"Language is like a drawbridge": A conversation with Joshua Ferris

photo by Nina Subin

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End chronicled the life and death of a Chicago advertising firm. Relayed in the first-person plural, it was sharp, witty and insightful about how work informs our lives. It was also a hit, and won Ferris the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel. Ferris’ follow-up, The Unnamed (Reagan Arthur/Black Bay Books, $15.99), is more harrowing and more moving. It concerns Tim Farnsworth, a successful lawyer stricken with a bizarre ailment that manifests in compulsive, uncontrollable walking. In the midst of whatever activity Tim can suddenly be carried far away by his own legs, trudging through sometimes punishing weather without appropriate clothing or supplies until he collapses into sleep whenever and wherever his body finally gives out. His condition gradually eats away at everything he cherishes, including his job and his marriage to Jane, whose genuine devotion to Tim is pushed to its limits. The Unnamed observes its characters’ trials with tremendous tenderness. Though fascinating, inventive, and at times extremely humorous, it’s uncompromising, even brutal in how it follows its central idea to what ultimately feels like its inevitable conclusion. I spoke with Ferris last week when he was in Toronto attending the International Festival of Authors.


JB: Your first novel took its title from a line in Don DeLillo’s Americana. There’s a certain boldness of language and engagement with vernacular in The Unnamed that occasionally recalls DeLillo as well. Does he remain an important touchstone for you?

Joshua Ferris: DeLillo’s a giant. He’ll forever be incorruptible for me. His books are woven into my reader’s DNA. How that translates into my own writing is very hard for me to say. I think it’s important to try to not sound like DeLillo. I’ll go out of my way to strike sentences that sound too much like DeLillo or Proust or Hemingway. If I can feel the hovering presence of someone I admire within a sentence, I scratch it out.

JB: Because it gives an undesirable sense of assurance, knowing that your writing conforms to a tested model?

JF: No. It just gives me a sense of anxiety. I’d rather write a bad sentence that seems to possess authorial intent from me than write a good sentence whose authorial intent can be ascribed to someone else. That may be pride talking, but I think it’s also something deeper than that, going back to an Emersonian self-reliance that states that to borrow from someone else is to abdicate your originality. There may in fact be nothing new under the sun, but it’s important to try my best to sound like me.

JB: What does it mean to name something? Your novel implies that the difference between having and not having a name is the difference between having a place in the world and being rejected by it.

JF: I think that’s accurate. It’s also about having a set of attributes that adhere to you. There’s a tic you find sometimes in writing. You have a character named John and you’re told something is “a very John-like thing to do.” It’s a shorthand for some writers to convey an entire personality, just using the character’s name as a modifier. When you take that name away, you’re looking nakedly at the object itself—maybe you’re unable to look at it. The specific referent in the title of The Unnamed is the unnamed disease. You can’t make anything of it. Doctors can’t rally around it. There can’t be a 5K run in benefit of it. So the result of this namelessness is a tremendous loneliness. Adam named the animals for a reason—he was lonely. By naming the animals he got closer to them. If he’d kept the animals nameless it would have been a much chillier garden. This goes back to what language can and can’t do, how it bridges certain gaps, how it breaks down. The limits of language are something I wanted to explore in the book, especially with respect to subjective experience, how you can or cannot convey to your most intimate loved ones how you’re actually feeling. To extend the metaphor, language is like a drawbridge. Sooner or later it goes up and you can’t get to the other side.

JB: Do you relate to Tim and Jane’s relationship, to how they attempt to express their feelings to each other?

JF: Yes. I think what they do in a more dramatic way what many married people do, which is come together at a moment in time, find themselves speaking the same language, and then for whatever reason fly apart. Far apart, and for a long time. Then they come back together for inexplicable reasons and do it all over again. My reading of the book is that it’s basically a love story.


JB: Has writing this novel strengthened or weakened your faith in the durability of love?

JF: That’s tough to say. I don’t think that a novel informs or comments upon its writer. The writer had those ideas somewhere in them prior to writing the book. Once written, the book might represent one-tenth of the writer’s understanding of love. There’s still that other 90% of the writer’s psyche that hasn’t been plumbed. The Unnamed is one take regarding one couple. It can’t really teach me anything. All I taught myself in writing it was how to write the book. The finished novel is not a textbook for the future writer.

JB: But are you surprised by what you’re saying about love as you write, what you seem to believe or hold dear?

