Courtesy Lionsgate

Josh Brolin as George W. Bush in "W."

"W."

Oliver Stone paints a surprisingly sympathetic picture of George W. Bush in this award-courting movie.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: George W. Bush, Stephanie Zacharek, Drama, Oliver Stone, Politics, Movies, President, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Government, Reviews

Oct. 17, 2008 | There's nothing overtly or even subtly disreputable about Oliver Stone's "W.," which is exactly what's wrong with it. I admit that my hopes were probably too high: In these twilight days of the George W. Bush administration, I find my anger intensifying rather than abating, and I was hoping "W." would be a more cathartic exercise than it is.

Stone is sometimes a fine director and sometimes a total nutball; sometimes he's both at once. But "W." needs more nuts and less finesse. That's not to say the movie is exactly subtle -- this is an Oliver Stone picture we're talking about. It's just that Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser seem to be torn between duty and impulse: Stone, who has earned plenty of accolades for ponderous, heavyweight pictures like "Nixon," may have felt compelled to deliver a historical document, something that will stand for the ages. But he also tips his hand frequently enough to let us in on his true feelings about our 43rd president: Stone leaves no doubt about his meaning when he shows his characters -- Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Franks, Powell, et al. -- trooping across a field in Crawford, Texas,  as the theme from the '60s TV show "The Adventures of Robin Hood" tootles in the background. It's when Stone engages in shameless editorializing -- when he lets his freak-flag point of view fly, rather than tempering it -- that "W." is most entertaining and most vital. The rest of the time it feels too much like awards bait: stiff, arch and knowing.

Stone and Weiser arduously poke into every corner of the W mystique, and their lead actor, Josh Brolin, follows fearlessly. The picture is a series of interlaced flashbacks, some fairly recent, others delving further into the back story (which is mostly factual, albeit enhanced by imagined details). We see young W as a Yale undergrad being inducted into a fraternity, one of numerous young men engaging in the thinly veiled homoerotic ritual of being stripped down and tied up and having liquor funneled down their throats. When young W lands in jail, Poppy (played, in a sympathetic and beautifully focused performance, by James Cromwell) gets the phone call asking for help -- and grants that help with a telling reluctance.

The picture hopscotches backward and forward, covering W's wiggly-waggly entry into politics (at one point, his greatest dream is to become baseball commissioner), a trajectory driven seemingly as much by happenstance as by ambition; his days of playing poker and drinking with his Texas buddies; his masterminding of the Iraq war, and subsequent attempts to manage it, with his Cabinet (more on these merry men, and woman, later); his early years with Laura, a supportive wife who, as she's played by Elizabeth Banks, sees everything and says nothing; and in between all that, numerous scenes in which he crumples under the only semi-approving gaze of his father.

Stone and Weiser pack a lot in -- too much. In trying to create a document for all time, they've made a picture that drags aimlessly in its last third. And while the scenes showing the Cabinet's Iraq war strategizing are reasonably well dramatized, I was left with the feeling that Stone was rehashing much of the same stuff we've already seen in documentaries like "No End in Sight" or read in the newspapers: These sequences would be more effective if he'd streamlined or even stylized them.

Because the moments in "W." that approach greatness are those in which Stone allows himself the luxury and the privilege of an artist: the freedom of stylization, as opposed to strict adherence to everyday logic. There are scenes in "W." that are beautifully played and shaped, and even though they're small scenes (much smaller than the elaborate Iraq war strategizing sequences), they embody the most potent parts of the George W. Bush story. A scene in which W and Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) talk torture -- although, of course, they barely mention the word -- takes place over an informal lunch between the two. The scene is brilliant and powerful for the way it asserts that history happens in haphazard moments: Significant words are often tossed around casually, even as sandwiches are being gobbled and soda is being guzzled. (At one point during the conversation, W refers to Guantánamo as "Guantanamera" -- just one of the ways in which Stone and Weiser use W's recurrent malapropisms as loony poetry.)

It's in the smaller scenes that Stone digs most deeply into the mysteries of the man himself: At one point W summons the man who helped him along on the path to religious redemption (he's a composite character, played by Stacy Keach, who looks alarmingly like Larry Flynt) to announce that God has told him it's his mission to become president. Elsewhere, W pouts and balks when the powerful men around him -- especially Karl Rove, played with slithery, unctuous bravado by Toby Jones -- try to put words into his mouth. He wants to be the visionary, the decision maker, the leader -- he doesn't want to be seen as a puppet. That's a shrewd observation on Stone's part, and one that flies in the face of the common view that W is just a pawn, a puppet, surrounded by a bunch of smart, manipulative guys. If W is a pawn, then he's not responsible for his actions, and Stone's view suggests, aptly I think, that the younger Bush is an extremely shrewd individual, possessed of the kind of sneaky smarts that don't necessarily come with book learning.

Next page: Laura Bush, woman of mystery

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