W

Color me very disappointed. I am big movie fan. I think I have mentioned that from time to time. Unfortunately, I don't get out to the theater as much anymore. This isn't because of high ticket prices (which are mitigated somewhat since I still carry around my college ID card; for some reason, unmeticulous ticket people never catch on), but really because movies these days are so bad. Really, they're awful, absolute garbage, bereft of a shred of originality.

When I saw that Oliver Stone was making a move about President Bush, I dismissed it out of hand, promising not to see it. While I thought that "Nixon" was quite underrated as a movie, I still have memories of "JFK", a film I found to be a waste of many hours. Additionally, I was not sure I wanted to shell out any bucks to see a movie about a failed President, I, and millions of others are reminded of every single day when we turn on the news. However, over some time my stance softened, and I became very intrigued by the great trailers they created for the film and put up on Youtube. Personally, I thought the second one was so good that I became convinced to see it immediately after it came out. I was genuinely excited, and several positive reviews (though, admittedly, the reviews have been mixed) only bolstered my expectations.

I should have gone with first initial instincts of the film. It was bad. Just a total mess, and a waste of an afternoon. "W" is just not a good movie, and politics has nothing to do with this assessment. I see a movie if it looks entertaining, and my personal politics have nothing to do with an appraisal I make. Oliver Stone has not created a movie, but a disjointed mess, a soupy mix of gobbledygook which is neither nutritious, nor even tasty.

What "W" is, really, is a series of mostly mediocre, some abjectly poor, and two or three strong caricatures of the major political figures of the Bush administration. That's it. While Stone has tried to create some sort of probing psychological look at the second President Bush, he is able to neither argue nor much less prove anything too deep about our 43rd President. Instead, the audience is treated to (perhaps 'subjected to' would be a better way to put it), this long series of back-and-forth clips of Bush's early life interspersed with events happening while he was President. The style does not work.

There is little doubt in mind that this movie fails in great part because President Bush is still in office. I don't know how to perfectly express it, but it is hard to give a full and fair appraisal of someone while he is still around. Even for entertainment purposes, if not especially for entertainment purposes. Time and events need to time to develop and ripen before they can be properly judged.

Seeing Bush when he was in college, coasting through a series of jobs, and finally getting into politics was just plain weird. It was difficult for me to fully relate all of these events to the man who is still living in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps an effective movie about a President has to be a movie about a former President. It just is not the same. I am sure Stone wanted to make more money, so he and the studios pushed to get this out not only before Bush left office, but before the fall elections. In the end, this probably detracted even more from the movie. You cannot write someone's professional (or personal) obituary while the body is still moving. You cannot get a full appreciation or catalogue of one's triumphs and failures, his great qualities and tragic faults in the middle of his own time. This is one of the key reasons the movie fails.

The major underlying thesis of this movie is that much of W's adult life, including both his failures and enormous successes were the result of a strained relationship with his father. The movie kept returning to theme of how Bush Sr. never showed Bush the love and respect that Junior craved. This relationship undermined Bush early in his life, as he skipped from job to job, and later when he ran first for Texas governor, and then President, both despite his father's reservations. At the same time, though, both his run for President and his ultimate invasion of Iraq, Stone infers, are made out of Bush's desire to avenge his father's two biggest failures: his electoral defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton and his inability to decisively crush Saddam Hussein after the U.S. victory in Operation Desert Storm. Here, Stone tries to draw his most satisfying conclusions that Bush has been driven a desire to meet his more accomplished father's approval, finally, after many personal failures earlier in life where HW had to explicate Junior from trouble. He even has a funny dream sequence to this point where Bush Sr. tries to engage his son in a fight.

I think Josh Brolin as W himself did a fine job with a very tough role. He has the accent and mannerisms down pat, but at the same time he plays up Bush's inner insecurities while occasionally pushing to the surface with the President's trademark cocksure attitude. Given the direction and purpose of the movie, Brolin (and Stone too) is more interested in outwardly portraying the inner Bush for the audience, rather then giving us all the same stuff we have seen from the President every day for the last seven plus years. This is good because it is something different and not what you might be extecting to see when you walk into the movie.

More importantly, Brolin's portrayal of Bush is scrupulously non-partisan. While many Republicans have been loudly fretting at the tone of the movie, you can tell that Stone went out of his way to not make this a Bush-bashing movie. If anything, Bush comes out of the film a sympathetic figure: a good guy without any insidious intentions who was led astray by the influence of very bad people. Of course the movie does not make the argument that Bush has not been nakedly political. Stone makes it a point to show this several times. Two memorable scenes to this point include one where Junior pushes his father to go very negative against Michael Dukakis, and the second happens when, after he loses a race for Congress to a conservative Texas Democrat, Bush loudly declares that he would never be out-politicked with nasty attacksm out-Christianed, or out-Texaned again.

