...
...Considering the sorts of things that have been said, written, and put on fi lm about George W. Bush over the past few years, W. is astonishingly anodyne...
...That’s true of its protagonist, and even more true of its director...
...Then he meets Karl Rove (the unctuously dwarfi sh Toby Jones), who tells him he is a star and guides his political career...
...Of course, just as when Dallas jumped the shark, the Oval Offi ce scene is only a dream...
...He’s not much of anything, really...
...Stone does more than allude to Bush’s drinking problem...
...Two hundred years of work up in smoke because of this . . . fi asco...
...Here’s the real target,” says Dick Cheney in the Situation Room as the map in front of him magically changes color and Cheney is cast into shadow...
...Stone’s tinfoil hat constituency is going to be gobsmacked by W. The movie, dull as dishwater and twice as tepid, is a pointless portrait of a perfectly decent, somewhat dim, well-meaning fellow who sincerely believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, wanted only to bring democracy to the suffering peoples of the Middle East, is loved by his wife, not loved enough by his father and mother, and never meant anybody any harm...
...Stone’s Bush, aided by Stanley Weiser’s screenplay and Josh Brolin’s exceedingly superfi cial performance, is basically a humorless version of Will Ferrell’s Saturday Night Live caricature...
...He’s shiftless, but he has reason to be, as he is oppressed by the arch disappointment expressed toward him by his patrician father...
...This thing is eating you up inside...
...Surely, Stone’s W. would prove to be the dream fi lm of every Kos diarist, every obsessive follower of the monstrous injustices done to Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV and Valerie Plame, not to mention every boy and girl who ever hooked up at a MoveOn.org meet-up...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...shouts 41 to 43...
...he photographs every scene in the years leading up to W.’s renunciation of alcohol with a bottle of Jack Daniels prominently featured either right next to the camera or right next to Bush...
...As an adult, he fi nds he can’t escape his father’s shadow...
...W. proves there’s nothing more boring than a wild man who goes straight...
...Act like one...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Oliver Stone accused Lyndon Johnson of killing John F. Kennedy in one fi lm, and Richard Nixon of killing John F. Kennedy in another fi lm...
...W. travels across decades, with bad makeup and hairstyle alterations used to suggest the passage of time...
...Eventually, in the White House, he bumbles along cheerfully, hungry for Saddam’s hide, very focused on getting his three-mile run in, and allows himself to be guided by his vice president (Richard Dreyfuss, whose Dick Cheney is about as Wyomingborn as Sholom Aleichem...
...Tell him what you think,” Barbara says when 41 is awake at Kennebunkport at three in the morning just before the Iraq war...
...George W. says to his father...
...Weiser’s screenplay is embarrassingly “on the nose,” as the Hollywood clich...
...The portrait of George W. Bush offered in this movie will, I would wager, prove as tiresome, obvious, and boring to the Kos Kids as it did to me...
...IRAN...
...It’s a perfectly terrible movie, obvious and overly deliberate in the manner of a biographical picture made for television in the 1970s...
...As a kid, he’s a party boy who doesn’t seem to be enjoying the party all that much...
...And now, in the capstone of his bizarre career, Oliver Stone takes on George W. Bush, the fi gurehead of a thousand conspiracies as deep and dark as any of the ones Stone has spun over the years...
...He does, however, fi nd solace in sobriety and religion, as a celebrity preacher (Stacy Keach, in a spectacular turn) guides his path toward Jesus...
...has it—rife with dialogue that comes out and says with exclamation points what ought to be understood...
...They knew all this years ago: Bush choking on a pretzel, Bush calling himself “the Decider,” Bush asking “Is our children learning...
...And on and on it goes, so much so that for the fi rst time in my moviegoing life, I longed for the old Oliver Stone, the one who would have turned George W. Bush into a Machiavellian maneuverer who only plays dumb to gull the liberals into a stupor, and goes to war in Iraq to help the FBI and the CIA hide evidence of JFK’s assassination, for which his father was responsible, somewhere in Falluja, with the secret assistance of Osama bin Laden...
...You have besmirched the family name...
...You’re not a Kennedy, you’re a Bush...
...Why don’t you love me like you love Jeb...
...He portrayed a typical Vietnam platoon as a bunch of crazed rapists and pillagers who fi nally kill their evil lieutenant...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 7
