My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  In Violence, people constantly undergo astonishing transformations. Mike impulsively decides that fame, riches, and power are no substitute for poverty and anonymity. Page undergoes a similarly dramatic transformation. In Mike’s absence, she morphs from a powerless Ophelia into a cold-blooded, iron-willed Lady Macbeth eager to assume leadership of her missing husband’s empire.

  But these transformations pale in comparison to the spiritual metamorphosis of the film’s most deliciously ridiculous, wonderfully implausible character, a mustachioed gangsta-rap mogul, producer, and rapper named Six O One played by K. Todd Freeman, a respected theater director and actor woefully ill equipped to play a sneering studio gangsta. Six O One is clearly modeled on Dr. Dre, yet he looks and dresses like a smooth-jazz musician, is clearly pushing 40, employs slang that hasn’t been current since they stopped making breakdancing exploitation movies, and says things like, “You know my shit is phat. It’s hot, man. You gonna be using it? Or are you going to be losing it?”

  After Six receives a prank call urging him to abandon violence in his lyrics, he experiences a profound existential crisis (which seems to be sweeping the greater Los Angeles area) and delivers a patchouli-scented spoken-word piece about how, like, violence is played out and wack, and being peaceful is where it’s at.

  The End Of Violence is about the emptiness of popular culture from a filmmaker who apparently hasn’t picked up a magazine or listened to the radio in 15 years. As an allegorical, downbeat mood piece, the film has a certain power. As usual with Wenders’ films, it features an elegant soundtrack and superb cinematography. Narratively and psychologically, the film is so perversely upside down that I almost began to like it that way. But its singular fusion of arthouse pretension and hard-boiled posturing seems completely removed from the world on which it’s supposed to be commenting. “Why do I make films in America? I should have stayed in Europe,” frustrated filmmaker/Wenders surrogate Zoltan Kovacs (Udo Kier) muses late in the film. In spite of Wenders’ scattered successes on this side of the pond, that’s the one line in Violence that rings absolutely true.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Misunderestimated Book-Exclusive Case File: W.

  All cinephiles reach a moment in their intellectual development when they realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit. I experienced that epiphany at 15 while watching The Doors. Suddenly everything about Stone and his aesthetic seemed patently ridiculous: the peyote-soaked pseudo-mysticism, the laughable pretension, the stylistic excess, the self-aggrandizing idealization of the ’60s counterculture, and the exhausting, empty hedonism. It was as if a Native American spirit guide appeared to me in the bathroom of the Lincoln Village Theater in the form of a majestic eagle and uttered the magical words, “You know this guy’s a fucking hack, don’t you? Major, major tool. The path to wisdom begins with that understanding.”

  I’d grown up seeing Oliver Stone as the archetypal Serious Artist. Turns out he was simultaneously more and less than that: He was an outsized caricature of a Serious Artist. He made Important Films about Important Subjects that demanded to be capitalized, including War (Platoon), the Antiwar Movement (Born On The Fourth Of July), Business (Wall Street), The Kennedy Assassination (JFK), Violence in the Media (Natural Born Killers), and Presidential Politics (Nixon). He was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won three.

  Stone’s Very Important Films about Very Important Issues both reflected and affected the zeitgeist. For almost a decade, an intense culture-wide conversation accompanied almost every Stone film. After Platoon, no one could shut the fuck up about Vietnam. Wall Street unleashed a wave of editorial hand-wringing about the excesses of capitalism. JFK incited a firestorm of controversy about the Kennedy assassination. Nixon proved that, to borrow William Faulkner’s famous line (and mix it with some Gerald Ford), the long national nightmare of Watergate is never dead; it’s not even past. Natural Born Killers gave thousands of freelance writers permission to pitch stories about the desensitizing effects of violence in the media.

  Where other major filmmakers trafficked in irony and ambiguity, Stone was considerate enough to tell audiences how they should feel and think. Around the time I was visited by the Native American spirit guide, I came to realize that great art doesn’t tell you what to think—that’s propaganda’s job. Great art respects audiences enough not to bombard them with heavy-handed messages. To paraphrase the theme song to Skidoo, Stone forgot about the color that’s between the black and white, the groovy little in-between.

  During his 1986 to 1994 heyday, Stone couldn’t be denied. After that, it became prohibitively difficult to take him seriously. Stone had a remarkable eight-year run as our most controversial, talked-about filmmaker, but then began a long, seemingly permanent slide into irrelevance. After his long stint as American film’s reigning enfant terrible, everyone seemed to realize he was just plain terrible.