Therefore, while men like Dick Cheney or Karl Rove may not like how they were portrayed in the film (though I highly doubt either of them will ever see it), Bush supporters should not feel so angry. This really is not a movie about rehashing Florida in 2000 or the Iraq war, even though the latter is a big background part of the movie. Stone has instead tried his best to craft a narrative to explain how he perceives George W. Bush the man, why he has acted the way he has acted throughout his life, and how his faults and personal assets got him where he is today. Yet, while Brolin did a fine job in his role, the movie itself is unsustainable.

The biggest reason for this, as I mentioned above, is that this really is not one fluid movie but a choppy series of scenes in Bush's life slapped together in a seemingly completely haphazard manner. Flashbacks are one thing, but the movie bounces back and forth between early life and the presidency without really stating anything. It's not so much confusing as it is hard to get anything substantive from this style of movie. It is almost like the whole film is building up to something, and when it's all said and done, nothing happens. Granted, the Bush presidency is still going so we cannot yet write that complete ending, but from the movie's standpoint, we leave the theater totally unsatisfied. I know I did, as did my friends.

Another thing which undermines the movie is, quite simply, the series of collective performances. There is no other way to say it except that many of them simply are not very good. First, the positives. Obviously Brolin did well in a movie where he was the centerpiece of every single scene. Richard Dreyfus was also very good as Dick Cheney: he has his mannerisms down very well, and well-plays up Cheney as the sinister force behind the administration's misdeeds. Cheney as Darth Vader is alive and well here.

The great James Cromwell was also excellent as Bush Sr. While Cromwell neither looks nor sounds a wit like HW, he still does a superb job. More than anything else, Cromwell was able to carry the senior Bush and exude the proper level of seriousness and accomplishment that the former President Bush embodies. What is interesting is that I think Cromwell was not obsessed with recreating Bush Sr in voice or general expression. Rather, he wanted to make sure that he captured the 41st President's sense of dignity, and he so marvelously, particularly in scenes where he expressed disappointment with having to use the 1988 Willie Horton ad strategy and rebuffed his advisor's attempts to claim he was a born-again Christian to get more votes in 1992. His interactions with Brolin were some of the best scenes in the movie.

That's about it. The rest of the portrayals in the movie were pretty unmemorable. Karl Rove was really just a piece of the scenery, and while the actor portraying him was able to make him out to be more of a weasel who followed around Bush like a puppy, I just did not buy it. Not only did he not much look like Rove, but he did not get the general meanness and political brutality that Rove embodies, the gleefulness Rove takes when he defeats an enemy in the arena of politcal combat.

Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld was also not that good. Glenn, who played Jack Crawford, Clarice Starling's mentor in "The Silence of the Lambs" has Rumsfeld's detached arrogance, but little else. Jeffrey Wright, who I think is a fine actor, can't pull of Colin Powell. Forget the absurd voice (Colin Powell sounds nothing like that!), Wright just cannot carry Powell's considerable gravitas. Finally, Thandie Newton, a lovely actress in her own right, personifies my criticism of the movie: she is nothing more than a bad impression of Condi Rice--positively putrid.

Interestingly, Elizabeth Banks, who plays Laura Bush does a good job, even though her Laura is nothing more than a statue or a piece of furniture in Bush's life. I say that because, with all due respect, that is how I have always perceived Laura Bush: nothing more than a prop in President Bush's life, a living version of Bush's cowboy boots and Crawford ranch as tools in his political arsenal. So from that standpoint, Banks does well; though, Banks, who I think is extremely attractive, does not age throughout the movie, so I found it hard to fathom her lying next to President Bush present day sans any wrinkles. But that is neither here nor there.

In the end, then, what we can say about this movie is that it is neither informative in the least or even entertaining is a piece of historical farce. Obviously, you have to go into the movie assuming that just about even event is either grossly fabricated or completely made up. That goes without saying. But the movie fails in what is likely its principle mission of trying to understand George W. and draw a psychological picture of him. Additionally, it cannot fall back on the key underpinning of every good movie -- that it is entertaining -- because it is not terribly fun to watch. All we get are those few good performances, but a choppy mixture of bad SNL impressions under dark, forbidding lights.

Two out of five stars **/*****