Yet as Stone guided Cromwell and Brolin across Shreveport's Independence Bowl stadium, doubling for the Rangers' home field, it was possible to see that "W." could be, in a complicated way, sympathetic.
The father was belittling a son, George H. W. cautioning George W. to stick to simple things: "Maybe better you stay out of the barrel," the senior Bush told his son, and leave the family's political legacy to younger brother Jeb. "Well, son, I've got to say I was wrong about you not being good at baseball," the father ultimately said, tossing him a scrap of a compliment.
The future president didn't quite get what the reproving "barrel" idiom meant, but he realized his father didn't respect him. Brolin took in the snub, but then his bearing grew determined: George W. would have to prove himself beyond anyone's imagining.
Stone said it's part of what drove the younger Bush into the White House: to show his doubters wrong. "Someone who could step into that path and out-father his father," Stone said in his air-conditioned trailer during a break in filming. Racing to film, edit and release the film before the November election, Stone was not always getting five hours' sleep. Even though it was nearly midnight and the crew was just finishing its lunch break, the 61-year-old director grew increasingly animated talking about "W."
"I love Michael Moore, but I didn't want to make that kind of movie," Stone said of "Fahrenheit 9/11." "W.," he said, "isn't an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it."
Stone, Brolin and the filmmaking team believe they are crafting a biography so honest that loyal Republicans and the Bushes themselves might see it. Given Stone's filmmaking history, coupled with a sneak peek at an early "W." screenplay draft, that prediction looks like wishful thinking.
Still, it's a captivating challenge: Can a provocateur become fair and balanced? And if Stone is, in some way, muzzling himself to craft a mass-appeal movie, has he cast aside one of his best selling points?
Locating an inner voice
Dressed IN a suffocating Rangers warmup jacket earlier on that scorching June day, Brolin kept running into an outfield wall, trying to make a heroic catch as part of the film's baseball-oriented fantasy framing device.