JF: Yes, quite often. I’m probably being instructed as I write, getting some clarity as to how I see things. It’s like feeling something in the dark and then suddenly shining a light on it. Pretty or not, there it is.

JB: You were saying earlier that you have a poor memory. What makes you say that?

JF: Fiction seems to be made up of three predominant branches, those being memory, imagination and language. I can do language pretty well. I can do imagination well. But memory seems to be my weak branch. I’m sure there are writers who would want more branches or fewer branches or whatever, but that’s how I see it.

JB: The Unnamed lends itself to being read as an allegory, but I’m personally uncomfortable with that term because it seems to imply a one-to-one relationship between the ostensible metaphor and what it represents.

JF: I never in a million years would have written this with the intention of it being seen as allegory. The allegorical readings I’ve come across have surprised me. It’s obviously a metaphor for sickness because I invented the disease. I wanted to explore sickness without the baggage of a known disease. When I read Kafka, I don’t think of Josephine the Mouse as an allegory or metaphor for something else. I don’t read about K.’s travels in the castle as a metaphor for the terrible bureaucracy that overtook the 20th century and led to the systematic decimation of Jews in the Holocaust. I take it all very literally, and only later think about the allegorical possibilities surrounding the story. That eventually gives you a fuller and more interesting reading, but I think the primary work of the reader is to imagine the actual, literal situation described. That’s responsible reading. The rest is 10th grade term papers.

JB: There’s a current running through The Unnamed that concerns religious belief, and it seems that you’ve left the door open in the novel’s final passage, with Tim suspended in this almost metaphysical space of listening and anticipation.

JF: That was always my intention. Dogmatic fiction, fiction that closes doors on possibilities, isn’t exciting for me. To go back to DeLillo, one of the great triumphs of White Noise is that it is excoriating about technology. Technology is something to be dreaded in the book, and there’s a real nostalgia for pre-technological time. But the same sentences that cause me to arrive at those conclusions are the very same sentences that bring a tremendous Romanticism to technology. Throughout The Unnamed there are philosophical ideas presented concerning the existence of God or the difference between the mind and body. For me to have tried to close the book with clear, absolute conclusions to the explorations of those ideas would have taken the book out of the realm of fiction and into that of the essay. I don’t think that’s my job. I was always trying to tell the story, to rely on imagination, and where it landed was where it had to land.

TIFF '10: Traversing precarious terrain

Wednesday evening’s Mavericks session at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival featured Kelly Reichardt, the American director of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. It was probably the most captivating and intimate session of its kind I’ve ever seen at TIFF. Reichardt was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, who would not have been my first choice for the role but in fact did a remarkable job, alternately supporting and gently provoking her subject. Reichardt was warm, good humoured, yet utterly frank about her particular anxieties as a filmmaker who, in the ten years between her first and second features, gradually came to realize the myriad filmmaking methods for which she was not suited and essentially refused to work. Joking somewhat painfully about the disappointingly smallish crowd that turned out for the on-stage Q&A—among them actors Shirley Henderson and Neal Huff, and composer Jeff Grace—Reichardt matter-of-factly tried to explain how she was acutely aware that her opportunities to make the sort of films she wants to make—the sort that are handmade, that use skeletal crews, that offer the talent no pampering whatsoever, that are shot on film despite tiny budgets, that grant the director genuine and complete independence, that reject diversion in favour of quietude, narrative dynamics in favour of close observation and emotional nuance—could evaporate at any moment. Reichardt is beloved and respected, especially amongst local cinephiles, and everyone there seemed to want to reassure her of this, yet honestly, I think her anxieties are perfectly valid. What makes Reichardt’s work so valuable and enduring is also what can make it seem like some sort of endangered species.

