Director: Oliver Stone
Writer(s): Stanley Weiser

Cast:
George W. Bush – Josh Brolin
Laura Bush – Elizabeth Banks
George Herbert Walker Bush – James Cromwell
Barbara Bush – Ellen Burstyn
Karl Rove – Toby Jones
Condoleeza Rice – Thandie Newton
Colin Powell – Jeffrey Wright
Donald Rumsfeld – Scott Glenn
Tony Blair – Ioan Gruffudd

Preamble:
Should we try to flesh out a man whose actions seem so transparent to anyone who approaches them with a critical eye? Is it worth analyzing the steps taken by someone who makes his intentions and paths so clear?

Plot Points:
A somewhat fanciful biopic about lame duck United States President George W. Bush.

The Meat:
‘W’ is one of the more entertaining movie failures in recent memory. It has plenty of positives off the bat:

/The ideas for storytelling keep the pace lively
/the humor works consistently
/There are exceptional performances, most notably by Brolin as “W”.

Ironically, however, a movie that focuses on Bush’s inability to create his own path never quite decides what it wants to say about him that hasn’t been said before. Presumably, Stone didn’t want to make a judgment of Bush with this film. Instead he chose to formulate a comedic character study with an eye towards making him three dimensional. A firm voice, unfortunately, is precisely what’s missing. ‘W’ justifies this lack of a clear direction by showing us that the man it is presenting for character study suffers from exactly the same problem. ‘W’ gives us a Bush who stumbles from failed jobs to failed businesses and always comes back crawling to his disapproving father for help, unable to ever establish an identity that his proud family finds acceptable. He meets and quickly falls in love with his future wife; the combination of this and a decision to give up the hard drinking/partying lifestyle of his youth turns his life around. Is any of this something we didn’t know about Bush, though? The other areas where the film tries to expound on his life, such as in fleshing out the relationship between Bush and Bush Sr., are patently false in some scenes (the creation of the Willie Horton ad sticks out). If Stone’s idea was to make excuses for inaccuracy in the interest of giving us insight into Bush’s character that only makes the portrayal look more shallow and lazy

The vignettes move quickly but are really carried by Brolin’s exceptional performance as Bush. He’s eager to please, genuinely affable, burdened by his legacy and yet habitually dependent on it. Brolin achieves a rare feat, providing familiar sound bites and expressions but not falling into the trap of mere impression. Bush’s mannerisms and habits are completely rolled up into the character’s core and one can only imagine what he could have done with a meatier script. Instead we’re treated to a screenplay that never matches Brolin’s effort, and in places painfully repeats itself. Mama Bush’s late revelation that Bush doesn’t take criticism well, for example, is pretty useless considering an earlier scene showing him driving into a garage when Laura tells him he did something poorly. Bush’s dream about his father wanting to fist fight him is an awkward summary of everything we’ve learned during the rest of the movie. The visualization of Bush stepping onto a baseball field and imagining crowd roars is far more effective. The final baseball scene, in fact, is especially effective compared to Bush getting booed as he threw out the first pitch as the Washington Nationals’ 2008 opening day.

Make no mistake, ‘W’ is still worth seeing at least for the sake of satisfying curiosity. The supporting performances are very good, especially Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell. Stone directs with a nice pace and his usual steady hand, and things are generally well edited. The demonstration of Powell having behind the scenes concerns about their actions would at least seem to jive with his post-administration comments about their work in Iraq. It was fun to see these kinds of debates and other conversations play out in full view. It’s political vicariousness at its best when it’s working well. It’s just too bad that the concerns about the film being rushed turned out to be so justified.

Movie – 5/10

‘W’ Trailer:

Review by Steve Broome
sbroome at coalminds dot com