Opinion: The resemblance to W - and everyone else
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Like a lot of journalists (I suspect), I spent Friday evening in a movie theater watching ‘W,’ the President Bush biopic. Like Times reviewer Kenneth Turan, I found the Oliver Stone take on Bush suprisingly complex, not the unsubtle screed I had expected. My one disagreement with Turan is with this portion of his review: ‘It also helps that ‘W’ is exceptionally well cast with actors who are not only gifted but who also actually look like the people they portray. Richard Dreyfuss makes a fine scheming Dick Cheney, Scott Glenn is a confident Donald ‘I don’t do nuance’ Rumsfeld. And Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush and Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice are also on target. First among acting equals is the always involving Jeffrey Wright as Gen. Colin L. Powell, a man torn between an instinct for loyalty and what he sees happening around him.’
As the friends who accompanied me to ‘W’ can attest, I found jarring the fact that some of the characters -- particularly Wright as Colin Powell and Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld -- looked not at all like the people they were portraying. The problem was aggravated by the fact that other actors in the film -- especially Brolin as W, Dreyfuss as Cheney and Bruce McGill as CIA Director George Tenet -- were the spittin’ image of the real people. The inconsistent casting made it difficult for me to suspend disbelief across the board, which wouldn’t have been the case with a film that wasn’t as intent on verismilitude. For example, ‘RFK,’ a 2002 cable move starred British actor Linus Roache (the prosecutor on ‘Law & Order’) as Bobby Kennedy, even though Roache didn’t look the part. (The actor playing Lyndon Johnson in ‘RFK,’ by the way, was James Cromwell, who unconvincingly plays George H.W. Bush in ‘W.’)
The casting of Wright is especially annoying, because it seems to reflect the Hollywood belief that one black actor is as good as another. Wright doesn’t resemble Powell, any more than Sidney Poitier looks like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall -- yet Poitier played Marshall in a 1991 television film. Though not a clone of George W. Bush, Brolin’s resemblance to Bush is close enough to complement the character’s mannerisms. The film wouldn’t have worked as well if Stone has cast another white actor -- Paul Giamatti, say -- in the role. But it isn’t only whites who take a simplistic attitude toward racial casting: There were murmurs of disapproval when ‘Saturday Night Live’ first cast Fred Armisen, who is of South American and Asian ancestry, to play Barack Obama. Yet Armisen, with the aid of makeup, looks at least as much like Obama as Brolin does George W. Bush.
Obviously there’s more to capturing the personality of a real-life figure than physical resemblance. But in a film that strives to replicate the face as well as the name, everyone should look like the original -- or no one should.