IMAGINE these fantastical sequences from “W.,” the Oliver Stone portrayal of President George W. Bush that opens on Friday: The president is not alone with his dogs when he chokes on a pretzel and tumbles from the sofa; Saddam Hussein is in the White House family quarters with him. Later Mr. Bush flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet as the bombs rain down. And finally Mr. Hussein returns for another cameo, this time to shout insults at the president and his father.
These depictions would hardly be a reach for a director who is fond of monkeying with history. In “JFK” Mr. Stone suggested that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of gay anti-Communists. In “Nixon” he made that president so epically loathsome that even his Irish setter turned on him.
But “W.” contains no airborne Bush; Mr. Stone cut the scene. And the pretzel incident has no Iraqi dictator, only the two first dogs, Barney and Spot.
“It was wacky stuff that at the end of the day took us out of the movie,” Mr. Stone said in a recent interview in a back corner of the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan. “We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don’t change anything in his true story. Don’t have to, because it’s a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States.”
The surprise about “W.” is that its left-wing creator made a movie that is not so much operatic or hysterical as utterly plausible.
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