Two From Buñuel, “W.”

Frankly delighted with human folly, and as fluent as a Symbolist poet with the effortlessly...

The case for Oliver Stone’s “W.” (2008) is more fragile — contrary to everyone’s hopes, the film is not a frantic, excessive splooge of conspiracy fever and historical hysteria like “Nixon” or “JFK,” a prospect that when applied to the still-sitting worst-administration-of-all-time had a seductive and potent charm. How can one, after having a career like Stone’s, choose temperance over fury when it comes to George W. Bush? Now that our disappointment has faded into last year’s sum-ups, and the administration itself is a bad memory, we can overlook the movie’s half-baked evasiveness (expecting as we did a serious political torpedo) and see Stone’s extremely strange film for what it became despite his intentions: an autocritiquing waxworks parody of the Bush paradigm, with every famous malapropism reiterated (in private, which means the fictional Bush repeated them), every personal tic (Cheney’s snarl) reconstituted as if in a stand-up routine and every historical moment playing out as the story of a Texan Candide laying waste to the (entirely off-screen) world and holding fast to the belief that his life represented a best of all possible worlds. Of course, for him, it was (is there a luckier American man alive?), even if Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser posit a mid-life crisis of lost father love, a point that may’ve seemed pertinent to Bush’s ascendency in 2002 but hardly in 2008. The Surrealist gesture that pushes “W.” over the hump into unintentional vaudeville is Thandie Newton’s mutant version of Condoleezza Rice; by assumed accident, Newton’s impacted, puppet-like portrayal (constricted as she was under an arsenal of make-up affectations) embodied the falsity of the whole project and, by extension, the absurdity of the Bush administration’s fabulously unconvincing public face. I see “W.” now as the first domino, the leaden, silly first launch into the void (consider the pot-party cult renter it’s bound to become), to be inevitably followed by other incarnations, deliberate parodies and stone-serious explorations and psychosocial genre riffs, all of it implicitly as inquisitional of our complicity and mysterious cooperation under Bush as of Bush himself. This is just the beginning.

“The Exterminating Angel” and “Simon of the Desert” (Criterion Collection) and “W.” (Lionsgate) are now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: Claudio Brook in "Simon of the Desert," Altura Films International, 1965]

Pages: 1 2