  After the failure of 2004’s Alexander, Stone delivered his most conventional film in 2006’s tastefully dull World Trade Center. Stone surprised his detractors by releasing a film about 9/11 that conservatives could embrace. He’d gotten boring and safe in his old age. With his next project, he looked to reestablish his maverick reputation by setting his sights on the most famous, controversial man in the world at the time: George W. Bush.

  Stone wasn’t going to wait for history to render its verdict on Bush’s legacy. Like Haskell Wexler with Medium Cool, Stone was going to capture history as it was being written. 2008’s W. was rushed into production and filmed in just 46 days so it could hit theaters at the tail end of the presidential election. From the beginning, an air of instant obsolescence hung over the film. By October 17, 2008, the film’s release date, even George W. Bush had come to think of George W. Bush as history’s greatest monster; that “Worst. President. Ever.” bumper sticker on the back of the presidential limousine was a dead giveaway.

  So I entered the preview screening of W. with mixed emotions. The 12-year-old in me that bought the media’s spin on Oliver Stone as the only filmmaker who mattered looked forward to a Bold Statement from an Important Filmmaker. The 32-year-old me dreaded a desperate stunt from an increasingly irrelevant provocateur.

  The early buzz on W. was that it was both a raucous comedy and a surprisingly empathetic depiction of the man progressives loved to hate. In the spirit of Nixon, Stone was going to elicit sympathy for a preeminent political devil. Reduced to its broad outlines, W. certainly suggests a rowdy slobs-vs.-snobs farce: underachieving, hard-partying, malapropism-prone son of an uptight New England blueblood raises hell and runs amok for four solid decades before somehow ending up as the most powerful man in the world during a crucial period in the nation’s history. Then he ends up nearly destroying the planet in a desperate attempt to impress Dad. Think of it as a real-life King Ralph mixed with a Shakespearean tragedy and a soupçon of Being There.

  W. leapfrogs back and forth in time between 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 gov
ernor 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. For example, 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 drinking buddy, when you can simply have Karl Rove (Toby Jones) tell him, “What it all comes down to is who Joe Voter wants to sit down and have a beer with. And guess who that is?” before shooting an approving finger in W.’s direction.

  Stone assembled an impressive array of ringers to round out the supporting cast, though the result plays, to borrow Woodrow Wilson’s alleged praise of Birth Of A Nation, less like history written with lightning than like a Saturday Night Live sketch in which familiar faces have a go at playing top political figures. Thandie Newton decides to give her Condoleezza Rice the excitable nasal whine and demeanor of Olive Oyl, while the brilliant Jeffrey Wright gives us the Colin Powell of liberal daydreams, the noble voice of reason and restraint, a good man in an impossible situation. He’s the angel on Bush’s shoulder, overruled by thousands of neocon devils on the other side, baying for blood and oil.

  In its painful last act, W. is as lost as its subject during the final years of his presidency. W. lacks both righteous indignation and sympathy. Stone’s attitude toward his subject isn’t rage or empathy so much as passive aggression. Its attempts to generate sympathy for its subject are compromised by its reliance on clunky dumb-guy humor and an unfortunate need to shoehorn W.’s greatest verbal gaffes into strange, inaccurate contexts, like having W. deliver the famous “misunderestimating” line in a strategy meeting about the Middle East.

  When considering what Stone set out to do with W.—the first and hopefully last lame-duck presidential biopic—it’s instructive to think of what Fahrenheit 9/11, another manifesto by a loud, divisive, self-publicizing lefty blowhard, actually accomplished. Fahrenheit 9/11 received the reception W. was denied. Even before its release, 9/11 transcended film and became not just a pop-culture phenomenon but also a cultural phenomenon. It was big news.

  Moore chronicled the tragicomic 2000 election with a visceral intensity that felt like an old wound being ripped open. Watching Fahrenheit 9/11 was like reliving a national trauma. When Stone just barely dramatizes the run-up to the Iraq War, it feels like a rerun. Stone’s films have always been wildly, even irritatingly cinematic, but W. feels like a television movie shot on the cheap.

