Every Stone Left Unturned

I have been able to take time out of my lazy schedule to go to the cinema recently, which is just as well considering the amount of films that have been vying for my attention. Alexandra, Burn After Reading, Quantum of Solace... all three of these heavyweights were barely pushed aside by W., but were all massacred by Of Time And The City, the two I elected to see.

W. is empty, lazy entertainment. It has its strengths, most notably the performances of almost every actor in the film, most notably Toby Jones (Karl Rove), Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell) and Brolin himself, but Oliver Stone permits nobody to rise above the level of caricature. Thandie Newton is certainly ugly enough to be Condoleeza Rice, but instead plays Bush’s PA, curiously going by the same name, and she might as well not be there. Ellen Burstyn is completely wasted on Barbara Bush. Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney) and Scott Glenn (Donald Rumsfeld) are devious pantomime villains. And Ioan Gruffudd’s 20 second cameo as Tony Blair is borderline insulting. Whereas in real life, Blair was publically calling for “a long-overdue appointment” with Saddam Hussein as early as 1998 following the Nato-assisted fall of Slobodan Milosevic, in Stone’s world he is a weak English stereotype swiftly bullied into going along with the 2003 invasion (contrasted with the heroic refusals of Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin, the latter being made reference to in a scatological joke by the childish, tantrum throwing Bush) presumably after a brief stint playing quarterback for the London Silly Nannies. Truly, the only characters that escape with any dignity intact are Laura Welch (an uninspired Elizabeth banks) and Powell, although since both are defecated upon by their peers this may seem a contentious statement.

And what of Dubya himself? As noted by several other reviewers, here Stone has taken the easy way out. Instead of portraying him as a complex, intelligent individual who made the wrong choices for good or for bad, Stone has him pencilled in as the redneck buffoon he played in public. As hard as Brolin has worked to overcome his lack of immediate similarity with the President, all Stone’s graft has already been done by the real life Bush. This biopic is fun, but it is neither insightful nor realistic. Some vague idea that it was Bush’s Congressional District defeat to Kent Hance that inflamed his desire to not be “out-Christianed and out-Texaned” again may seem like a revelation to some, but this was a paraphrasing of the real-life Bush anyway. And that’s really where the film finds itself: educating to people who don’t follow politics, unimportant to those that do, and uninspiring for film aficionados. There are genuinely funny moments (“Wait, guys, I think we’ve missed the side road,” says Bush to his cabinet as they walk around the grounds to the Robin Hood theme, preparing for war) but this is a subject that needs to be tackled by a serious director, not the lazy, confused one Stone is.

A review of Of Time And The City is pending.