Meek’s Cut-off, Reichardt’s fourth feature, roughly approximates a western, though it forsakes widescreen vistas for square images of landscapes dissolving into other, similar landscapes. It offers a paucity of action, and is firmly committed to conveying the arduousness of settling in unmapped territory. It is distinctly immersive and may very well be the best American film of the year. Based on true events and set in 1845, it chronicles a trio of families traversing Oregon with the increasingly dubious leadership of big-talking, biker-bearded Bruce Greenwood’s Stephen Meek. Terrain proves troublesome and water progressively scarce. Henderson’s character is pregnant. A strangely moving scene finds her chasing a kerchief across parched gray earth in the mischievous wind. Washing up, repairing wheels, building a fire: drawing inspiration for Robert Flaherty’s films, Reichardt allows the group’s chores to play out in real time, and in doing so slowly changes our sense of time. From a distance we watch Michele Williams fire and then reload a musket in a state of panic and it is an unnervingly long process. At one point the men capture an Indian. Against Meek’s wishes they let him live so as to lead them to water. There are no subtitles and we have no special access to his thoughts or intentions. He isn’t ennobled or humanized any more than anyone else. He’s a man, which is enough for Williams’ character to fear him, but also to treat him with respect. She’s pragmatic first and sympathetic second. The film’s ending is sublimely well judged, resolving almost nothing yet ushering us right to the moment where our desperate convey of characters must surrender any notion of being able to control their destinies. Beautiful. But political? It’s that too, but I’d rather you discover those layers on your own.

José Saramago, 1922-2010

Speaking of blindness... the great Portuguese novelist and controversial polemicist José Saramago died on 18 June, and if the announcement of his departure shocked me it wasn’t because of his age—he was 87—but his sheer productivity right up to the end. How many examples in literature do we have of authors who created such a bold, challenging and prolific body of work at an age as advanced as Saramago’s during his last two decades of robust busyness? (I’m sure Borges would have an answer.) Like many Anglophone readers I discovered Saramago with his Nobel Prize-winning Blindness, published in translation in 1997 and written when the author was already a septuagenarian. I’ve read everything since, which is a lot, and not much that was written beforehand, something I look forward to remedying. Blindness concerns a plague that renders nearly all of humanity blind, and its sentences that go on for pages, with several exchanges of dialogue mounting atop one another so that it can become difficult to discern who’s speaking, struck me as a brilliant way of making the reader almost feel as blind, in some sense, as the characters. When I first read Blindness I hadn’t yet realized that pretty much all of Saramago’s fiction is written in the same style. Yet this style lends itself to a seemingly infinite number of uses.

Saramago’s prose, exalted in structure, colloquial in word choice, seem simultaneously carved in stone and transcribed from the most intimate conversations. His ongoing critique of consumer culture, which was perhaps most eloquent and compelling in The Cave, which will forever change how you look at West Edmonton Mall, was often aligned directly with his mercurial Marxism, and his fantastical conceits were often regarded, or at least marketed, as allegories. Yet Saramago’s best stories were far too humane, spontaneous, organic, and mysterious to be neatly summed up in any sort of one-to-one metaphorical framework or reduced to didacticism. My experience with his novels has usually gone like this: I enter immediately engrossed and fascinated; halfway through, the seemingly endless digressions are wearing me out; by the end, the grand conclusion arises as though from a fog, my mind is sufficiently blown, and I treasure every page, even the ones that frustrated me, and feel like I’ve genuinely been through something, something that has caused me not to feel closer to Saramago’s world view, but to rigorously question my own. As our world continues to rumble forth his contentious, often poetic voice will be missed, but his texts remain, and thanks to the inherent sluggishness of translation, it seems we still have some new ones to look forward to.

It's no fun being an illegal alien—or changing into one: District 9

Not invaders so much as castaways, the aliens wash up over Johannesburg, their great ship looming, suspended and ominously silent for a long while until we humans finally break in and discover the lot of them ailing and with no place to go. More than two decades later the aliens have become the new gypsies, a nationless people unwanted, feared, segregated, blamed for all sorts of things. They’re already loosely confined to zone, but our story begins proper when a private multinational is hired to round them all up and send them to a more remote colony, out of sight, out of mind, herded into the ghetto.

District 9 takes a rather visionary approach to our anxious dreams of extraterrestrial first contact, picking up cues from a lot of great science fiction prose, the sort that rarely gets made into movies. (It’s also entirely possible that parts of its story were inspired by Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film The Defiant Ones.) By rendering the aliens as ostracized refugees in South Africa the film opens the doors wide to invite all manner of metaphorical interpretation, grounding its narrative in the landscape of apartheid and having human characters of all racial backgrounds disparage their visitors with reactionary, colonialist rhetoric, their intolerance made ostensibly acceptable by the humanoid yet crustacean-like aliens’ all too evident Otherness. But this remarkable feature debut from South African-Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, made under the auspices of producer Peter Jackson, also functions quite nicely as engrossing comic book stuff. In fact, the deeper it ventures into pulp territory the better it gets.

Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our unlikely protagonist, a naïve, clownish, moustached bureaucrat who earns his high profile position of supervising the relocation project through pure nepotism. He’s a Kafkaesque tragic character in more ways than one, having first been ill-prepared for a mission fraught with issues of miscommunication and conflicting agendas, and then coming into contact with an alien fluid that infects him with some mysterious gene-altering virus. Wikus could never be mistaken for a hero—it’s only his process of transfiguration, and his sudden value to military strategists, that forces him to become heroic. He gets lucky, and his sheer will to survive is strong. He becomes an unwitting symbol for the possibility of racial conciliation, and embarks on a bloody adventure that slowly turns desperate self-interest into something far grander.

District 9 is wildly ambitious. By its brilliantly realized finale these ambitions are surprisingly fulfilled. Its difficulties arise mostly through a sense of uncertainty with form. Of the more mature filmmakers one might imagine taking on such a project—Paul Verhoven or David Cronenberg spring to mind—I can’t think of any who would have stuck with the limiting faux documentary approach developed by Blomkamp and his co-scenarist Terri Tatchell, which simply causes a lot of unnecessary problems. Opening with the news show style commentaries and character introductions offers the filmmakers a perfectly legitimate—if rather generic—opportunity to get a lot of exposition out of the way. But they continue to try and convince us that we’re watching a kind of documentary long afterwards, and it’s only when the form’s limitations become too constraining—we eventually need to see characters in situations that no diegetically-placed camera could possibly capture—that the film starts breaking its own rules and things get confused. With its handheld, vérité aesthetic, the faux doc format allows filmmakers to cheat certain things that a more classical approach is less forgiving of, but Blomkamp hardly seems like he’s trying to make The Blair Witch Project—on the contrary, he seems a skilled craftsman, so I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t go al the way and embrace the aesthetic demands of an unmistakably fiction film when his story started begging for it.

So District 9 gets off to a wobbly, distracting start, but rest assured it will more than make up for it, partially just because the story is so well-structured and the political—at times outright satirical—undercurrents so rich. Copley compliments this by hurling himself into the squirm-inducing physicality of the role and surrendering completely to the risky notion of the totally bumbling protagonist. Wikus is definitely not cut from the Cronenbergian model of the reflective hero fascinated by his own terrifying metamorphosis. The guy is really an idiot, and through it serves the drama effectively the meager redemption he finds is hard-won. This is what makes this sort of story work, the understanding that heroism is always a balance of character and circumstance, and once in while the latter grossly outweighs the former. In any case, it’s a must-see for anyone with even the slightest appetite for smart spectacle. It sure beats the hell out of the rest of the current summer stock.

Border incident: Lemon Tree

The new luxury home of Israel Navon (Doron Tavory) overlooks the border that divides Israel from the West Bank. Just over that border is a well-kept lemon grove tended by Salma (Hiam Abbass), a widow in her late 40s whose children have all grown and moved away. Her trees are so close and so fecund that if he wanted Israel could twist an arm through the wire fence and pluck fruit right from the branches. But according to Israel’s crack team of security advisors this very fecundity “poses an imminent threat to Israeli security,” it’s shady patches a veritable breeding ground for a deadly terrorist ambush. They advise Israel to have the entire grove leveled. Israel is the Israeli Minister of Defense, and he does what he’s told.

So we’ve got a character who seems to represent, to a conspicuous degree, the state of Israel. His name, lest we fail to draw the parallel, is Israel. He’s well spoken, and possesses the confidence of a man accustomed to power, privilege and a sense of entitlement. We’ve got a patch of land that seems to represent, to a conspicuous degree, the people of Palestine. It’s modest but lovely, vulnerable yet resilient, and carries with it a deep personal history. Salma and her elderly assistant are hard-working paragons of proletariat integrity. Salma refuses to allow her trees to be destroyed, even when assured of compensation for her loss. She hires a lawyer named Ziad (Ali Suliman) whose practice barely survives off of whatever divorce suits he can scrounge up. Salma’s case seems hopeless, but her plight earns Ziad’s loyalty. It also appeals to the international media hungry for some fresh human interest to attach to the ongoing story of this fraught region. She takes it to the Supreme Court.

If all this seems rather too forceful an allegory, it’s also, happily, a somewhat misleading set-up. If you’ll pardon the pun, Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree (Etz Limon) grows on you. While Riklis seems to be cultivating a simplistic spin on David and Goliath, this film’s real roots lie elsewhere. In fact, it’s far less pointedly about the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than it is about the politics of gender and familial roles. Across that fence from Salma, residing in that shaded fortress is Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), Israel’s lovely wife. Though Mira sympathizes with Salma she never quite manages to do very much about the situation and the two women never quite manage to meet, yet, in some very basic ways that betray their obvious imbalance of power, they share more than either realizes.

