Oliver Stone's George W. Bush

I understand that Josh Brolin will be playing our National Nightmare in Oliver Stone's movie, and while I think I understand why Stone is interested in making a movie about Bush--like Bush, Stone had a difficult relationship with his father and a long term infatuation with booze and powder--I'd rather have Stone do an autobiography. George W. Bush, for all the damage he has done and will do before this game is over, just isn't a very interesting person. He's always struck me as empty, mean-spirited, and vain--sort of a cross between Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. And while those characters were, in their own ways, compelling, it's necessary to remember that Tom isn't the lead character in Gatsby and can afford to be flat, and Patrick Bateman, for all his depravity, has a willingness to examine himself and his flaws that makes him interesting enough to carry a book. George W. Bush has never confronted the mad, empty, swirling vortex that is his conscience, and given his stated attitudes about self-reflection, he never will. That makes him a problematic lead character for a story. The only way to get at him, I would think, would be to place him in contrast to someone with actual humanity. Sadly, no one in the administration qualifies, and no one outside of it could get close enough to him to offer some perspective.

So why make the movie at all? I'm sure at some point Stone will tell us. But it'll take a lot of convincing to get me in to watch a three-hour movie about a willfully ignorant upper-class psychopath, when much more compelling psychopaths are already in my DVD and book collections.