W.
Produced by Emperor Motion Pictures
Directed by Oliver Stone
Screenplay by Stanley Weiser
Distributed by Lionsgate


Quantum of Solace
Produced and distributed
by Columbia Pictures
Directed by Marc Forster
Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis

 

It’s too bad W., Oliver Stone’s satiric biopic of his Yale classmate and our 43rd President, didn’t come out four years ago.  We might have been spared George W. Bush’s second term and enjoyed a comic dividend.  One can only imagine the fun of watching John F. Kerry impersonating John F. Kennedy by way of Ichabod Crane these last four years, his performance wittily enhanced by Ms. 57 Varieties at his side.

But Stone waited until after the damage had been fully done to tell us W.’s been a bad president.  His thesis is elegantly simple.  Bush suffers Oedipally, wanting alternately to please and to outshine his distant father.  Like most elegant explanations, this one beclouds as much as it illumines.  Human behavior, being ineluctably social, has too many permutations to be explained so cleanly.  Still, Stone does a fair job with the how of Bush’s performance, if not the why.

Stone makes the case that, over the past eight years, the father-lorn Mr. Bush has proved himself an utter incompetent, a judgment most embarrassingly apparent whenever he steps up to a podium.  Recreating Bush’s April 14, 2004, press conference, the one in which he was asked what mistakes he had made during his first term in office, actor Josh Brolin, playing Bush, grips his podium, thrusts his right shoulder forward, and hunkers down with a show of dogged determination.  You half expect him to growl.  Instead, he umms and ahs, shakes his head, and finally comes up with what he evidently thinks is a clever quip.  “I wish you woulda given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it,” he says with that muted snicker that has so endeared him to the American public.  This moment perfectly captures the W. we’ve come to love.  He’s a man so out of his depth that he cannot connect with the softest of softball queries.  The self-designated Decider doesn’t even swing at this one.  A 12-year-old would have turned it into a base hit, at the very least.  Mr. Bush only had to say something like this: “Mistakes?  Sure.  For instance, not explaining as fully as I might have just how successful we’ve been in Iraq to date.  True, not everything has gone as well as we’d hoped, but today I’d like you to know we’ve already achieved three of our most important goals.  First, . . . ”  Whatever came next would have been baloney, but at least it might have given us reason to believe that our Commander in Chief could think on his feet, and that maybe he’d yet adjust his course before he ran the country disastrously aground.  But no: Bush couldn’t think of anything at all.  “I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference,” he lamely went on, pleading jocularly that “with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer . . . it hadn’t yet.”  Note the folksy “hadn’t,” a touching good-ol’-boyism!  Did we deserve such a ridiculous president?  Don’t answer.

With unwonted fairness, Stone gives equal time to another podium moment in which Mr. Bush seems to get things right.  Asked by a reporter how he thinks history will judge him, he responds unhesitatingly.  “History?  In history we’ll all be dead.”  Then he flashes his patented frat-boy smirk, clearly pleased with himself.  Such existential wit could only be founded upon a fabulous indifference to history.  In an invented scene before his election, Governor Bush whines to his long-suffering wife that there’s never been a president’s son who has made it to the White House himself.  Laura gently alludes to the Adams family.  Exasperated by her useless marshaling of mere fact, W. responds, “Yeah, that’s about 300 years ago!”

It’s not that W.’s evil; he’s just a bit vacant in the top story, and his, shall we say, moral fiber has been left unstrung by unearned privilege throughout his life.  More than these deficits, he lacks curiosity about the world, in general, and about himself, in particular.  During the run-up to his invasion of Iraq, he’s shown in a Cabinet meeting, walking around the board table, huffing and puffing about how he’s going to kick Saddam Hussein’s ass and make peace “break out all over the Middle East.”  He’s determined to give democracy a chance to take hold in the region.  It’s clear, however, that he hasn’t the slightest interest in finding out who Saddam is or why he runs Iraq as he does.  He never wonders for a moment why democracy has never flourished before in the 5,000-year history of the cradle of civilization.  Nor does it ever occur to him that knowing something about the region’s various cultures—Persian, Arab, Kurd, and Israeli—might help him make better policy decisions.  Why would he need to know all that?  He’s armed with the ability to tell right from wrong, and he’s unswervingly confident that this moral birthright makes him the best leader for our perilous times.  Even more, he confides to his evangelical minister, God has chosen him to be president.  History, politics, culture—all are weightless when placed in the balance with his exalted calling.

