“Just tell me what to do,” barks an ambitious but politically inept George W Bush (Brolin) to his oily key advisor Karl Rove (Toby Jones).
Dubya was soliciting sound advice for his crack at the governorship of Texas but it was a floundering lack of focus, crushing naivete and gung-ho recklessness that would distinguish his eight years in charge of America.
The thrust of director Oliver Stone’s gloating biopic is that the feckless incompetent managed to remain in the White House for so long thanks to a coterie of hawkishly manipulative advisors.
There’s the ultra-loyal, right-wing lieutenant Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), the Machiavellian nerd Rove and – most terrifyingly of all – Cheney, a deceitful sabre-rattler happy to bleat on about freedom while detonating war in Iraq to secure oil reserves for Uncle Sam.
Their malleable figurehead and the mannequin whose strings they were happy to jerk is Dubya, an under-achiever whose desire to escape the overbearing presence of his father is only matched by his political bewilderment.
Stone flashes back to the underwhelming early life of Bush Jr, from his beer-swilling college days to a string of business failures until he enjoyed moderate success as co-owner of baseball team The Texas Rangers.
Brolin portrays him as an affable collision between Mister Magoo and Mrs Malaprop, a plaid-shirted regular guy you’d be happy to help change the wheel of his pick-up.
And that was his appeal. Not his political nous, his grasp of foreign policy or his understanding of the democratic system. No, the fact that he’s the kinda guy you could crack open a Bud with. Decent and not dangerous…until he fell in with the wrong crowd.
At forty years of age he lost the liquor and found God...and embarked on a remarkable clamber up the political pole, his Dukes of Hazzard-style appeal wooing ill-informed voters who thought America could be run like a Thanksgiving Day dinner.
You were never going to get a balanced biopic from Stone – and so it proves – but such is the maladministration on display that you don’t need further disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or the Wall Street meltdown to hammer the point home.
Released in the same week as the election of Barack Obama, it already has the feel of a period piece as opposed to a dynamic critique of a political force to be reckoned with.
As he opined in a typical Bush-ism in May this year: "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures what happened inside this Oval Office."
Tim Evans
4:43PM, Apr 27, 2009