Of course the story, written by Riklis and Suha Arraf, who collaborated previously on Riklis’ The Syrian Bride, is fundamentally about Salma, who finds no unconditional support from anyone save Ziad. Her few friends toss around a lot of blanket condemnations of the Israeli government, yet they neither condone her acceptance of compensation nor her fight to keep her land. When, following a scene of truly elegant and understated eroticism, we begin to sense a romance developing between Salma and her significantly younger lawyer, these same friends start coming round to warn her that her supposedly undignified behaviour won’t be tolerated.

Abbass, so moving in The Visitor, embodies Salma with such graceful transitions that her face, so beautiful and imperious, can seem to shift from hard and stoic to smooth and amorous while barely moving a muscle. Every time she applies or removes her headscarf, she conveys her decision with some intricate variation. Salma’s instincts and abilities register as maternal. As we watch her go about her routines, she seems built to tend soil, to prepare food and scrub floors, to graciously fulfill all the expectations of the narrow-minded patriarchy. Yet when the first signs of longing colour her cheeks it’s as though some dormant blood rushes through her. The effect is quietly exhilarating. Lemon Tree is thoughtful and engaging enough, but Abbass’ performance is uncommonly rich in specificity and feeling, and elevates the film to a whole other level.

The constant gardener: Being There on DVD

Going back to its opening scenes, especially as they read in the novel, Being There submits itself as perhaps our most acute modern take on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Before the death of his employer, Chance (Peter Sellers) spent his whole life confined within the high walls of an affluent mansion, meeting few others, tending the old man’s garden, and experiencing the external world entirely through the shadow play of television. The catch to this spin on the allegory is that liberation from his cave doesn’t necessarily enlighten Chance but rather leads to inspired farce, one with the distinctive blend of affection and dismay for American life that marks the perspective of the observant outsider, which is exactly what the late Polish-born writer Jerzy Kosinski was.

Kosinski’s eponymous novella was published in 1970, a sharp if unusually slight work from a period marked by dark, at times positively gruesome novels, including The Painted Bird, Kosinski’s controversial 1965 semi-autobiographical chronicle of an abandoned child’s harrowing survival during World War II. As directed by Hal Ashby, the 1979 film, adapted with surprising fidelity by Kosinski himself, is leisurely, almost whimsical, and, thanks largely to Sellers’ sublimely restrained central performance—his penultimate—it’s also very funny. Chance, who due to a misunderstanding adopts the name Chauncey Gardiner, resembles a permanently sedated child. His mind is placid. He can only convey ideas through gardening metaphors, can only understand human behaviour when it echoes televised simulations. Yet, thanks to outrageous fortune, Chance befriends a wealthy, dying financier (Melvyn Douglas), influences the American President (Jack Warden), arouses the friendship of the Soviet ambassador (Richard Basehart), inflames the passions of a fetching society woman (Shirley MacLaine), and becomes a sensation, a celebrity without a past.

Being There, especially when seen in the wake of the Bush administration, speaks to the adoration of naïveté that can imperil American political discourse. Yet despite the dangers he represents, Chance himself is never rendered as anything more than benignly vacuous, an inoffensive, (literally) impotent blank, a man whose homespun wisdom and pop cultural breeding disguises what finally feels like an alien entity, no more of this world than Benjamin Button or Truman Burbank. He could have easily a creation of Philip K. Dick's. Chance’s TV-derived approximation of humanness is a satirical reflection on reflection itself, the reflection of the world through a sentimental, infantilized, implicitly racist and commercially dictated mirror. So Being There also functions as a documentary on what everybody was watching 30 years ago—remember Cheech and Chong’s star-laden ‘Basketball Jones’?

Despite a bit of unevenness—the scenes of the President in bed with the first lady feel, oddly enough, like a bad sitcom—I think Being There holds up well, and that it will continue to look different for each successive generation. And, along with his appearance in Reds, it remains one of the very few traces of Kosinski’s strange, unusual presence in the movies. 

