Mud from a Stone?

So go the folksy opening lines of W, Oliver Stone's big screen portrayal of the life and presidency of George Bush, which begins filming this week.

Stone, who wants to rush a final cut of the film into cinema halls before the November presidential election, and certainly before Bush leaves the White House on January 20, claims W is a fair, true portrait of the man. Yet at first blush -- The World Next Week has seen what is allegedly an early copy of the screenplay -- the film will provide splendid entertainment, but lack historicity. 

Legacy spoiler?

Stone, whose previous presidential examinations -- 1991's JFK and 1995's Nixon -- were tremendously successful in box office terms, claims an historical and apolitical agenda; yet the draft of W comes across as a Parthian shot at a president of whom he disapproved.

The script is rather stronger than a 'warts-and all' portrayal of Bush; it frequently veers into Saturday Night Live-style caricature to make its points.  As a young man, the president is depicted as a struggling, maudlin drunk; as president, Bush wants information before ESPN SportsCenter begins, so trivial matters such as war and peace will not interrupt his enjoyment of the baseball. Dick Cheney is a sententious, malevolent figure with lines such as:  "anyone can go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran." Bush and Cheney even play a prank on Colin Powell, and lock him out of the cabinet meeting.

It is not all cheap gags. The inchoate screenplay, which intercuts between the past and present, also touches on Bush's relationship with his demanding father, his alleged obsession with Osama bin Laden and the president's blues.

Yet the overall feel of the early script is crude caricature rather than balanced representation. Peter Schweizer a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and author of The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, is doubtful the film will have any historical value. "This is 'Animal House' on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It's the sort of script you'd expect to be written by a grad student working for Noam Chomsky.  What does it get right?  Not much.  I suppose it does scratch the surface when it comes to the complexities that went into the decision to go to war. But like I said, it just scratches the surface," he tells The World Next Week.

Caveat spectator? 

As W will -- and should -- be judged as entertainment rather than a cerebral historical source,  why does the unsympathetic depiction of Bush cause so much hue and cry?  It could be the loftiness of Stone's declared 'historical' agenda that rubs students up the wrong way.  "I understand this is a movie, not pure history," Schweizer was also quoted as saying. "But if Stone wants to portray this as an accurate accounting, he has some serious work to do."

Other sources agree that Stone, who has expressed admiration for the Cuban Revolution and the Colombian FARC rebels in the past, is a better polemicist than historian. Journalist Jeff Dulgar accuses Stone of promoting historical inaccuracies, despite the director's claims to the contrary. "From misrepresenting JFK's assassination to inaccurately describing Nixon's domestic and foreign policy decisions, the man has quite a reputation in spite of his claims of innocence," Dulgar writes in The Daily Nexus. Stone's declared goal to release W while Bush is still in office would back up this assertion. 

Although Stone may be disingenuous, he is easily forgiven. All good raconteurs use some artistic licence for dramatic purposes as part of their trade; yet Shakespeare's 'historical' plays show how easy it is for historical inaccuracy to feed into folklore. Stone can also count on the weight of popular opinion; the president's job approval rating has dropped to 28%, the lowest of his administration.

If W entertains, audiences will laugh first, and ask questions later. As Frank Capra said: "there are no rules in filmmaking, only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness."