Everybody Must Get Stoned

On October 17—three weeks before Election Day—Oliver Stone’s much-anticipated film about the life and presidency of George W. Bush arrives in theaters.

October 2008

(Page 4 of 4)

BRINKLEY: I’m listening to this conversation and thinking that there’s one thing we might be able to agree on. If you’re going to write Oliver Stone’s biography, this is another home-run chapter. He’s inserted himself in the consciousness of our times whether we want to talk about him or not, whether we want to see his film or not. He has a genius for doing that. He has an ability to kind of throw his own vision into big national dialogues, whether it was Born on the Fourth of July or Nixon or JFK. Very few filmmakers have his talent for doing it. Some people call it narcissism run amok, some say it’s artistic genius, but Oliver Stone is a factor in our lives. I’ve always admired him for that.

DOWD: I want to speak to that, because I am all for Oliver Stone. I am all for people who want to present an argument. Oliver Stone has a truth to tell. He’s had a truth to tell in almost every movie that he’s in, and I think that’s a great thing. Regardless of what I think of this movie, it’s Oliver Stone’s version of what he believes the truth to be. It’s not just entertainment, it’s not just about making money. More power to him.

PIERSON: His most ridiculous movie was the one with the greatest historical perspective, the one on Alexander the Great. Across the centuries, the biggest chance for research, and it’s just silly.

BRINKLEY: If a student asked me about it, I would tell him not to think of Stone’s movies as history. We’re watching Oliver Stone’s mind at work. We’re walking into Oliver Stone’s movie. It’s not a story about George W. Bush.

KELLY: Isn’t every piece of history the historian’s version of the history?

BRINKLEY: But you try to be judicious with the facts. That Kennedy movie you love is bad history. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t stimulating. It may have even had a side effect of making people want to relook at the Kennedy assassination. But it was an awful piece of history. Maybe Stone can’t help himself. He may be a true believer in an ideological fervor that says America is an imperialist society that’s keeping down the world. He may have this vision from his Vietnam experience.

RAPP: The definitive Stone movie is Platoon.

DOWD: Actually, Platoon is one of his few movies that really added to the perspective of the American public. It was one of the first movies about Vietnam in which people had a chance to see the war in a different way.

RAPP: Even when I come out of an Oliver Stone movie and think, “That kind of sucked,” I can’t lose respect for him. I like the way he does his thing. I’ll see W. because he did it.

BRINKLEY: That line makes me think of “Brownsville Girl,” the song Bob Dylan co-wrote with Sam Shepard. Dylan is talking about Gregory Peck’s films, and he sings, “He’s got a new one out now/I don’t even know what it’s about/But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line.” There are people who will go see an Oliver Stone film because it’s Oliver Stone, and he’s created an America, and a world, of dissent. Too often we act like dissenters aren’t patriotic. I think Oliver Stone loves this country greatly. It’s just he expresses it in a way that sets some people off because it comes out of a deep distrust for our government.

RAPP: That’s why World Trade Center was lame compared to all of his other movies.

KELLY: It’s an utter bore. Dead on arrival from the first scene.

PIERSON: Certainly the least bomb throwing and the most mild-mannered.

BRINKLEY: He had to be decent for once.

RAPP: Let’s say you had a great relationship with your father and a horrible relationship with your mother, and they die. You write a book about your father and a book about your mother. The book about your father will be worthless. The book about your mother will be great. That’s why Oliver Stone couldn’t make World Trade Center.

KELLY: He was cowed by the subject in a way that no one would have expected from Oliver Stone.

RAPP: He probably tried too hard on that movie. He loved it the most—and he’ll go to his grave with that being one of his worst. It’ll be the baby with the disability.

DOWD: What’s going to be interesting about this movie is that it will be given extreme weight by the two sets of audiences whose minds will not be changed by it. Neither the left nor the right will be transformed by this movie, and it won’t have any real effect on anybody in the middle.

PIERSON: Once again this takes us back to Fahrenheit 9/11.

SILVERSTEIN: So how would you make this film in a way that would hit the middle?

DOWD: I’d focus on an angle that is either counterintuitive or adds something new. Everybody knows that he messed up in office and made bad decisions and fired people. He can’t speak right. There’s a part of him that’s simple and a part of him that’s lazy and a part of him that’s calculating. But there’s also the story of what happened in his youth with his father not being there and his mom losing the daughter and his becoming the person who kept his mother going. He entertained her, told her stories, made her laugh. His formative time was in there. That would be an interesting psychological tale. Not many people know it—how it led him to mess up, how it led him to do good, how that led him to the bullhorn moment. All those things would give you a window into this person, as opposed to hearing the same retread Comedy Central lines.

SMITH: If you read the leaked pages of the script that circulated on the Internet, you see that a lot of significance is given to the psychological dynamic between Bush and his dad, which plays out as a motivation for his behavior.

BRINKLEY: The left can’t give too much sympathy to the psychic life of poor W., because Dad was an ambassador and away all the time and he had to deal with home life as a rich kid when these young working kids are dying in the war. To indulge in that full human portrait of W., it dilutes the anger that is out there on the left over the war in Iraq. What if you’re a mother who lost your son in Iraq and now you’re starting to watch this Oliver Stone film, and you think, “My kid lost his life because he had a daddy problem”? It’s awful. We’re trying to elect people that are grown-ups, that are psychologically—

DOWD: You know what? That is awful. But that may be the truth. I mean, honestly. I have a son who’s sitting over in Iraq; he’s serving over there now, and I ask why. And that is god-awful. This is not the Oliver Stone movie, but maybe it is. Maybe he’s actually asking the question of how we ended up in a war that we shouldn’t have been fighting. I hope part of it tells that story in a way that’s just not the same old retread that we know but is sad and true.

V. The End

KELLY: I don’t know if anyone remembers a scene near the end of JFK, in which Kevin Costner turns to the camera and—speaking directly to Doug, no doubt—says, “It’s up to you.” That, to me, is one of the most primal moments of the last 25 years of moviemaking, because it’s the rare case of a moviemaker engaging head-on with the audience and asking them to become part of his inquiry. That’s why I’m so excited about this. I feel like Bush is a worthy subject.

SMITH: So what’s the last scene in this movie?

RAPP: This has got to be the hardest movie ever to write the ending for. I cannot stand it.

BRINKLEY: I’d go for a combination of John Ford and Dr. Strangelove. President Bush and Condi Rice riding off into the sunset on separate tanks but holding hands.

PIERSON: Jeffrey Wright getting Tasered and beaten up by the Shreveport police. That would be a good ending.

RAPP: It ends with Colin Powell walking away from the camera, shaking his head.

KELLY: Another movie everybody hates, Marie Antoinette, ends not with her getting beheaded, like you expect, but with her leaving Versailles and expressing utter sadness that this wonderful world she lived in is over.

SMITH: So it’s Bush back in Crawford looking at the mail that the post office held for the last eight years?

BRINKLEY: I think it’s with the unraveling of America under Bush’s watch: the Katrina debacle, losing our grip on Iraq, and all that. You’ll be captivated by his personal journey, and in the end, you see that all this dysfunction has led to a morass. If I were scripting it for Oliver Stone, it would be a large statement.

DOWD: That, or you go the exact opposite direction and make “The Incredible Shrinking President.” He leaves office and nobody’s listening. He’s trying to talk and nobody cares. He started out with the bullhorn and he ends up with nobody even giving a crap what he has to say.

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