Stone portrays W. as a feckless Candide surrounded by clueless sycophants and cynical Panglosses.  Playing sycophant-in-chief Condoleeza Rice, Thandi Newton has somehow transformed her beautiful face to look like a female version of Mortimer Snerd, buck of tooth and dim of eye.  Constantly grinning, she bobbles her head in agreement with whatever her boss says, no matter how preposterous.  As Dick Cheney, the head Pangloss, Richard Dreyfuss conveys the Vice President’s well-honed Machiavellian touch.  When W. takes him aside to tell him that he must refrain from taking over the Cabinet meetings, Cheney nods deferentially, but as he walks from the room, we see in his ever-so-slightly curled lower lip his contempt for his commander.  Only Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) ever questions W.’s decisions.  Once Bush makes it plain he wants to invade Iraq because of Saddam’s alliance with Al Qaeda, Powell respectfully observes that there’s no evidence of such collusion.  He then pointedly argues that if our troops depose Saddam, they’ll be required to check the civil war that will almost certainly break out between the Shia and Sunni.  W., of course, doesn’t know what the hell Powell is talking about.  Taking note of Mr. Bush’s confusion, Cheney lightly chides Powell for being so cautious.  Powell bridles: “Don’t patronize me, Mr. Five Deferments,” he says, referring to Cheney’s youthful reluctance to join the fray in Vietnam.  (As Cheney once explained, he had other priorities at the time.)  No matter.  W. has already made up his mind.  Here’s his chance to finish what his father had left undone in the Gulf War.  At last he’ll prove himself to the old man.

So W. allowed his troubled relationship with his father to dictate his decisions.  Plausible.  But unresolved Oedipal dynamics don’t necessarily lead to disastrous careers.  There’s something more here, and that’s the force of others in the Bush Jr. administration.  Although this is crucial to understanding why W. failed so miserably, Stone only vaguely gestures at it.  All presidents have had to deal with the ambitions of the others in their administrations.  It takes a man of character, confidence, and insight to stand his ground against counselors whose seeming concern for the nation may mask a private agenda.  W. is demonstrably wanting on all three counts.  He’s a nice guy who once made a reasonably shrewd owner of a baseball team.  But up against Dick Cheney and his neoconservative pals, Bush didn’t stand much of a chance.  Under cover of addressing the attacks of September 11, Cheney & Co. were able to use W. to initiate their preexisting plan to transform the Middle East.  They were determined to render the OPEC nations compliant with American oil interests and to protect Israel from any further attacks by her hostile neighbors.  And now we’ve turned the entire Muslim world implacably against us, put Israel in more peril than ever before, and tossed our economy into free fall.  Stone’s film has its merits as dramatization, but as analysis it does little more than rehash what the public at large already knows.  Stone missed his chance to make of Bush 43 a revelation of the much deeper currents in our present reckless course.

 

* * *

The title of the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, comes from an Ian Fleming short story, but it reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy, which argues that the amount of desire in the world is, at all times and in all places, an unvarying quantum of wantum.  However infelicitous, this phrase certainly sums up James Bond, who has always striven to fulfill his and our wantum.

Bond is at once the pure consumer and the perfect commodity, a condition recognized by the Omega watch company, which has wrapped its Seamaster Planet Ocean timepiece around the manly wrist of Bond’s latest avatar, Daniel Craig, to hawk these luxe chronometers at $4,900 a tick.

Bond’s the man who possesses so extravagantly that, in turn, we’re supposed to want to possess him as a sort of talisman capable of fulfilling our desires for food, drink, technology, and, of course, women.  Identify with Bond, and you, too, can become an accomplished consumer of the world’s endless delights.

So even though Mr. Bond is still despondent over the death of his lady love in Casino Royale, his wantum remains undiminished.  When he meets Strawberry Fields, MI6’s lovely agent in La Paz, Bolivia, she takes him to a hotel chosen, she explains, in keeping with their cover as teachers on sabbatical.  Balking at its Third World shabbiness, Bond whisks her to the upscale Hotel Andean, complete with pool and four-star restaurant.  At the reservations desk, he maintains cover professionally enough, telling the clerk that they’re boondoggling pedagogues who have just won the lottery.

Soon he and Miss Fields are ensconced in a sumptuously appointed bedroom, naked but for the sheets they have discreetly wrapped around themselves as he skillfully applies his internationally acclaimed massage to her demurely appreciative back.  Now that’s wantum victorious.

And the plot?  Oh, it’s the same as the Bond films before Casino’s risky departure from form.  The franchise, after all, has its own wantum to quantum.