It stands for “whatever”

W.
Review by Nathan Weinbender

You never know what you’re going to get with Oliver Stone. He’s a gambler, a conspiracy theorist, a political revisionist, a provocateur. He’s also a hit-or-miss filmmaker, and his movies always carry a certain level of suspense: Will his tendencies to gleefully incite controversy work wonders, or will they blow up in his face?

Stone’s newest picture is “W.,” a biopic about President Bush, and if you were expecting an explosion, you'll be disappointed to know that the movie mostly just fizzles.

This movie works neither as a biopic nor as a drama. It’s too unfocused to be absorbing and glosses over too much pertinent information to be informative. Why Stone crammed such a momentous life story into a tidy two-hour package is beyond me—Bush’s uneasy journey from frat guy to Commander in Chief could easily supply enough material for a ten-part miniseries.

Stone’s portrait of our forty-third president is also curiously indecisive, and it never decides whether it wants to mock Bush or to present him as a martyr, whether it should be a serious examination of his administration or a jokey Mad magazine parody.

It begins in 2002, as Bush (Josh Brolin) and his cabinet prepare to go to war with the Middle East. We’re then transported to the ‘60s, when Bush is a young buck in a Yale frat house, and the film continually jumps back and forth from Bush’s formative years to modern day.

We watch as he struggles to gain the respect of his father, stops drinking and finds peace in Christianity, becomes Governor of Texas and eventually President Elect, and as Dick Cheney, like a contemptuous puppeteer, convinces him to invade Iraq for control of their oil reserves.

Well-known actors are cast as look-alikes for well-known heads of state—Elizabeth Banks is Laura Bush, Jeffrey Wright is Colin Powell, Toby Jones is Karl Rove, Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell are Ma and Poppy Bush; Richard Dreyfuss is the weasley, calculating Cheney, who hunkers in the corner and flashes cynical grins, and Thandie Newton plays Condoleezza Rice with a crooked smirk that turns all of her cutaway shots into a punchline.

These characters feel like castaways from a bad “Saturday Night Live” sketch. They are broad-stroke caricatures, written to be the sum of their quirks, and they have about as much dramatic credibility as the real politicians’ phony TV personas.

Remember how effective Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen were in Stone’s “Nixon,” or the resonance and vulnerability they brought to their roles? Or how intriguingly Stone weaved historical fact with possible fiction in “J.F.K.?” None of that happens here.

Maybe it has to do with timing—those films had the advantage of hindsight. “W.” is the first feature film to present a biography of a currently-seated president, and Stone’s attempts to be au courant don’t pay off. Because Bush is still in office, it’s impossible to know what aspects of his presidency will be considered important or historically significant down the line.

Will future generations perceive Bush the same way we do now? What effects will his administration have on them? Will they still be paying off our national debt ten years from now? Twenty years? Will future audiences understand the brief, unexplained re-creation of Bush’s pretzel-choking incident? Will a more comprehensive Bush biopic have yet been made?

But this question still remains: Is the film as fair and balanced as Stone purports? Not really. The script (written by “Wall Street” scribe Stanley Weiser) never attempts to truly understand Bush—it portrays him as a drunkard, a simpleton, a C-student with Daddy Issues, and the analysis never really advances beyond that.

Brolin’s performance is superficial, too. His Bush is a bumbling goofball with hardly any moral code. He asks silly questions like “Is our children learning?” and talks with his mouth full of food. He’s easily manipulated by Dick Cheney, and Laura just smiles and wrings her hands as he spouts off his ungainly rhetoric.

When the movie ends, our opinion of George W. Bush does not change, and we know nothing more about him than we did from the start. The final image of the film—a baseball being lobbed into the air and never coming down again—seems to not only adequately describe George W. Bush but also the movie that has been made about him.

Grade: C

Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Stanley Weiser. Starring Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeffrey Wright, Toby Jones, Ellen Burstyn, Thandie Newton, Scott Glenn and Bruce McGill. PG-13; 131m.