I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it
The movie W. did not provide the crude anti-Bush agitprop that the reviewers craved, says Rod Liddle. This was precisely its strength: we need to get inside the minds even of those we most deplore Imissed the first three minutes of Oliver Stone’s film about the outgoing US President, W., because the indolent woman serving behind the counter took ages to give me my ticket. That’s because she was serving someone else with ice cream, a beaming fat cow who was ordering herself a bucket of cherry and vanilla and butterscotch, a vat of frozen animal fats in which she would immerse herself for the next seven hours. ‘Ooh, and I’ll have a scoop of rum and raisin too,’ she whinnied just when you thought she was finally done, the veins on her neck bulging out and saliva dribbling down her grey chin. What annoyed me most was the fact that she was not a paying customer, but the bloody cinema manageress. And also that she didn’t realise this was my annual visit to the flicks and because it is a special event I expect everything to go smoothly. I used to go twice a week, in my youth, usually to watch black and white Rumanian films about coat hangers, or something; these days it’s a nice middlebrow film once a year. In 2007 it was Atonement; this year it’s W.
It almost wasn’t W., mind, on account of the reviews. All of the reviewers I trust — and quite a few I don’t — slagged the film off, or damned it with the faintest of praise. The excellent Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called it a ‘solemn hagiography’, a ‘frankly timid’ film that ‘pulled its punches’. Time Out’s reviewer whined that it ‘made excuses’ for George W. Bush and was neither ‘coruscating or edifying’.
It’s an odd thing. I thought the film was terrific — witty, well-acted (apart from by Ms Thandie Newton, who played Condi Rice as if she were a vaudeville turn) and humane. Whenever I look through the cinema listings, there’s very little that I want to see; I want something approaching intelligent and maybe on a serious subject. And here, in W., I got what I wanted. Maybe it’s because I don’t get out very much that I enjoyed it so much; that’s possible. But my suspicion is that it’s a good film and that the reviewers didn’t particularly like it for reasons other than the purely cinematic. The clue is in that phrase of Bradshaw’s, ‘pulled punches’. I think British film reviewers didn’t like W. precisely because it invested the appalling President with a degree of understanding, with a soupçon of humanity. Not that much understanding and humanity, mind — the film, a lot of the time, played it for laughs — but just enough to make the Brits uneasy.
It’s a peculiar thing, the visceral loathing with which Bush is regarded by the European chattering classes and the determination with which we refuse to countenance any attempt to invest the US regime with a purpose which is anything other than purely, unequivocally evil. I recently interviewed the author John le Carré about his lovely new novel A Most Wanted Man and annoyed him by suggesting that he might have taken as much care with the characters of his American secret service men as he did for the marvellous collection of Brits, Turks and Germans who populate the earlier parts of his book. The Americans do not have characters at all; they are simply agents of evil, arrogant, vicious and peremptory, a strip cartoon dropped into a complex novel. Le Carré argued that this was a deliberate, dramatic literary ploy of his — to have a sort of inchoate explosion at the end. But I am not so sure. It seems to be part of the same problem which afflicts those film reviewers: George W. Bush is absolutely ghastly and does not deserve a moment of our consideration or understanding. So too are those who work for Bush.
I have the suspicion that Oliver Stone’s film would have been much better received over here if it had been one of those hammer-headed agitprop exercises which usually star Tim Robbins and his missus, Susan Sarandon. ‘Pulling punches’ means not going on interminably about Bush and Cheney’s oil interests and Halliburton and all those shady defence companies that made a packet out of the invasion of Iraq; it means not laying the blame for the war at the door of either dark financial self-interest or Bush’s messianic complex occasioned by his simplistic and vengeful Christian faith. Or both of these whipped into a convoluted conspiracy, probably involving the Bilderberg Group.
It is a strange mindset, but one which is terribly prevalent. Quite laudably, there have been plenty of novels and films which have tried, with varying degrees of success, to get inside the minds of those psychopathic fundamentalist Islamists who wish to kill us all. This is a good thing, even when the attempt is as lame as in John Updike’s last but one novel, The Terrorist. Without exception these writers and film-makers are commended for their attempts to understand the enemy, to shed light on what seems to be an alien and averse thought process. And, in so doing, ‘make excuses’. I don’t disagree; we should attempt to understand them. Know thine enemy, as they say. And then shoot him. But it is bizarre that the same latitude is not extended to those who are, nominally at least, on our side. Any notion that Bush’s motives might not have been wholly murderous or venal or duplicitous simply cannot be countenanced — even when, as in W., the whole business is dressed up with lots of humour at the expense of the President.
I suppose, in a way, it doesn’t matter very much any more because those awful people — Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld — have left the scene and the USA is about to be led by someone who is beginning to be viewed as a sort of half-caste Princess Diana. I’d have voted for Obama too, given the chance, and I believe the war in Iraq was wrong. But not unequivocally so and beyond any attempt at understanding. If we wish to stop wars like that in future, isn’t it important that we attempt to understand fully why and how they came about?
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