My Year of Flops Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bush’s stint as the wildly improbable leader of the free world and his far more plausible wild years as a booze-addled fuckup. Shifting easily between a simian smirk and a grimace of sober contemplation, Josh Brolin plays W. as an idiot man-child whose life and career are defined by his relationship with his wealthy, powerful father, George H. W. Bush (James Cromwell). In an acting choice as daring as it is distracting, Cromwell makes no effort to talk or act like Bush Senior, aka “Poppy.” He merely functions as an exemplar of chilly aristocratic reserve who loudly broadcasts his disappointment with W. and expresses his preference for W.’s brother Jeb at every opportunity.
    Bush Senior’s face is permanently fixed in a scowl when dealing with W., but he talks about the bottomless potential and genius of Jeb with a gleam in his eye that implicitly says, “Why, if I weren’t straight and he weren’t my son, I would so go gay for Jeb. Those big, soulful eyes; those strong, masculine hands; that devastating wit … It would just be heaven spooning with him for hours and hours and hours. What’s that, shit for brains? You just got elected governor of Texas? Good for you, though I doubt you’ll do a tenth as good a job as that wonderful Jeb Bush would.”
    Before he essentially begins his life over at 40, W. lurches drunkenly from one low to another. He’s arrested for shenanigans at a football game. He drunk-drives onto Poppy’s lawn. He’s a failure as an oilman and as a candidate for the House of Representatives. Just about the only thing he succeeds in is pissing off Dad and drinking his weight in liquor every night.
    Then he turns 40. The rich, they are different from you and me. Forexample, they get a big do-over if they’ve wasted the first four decades of their lives. W. is born again in the truest sense: He gets smashed at his 40th birthday party and falls to the ground while running. He collapses into a fetal heap and gives his life over to Jesus.
    Perhaps the ultimate tragedy of W.’s life is that the humility of an alcoholic prostrating himself before God and conceding his powerlessness before his addiction morphed into the tragic arrogance of a leader behaving as if the Lord acted directly through him. After being born again, W. acts with absolute moral certainty. He’s the decider, but the Heavenly Father calls the shots.
    W.
clumsily acknowledges this by interminably dragging out the moment when, late in his presidency, W. is asked during a press conference what mistakes he’s made since 9/11, and what he’s learned from them. It’s a major, if not definitive, moment in the man’s life, as W. stumbles and bumbles and wastes a lot of words saying nothing. A man incapable of acknowledging mistakes and learning from them is a man incapable of grasping the complexities of the world, but the scene would be more resonant if Stone didn’t lay on the sorrowful strings and concerned reaction shots that add exclamation points to a theme he’s already spelling out in capital letters.
    Once W. sets his sights first on the Texas governorship and then on the White House, the film turns into a Cliffs Notes version of his presidency, hitting all the expected notes with no poetry or grace. When Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) tells W., “You know I don’t do nuance. It’s just not my thing,” he could be channeling Stone. Everything in
W.
is condensed and simplified.
    Why let themes and conflicts emerge organically when you can foreground them in the dialogue? Why establish through subtext the widespread perception of Desert Storm as the antidote to our crushing defeat in Southeast Asia, when you can simply have George H. W. grin big and volunteer, “I guess we finally kicked that Vietnam Syndrome”? Why subtly hint that W.’s popularity was largely attributable to his reputation as the working man’s fantasy