The Reel Critic

Author: Jason Gutierrez

Movie: W.
Director: Oliver Stone
Starring: Josh Brolin

I feel that a critic, even an amateur one like myself, should make every attempt to go into the film he is reviewing with as few preconceived notions as possible. I must admit that when I entered the theater to watch Oliver Stone's latest offering, the George W. Bush biopic "W.," I did not enter the theater with a clear mind. I expected to see a film that anti-Bush audiences would love and pro-Bush audiences would vilify. But I was shocked to see Stone follow a different tactic. Instead of the morally bankrupt portrait I was expecting, Stone creates a charcoal sketch of a sincere man-child struggling to win his father's approval. That is, unfortunately, the most surprising thing about, "W." The rest is a wildly uneven film that is too obsequious to be inflammatory and too condescending to be thought-provoking.

Stone's film jumps back and forth in time, temporally grounding the audience during President Bush's planning and execution of the War in Iraq, but using that time period as the jumping off point to show us Bush at various stages in his life. We are shown the party-hard Bush at Yale, the Bush that couldn't keep a steady job, the baseball-loving Bush, the failed Congressional candidate Bush, the born-again Christian Bush and Governor Bush. Even if you have only a rudimentary knowledge of the man, nothing you see is new information. The only new information presented is Stone's hypothesis that Bush's entire legacy is due to his inability to receive his father's approval. Either way, one can't shake the feeling that screenwriter Stanley Weiser did no research beyond reading an article in the New York Times. Events pop onscreen with the subtlety of a PowerPoint presentation. You can almost hear an off-screen voice saying, "…and this is when W. bought a baseball team."

Then again, subtlety has never been Stone's calling card. He has always been a blowhard whose showmanship tended to get in the way of story, character and message. Here, Stone makes an egregious error in judgment and attempts to get into the head of Bush by creating fantasy/dream sequences that rival the most asinine moments of "Natural Born Killers" in terms of sheer stupidity. Bush is shown wandering around an empty baseball stadium, and in case the audience didn't catch Stone's theory about W's oedipal complex, he dreams of boxing against his father in the Oval Office. Even when Stone is not attempting to enter the subconscious of our 43rd President, he makes his authorial (and make no mistake, he is the author of this film) presence known. Characters come in and out of focus during key moments, real footage of the Iraq War is spliced together with re-enactments of Bush photo-ops and other photographic tricks are used so the audience knows exactly which moments are the important ones.

For the most part, the actors find themselves in the weeds. Thandie Newton is unspeakably horrible as Condoleezza Rice, and Toby Jones' Karl Rove is missing a mischievous malevolence that would have made the character memorable. Part of the problem is that Weiser doesn't give the actors characters with any depth or personality. They are about as fullyrealized as their counterparts on SNL sketches. The brush strokes are too broad to find fleshed-out characters; all we are left with is one defining attribute per character. Ellen Burstyn's Barbara Bush is a hairpiece, Richard Dreyfus' Dick Cheney is shifty and Scott Glen's Donald Rumsfeld is insane.

Only three of the actors preserve their dignity. Geoffrey Wright nails the inner turmoil of Colin Powell - an army man torn between what he knows is right and his commander-in-chief. Elizabeth Banks plays First Lady Laura Bush with a quiet grace and dignity that is incredibly appealing, until her character is pushed into the background. And what of Josh Brolin as the title character? This performance, along with last year's "No Country for Old Men," should propel him into the acting stratosphere. He straddles a fine line between broad mannerisms that the public knows and a man reeling while trying to step out of his father's shadow and find himself. He doesn't lose dignity amidst Stone's desire to get a cheap laugh by peppering his dialogue with legendary Bushisms. It is simply a marvelous piece of acting that truly deserves a better film behind it.

"W." was rushed through production so that it could be released before the election. Given the result, one can't help but wonder why this project couldn't have waited five months so the script could go through a few more drafts. The people we are watching onscreen are still making decisions that effect the direction of our country. For Stone to throw them up onscreen so we can laugh at their character flaws seems to miss the point. The final scene in the film is a fantasy that shows Bush playing center field for the Texas Rangers. A fly ball is hit his way, but when he looks up to catch the ball he sees that it has disappeared. In a way, Stone is like Bush in this sequence. Stone did not just drop the ball; he had no idea where it was in the first place.