Presidentgate

I saw two movies today (I saw another one last night, which I would want to write about, but maybe later) that have a lot in common.

Both 2008 movies, made by directors, who have made some of the most well-known American movies in the last decade or so, who are very highly respected, but also ones who tend to go overboard at times - Ron Howard and Oliver Stone.

Both movies are about US Presidents, both Republicans - without doubt, the two most unpopular people the world has seen holding that position - Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

And both movies make us realize that even the Leader of the Free World is, all said and done, a human being.

The similarities pretty much end there.

While Howard's Frost/Nixon is a taut, thriller-like, period drama, concentrating almost completely on the run-up to and recording of the famous David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon, Stone's W. is more of a spoof, a comic retelling of the life of George, Jr.

Frost/Nixon is one of the finest movies I have seen this year, and even though my vote goes to Milk (I haven't seen The Reader yet), I think F/N could be a very strong contender for the Best Motion Picture Oscar. I don't know much about Nixon, and his entire legacy seems to be overshadowed by Watergate, but I got a pretty good idea of how painful it must have been for someone with as high an opinion of oneself as Nixon did, to the extent of almost believing that the President's chair brought him divine powers, to be the most reviled person in the country.

No one had a doubt that Nixon had committed a crime in abetting the burglars who had broken into the Watergate hotel, except maybe Nixon himself. And the interview was meant to give him a chance to confess, to apologize for letting the people of USA down. While his plan was to make use of the fact that the person interviewing him was just a talk-show host, known more for talking to starlets, and make one last attempt to revive his dead political career by coming across as a misunderstood statesman. Did he succeed?

We all know that he did not. But the movie tells us that he almost managed to. And the pain on Frank Langella's Nixon's face when he realizes that his apparently unworthy adversary has dealt a body blow, from which there is no recovery, in the last round of the sparring match that he had been winning almost by a knockout is killing. It shows that behind that smiling face, impressive built and clever conversationalist lied a somewhat delusional, weak, old man all too aware of the mistakes he had committed.

Aided by an amazing support cast including Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Oliver Platt, not to forget Michael Sheen (seen earlier very memorably as Tony Blair in The Queen), the film is a fairly unbiased, slightly fictionalized, account of the end of the fall of a successful politician and the beginning of the rise of an unsuccessful performer.

W., as I said, is a comedy, filled with, or at least I hope it is filled with, hyperbole. Because if all of it were true, this would be more a horror film than a comic one.

The film starts with the Oval Office meeting in the early 2000s, which gave birth to the term Axis of Evil. And 5 minutes into the meeting, you realize that this is a bunch of over-confident nincompoops, who have dangerously little concern for anything outside the US, or maybe even outside Texas.

The film keeps going back and forth between earlier instances from Bush's life - like his hazing at college, his occasional conflicts with his dad and the barbeque lunch where he met Laura - and the series of mishaps that his presidency was.

We all have heard and lived to see in gory detail everything that was wrong with the Bush years. So, instead of making me feel angry or pained at how casually they treated war (Bush's advisors were discussing the merits of the pie they were eating, at the dinner meeting to discuss the absence of any WMDs in Eye-rak, after hundreds of people on both sides had been killed) or how their policy in the Mid-East is dictated solely by their love for oil, it just made me realize how unsuited a person Bush was to handle the entire post-9/11 situation. An overgrown kid, who just wanted to run a baseball club, drink beer and eat pretzels, and who contested the Texas gubernatorial elections mainly because he was tired of his dad favoring Jeb, who was running for Florida, ended up spending 8 long years in the White House.

I have a feeling it was infinitely more painful for him than it was for any of us.