Sympathy for the dumbbell

There are times when you’ve got to wonder if this young century that no longer feels young anymore, more specifically the eight years that have followed that famously fraudulent 2000 presidential election, hasn’t been some sort of prolonged bad dream from which America and all the rest of us are about to wake from with one wicked-ass hangover. George Walker Bush will soon be making his departure from the White House, the last stretch of what has proven to be one very long and wearying walk indeed. Some may argue that a preemptive strike on summarizing his presidency is unlawful, but such temperance has no firm place in the dictates of movies, and certainly not the movies of Oliver Stone, whose W. arrives in theatres just in time to greet the appointment of a new American president—though the film might be best viewed as a melancholy parting gift for the outgoing one.

Stone and Bush—could one ask for a more delightful contrast of names?—are exact contemporaries. They attended Yale at the same time, though apparently never met on the student party circuit. But Stone has never shied from identification with the great demons of recent history regardless of their political stripes, thus his portraits of both Nixon and Castro have been strangely tender in their way. As W. gets underway we find Bush (Josh Brolin, who when wearing a cowboy hat bears a striking resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton) circling the oval office, pivoting round an axis in precise opposition to Stone’s camera, as though the two are in a formal dance or are a pair of boxers sizing each other up. And all the while our supporting characters sit in heated discussion over how to characterize their nation’s nebulous post-9/11 enemy, settling, finally, on “axis of evil.” It’s a rousing opener, introducing our protagonist just when his confidence is at the highest it’ll ever be, setting us up for the stumbling ascension to power that led up to this moment and, we presume, the terrible downfall to follow. Curiously, over the next two hours, we’ll witness a great deal more of the former than the latter.

Written by Stanley Weiser, who co-scripted Stone’s Wall Street, W. needs to be viewed more as portraiture than polemic, even if it seems at times to want to be both. This character study is founded above all in Bush’s contentious, approval-seeking relationship with his father (James Cromwell), whose own presidency and its misadventures in foreign policy now look to us like an exercise in centrist moderation in comparison. Having succeeded as a frat boy and failed miserably as a student and labourer, we hear Bush Jr. berated by his dad for hi-jinx and aimlessness, ordered to stop behaving like a Kennedy and respect the family name. Bush Jr. will never fully heal from these wounds, exacerbated by his suspicion that brother Jeb’s the unspoken favourite. It is these wounds that’ll slowly give him the gumption to go into politics and later still become so embroiled in Iraq, convinced of his mission to finish the job dad abandoned back in 1991.

The familial grievances offer Weiser and Stone a classical, dramaturgically sound framework to build on, and they’ve tailored the chorus of advisory voices so as to heighten the sense of their protagonist as tragic fool: Richard Dryfuss as Cheney, condescending, shamelessly savouring the word “empire” like a fat lizard; Thandie Newton doing a fun, blood-curdling Condoleezza Rice; Scott Glen as a glinty-eyed if perhaps not sufficiently callous Rumsfeld; Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, the defeated, lonesome voice of reason and morality; Toby Jones as Karl Rove, seen here as nothing less than a Satanic puppet master. Each has their moment to carry the torch of flamboyant disgrace, though none rise above the level of strict support for Brolin, whose performance here is virtually flawless, all the more effective and troubling for being somehow perfectly sympathetic, as amiable a good ol’ boy as we always suspected Bush must have been before he was granted fearsome powers. When Rove questions his strut, Bush replies, “In Texas we call that walkin’,” and it’s clear that the man might have seemed refreshing when the peril of his incompetence was still abstract and distant. W. is more than allegory and Brolin finally too complex in his characterization to seem merely a product of a flawed system, though in the end his confusion alone seems the absolute measure of his character.

Given all this, all these factors begging to add up to something, how strange that W. seems to be lacking a last act. This absence of resolution is perhaps fitting given the absence of exit strategy that’s so hounded the occupation of Iraq. Yet however eloquent this structural parallel between reality and art, you couldn’t be blamed for desiring more when the credits suddenly appear, be it the long, draining road to the present or our sad hero’s final surrender to the knowledge of his true historical role as widely loathed blunderer on the world’s greatest and more consequential stage. Stone would seem up for at least one of these jobs, and spends much of the film building up to it with a welcome lack of directorly affectation, save a few oddball close-ups of belt buckles or ladies’ shoes smooshing corn cobs and a regrettable, entirely redundant dream sequence offering only one more confrontation with poppy. How Stone and Weiser came to decide on their abbreviated ending is ambiguous, but I suppose we at least can give them credit for leaving the final judgment on their subject up to us.