I’m barely in my seat before Josh Brolin is reeling off the reasons why he almost said no to playing US President George W. Bush. First off, he is no fan of the sitting president. Second, he was wary of working with director Oliver Stone, who has a reputation as a loose cannon, “a leftist hammer.” And if that weren’t enough, he had to listen to Stone’s constant, clamoring insistence that Brolin actually had more in common with Bush than he cared to admit. “Oliver kept talking about the similarities between Bush and I, which really pissed me off. I don’t see them,” says Brolin. “I don’t understand it.”
But let’s look at the evidence. W tells the tale of a reckless, feckless playboy who follows his father into the family business, makes an ass of himself for a decade or two and then abruptly turns his life around on his 40th birthday. He is played by the eldest son of Hollywood mainstay James Brolin. Junior spent 20 years spinning his wheels in largely unremarkable movies before ascending to the A-list. By a happy chance, Josh Brolin turned 40 just weeks after signing on the dotted line.
There’s no denying he’s earned his spurs. In person, Brolin looks every inch the movie star; a toned, rangy alpha male who parries questions with an easy drawl that is one part good ole boy, one part stoner. And yet on screen there can be something low-key — even anonymous — about him. You might have caught him in his film debut as a teenage jock in The Goonies, or as the gay cop who licks Patricia Arquette’s armpit in Flirting With Disaster. More likely you first clocked him in No Country for Old Men, although even here his character was so deeply embedded in the warp and woof of the film that it was easy to overlook in favor of Javier Bardem or Tommy Lee Jones. “Yeah,” he says when I mention this. “But that’s a compliment in a roundabout way.”
W is different. Brolin’s performance is a showstopper, a firework display. It catches Bush’s hesitant vocal rhythms and fidgety physical tics with an accuracy that is rather eerie. Judged as a film, Stone’s movie is a bit of a Horlicks. Viewed as an acting masterclass, it’s endlessly entertaining. Brolin’s co-stars include Richard Dreyfuss as an implacable Dick Cheney, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld and Thandie Newton as the Uriah Heep-ish Condoleezza Rice. At one stage our merry band get hopelessly lost on the dirt tracks of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, while plotting the war on Iraq.
I suggest that Bush is something of a construct himself — an East Coast aristocrat playing the part of the Texas cowboy. But Brolin is having none of it. “No,” he says. “He really is that guy. He didn’t grow up in the east, he grew up in Texas. That’s where his roots are, and I do think his intentions are pure. I think he’s surrounded by, you know, very, very ... I don’t want to say evil.”
Oh go on — say evil.
“I don’t want to say evil, even though I just said it. Let’s just say that they are people with massive agendas. But I don’t think this was the impact that he initially wanted to have on the world. I think he wanted to have a positive effect.”
Against the odds, he found himself admiring certain aspects of Bush’s personality: the way he battled his demons, the way he treats his family. Maybe that’s a hazard of the job. Maybe the longer you spend in someone’s skin, the more you come to identify with him. Or perhaps Stone is right when he says that there has always been a bit of Bush in Brolin and that the actor “no doubt shared many of the crises George Bush found himself up against.”
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