  Stone saves his worst crimes against subtlety for the very end, during a pair of fantasy sequences. In one, George H. W. decries W.’s presidency as nothing short of a “goddamned fiasco” and bitches him out for ruining things for H. W.’s beloved, beautiful, godlike favorite son Jeb. I’d somehow missed the film’s previous 700 references to H. W. being disappointed in W. and favoring Jeb, so I appreciated Stone once again making the film’s themes extra clear. In the second fantasy sequence, W. is patrolling center field for the Texas Rangers—a team he once co-owned—and lets a home-run ball get away from him. You know, like he let greatness get away from him during his presidency, and shit.

  Stone took a big risk making a biopic about the sitting president. That’s the kind of ambition I like to praise and damn with My Year Of Flops. Alas, the film everyone was going to be talking about became the film the culture more or less ignored. Let’s just hope Oliver Stone’s Palin never gets green-lit.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Richard Dreyfuss On W.

  The ’70s ushered in a new era of unconventional leading men with offbeat looks and quirky personae. Richard Dreyfuss rode that wave to fame and glory as the Academy Award–winning star of hits like American Graffiti, Jaws, The Goodbye Girl, Down & Out In Beverly Hills, and Stakeout.

  Richard Dreyfuss: Playing Dick Cheney was great. It was like a great meal. Unfortunately, it was done by a guy who took the politics out of the story, so it’ll have no legs. He had an opportunity to keep a very important character in the film, and that character was you and me, the ones who really were, for a while, afraid of their own president. But by deciding to keep the story in the White House, it looked like business as usual, so the character couldn’t appear. And there’s no reason to see the film after you get past the performances or whatever. Josh [Brolin] is great, [Elizabeth Banks] is great, I’m really good.

  And Oliver [Stone] is a putz who screamed that I was the worst actor he’d ever worked with, and I’d ruined his film, he had to cut around me. And I said, “Oliver, you’ve made one strategic error.” He said, “What was that?” I said, “The junket has yet to come.” And then I ripped him apart at the junket. They said, “What did you think of the film?” And I went … [Grimaces.] I answered the question. And as I’m doing now, I’m continuing to do that, because he was a bully, he was graceless at the top of his lungs, and he blew a great opportunity, artistically, commercially, whatever you want to call it. And I have a just-big-enough ego. I don’t do favors for people who treat me like a pig. So as far as I’m concerned, you can lead this story off by saying, “Richard Dreyfuss still thinks Oliver is an asshole.”

  Nathan Rabin: Were you able to empathize with Cheney over the course of playing him?

  RD: Empathize? No. I think that he was true to himself, you know? He really did believe that the executive branch was superior to the legislative and the courts. He really did believe that the executive had the right to tell Congress to go fuck itself.

  NR: It was an imperial presidency.

  RD: Yeah. And he believed in the PATRIOT Act. And there was never a conspiracy with the Bush people. They never planned anything. They just waited for our outrage, which never appeared, so they took the next step. We’re the villains, because we have lost our outrage. />
  Book-Exclusive Patented, Pain-Free Case File: The Great Moment

  In Preston Sturges’ 1941 masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels, the pampered, wildly successful comedy director behind such fanciful frivolities as Ants In Your Pants Of 1939, Hey Hey In The Hayloft, and So Long Sarong tires of pumping out mindless escapism and sets out to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a timely, socially relevant drama about the human condition. To prepare, he escapes the comforting womb of Hollywood and experiences poverty firsthand as an undercover hobo. He ends up on a chain gang for his troubles but learns he can do far more good for the ever-suffering masses as a maker of mirth than as a dour chronicler of the human condition.

  In 1942, Preston Sturges, the pampered, wildly successful comedy director, set out to make a timely, socially relevant drama about the human condition and the cruelty of fate called The Great Moment. He was punished for his ambition with just about every indignity short of a stint on a chain gang.

  When he made The Great Moment, Sturges was in the midst of one of the greatest streaks in American film, a five-year stretch that encompassed such unassailable apogees of cinematic comedy as The Great McGinty, Christmas In July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle Of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail The Conquering Hero. Yet Sturges’ success mattered little to his bosses over at Paramount. The debonair filmmaker watched in horror as The Great Moment was reedited against his will, his prologue discarded, the running time trimmed to 81 minutes, and the film’s title changed twice (from Triumph Over Pain to Great Without Glory to The Great Moment). Then it lingered on a shelf for years. Upon its eventual 1944 release, moviegoers ignored it and critics dismissed it.