W.

Controversial director Oliver Stone often helms projects concerned with political hot potatoes, from noted officials to defining cultural events. His repertoire consists of hard-hitting films that are, above all, fact-finding missions, such as JFK and World Trade Center. W, his biopic about the 43rd (and current) President of the United States, may be Stone's most confounding yet daring spud of all.

It's no secret that Stone rushed the film to completion so that it hit red and blue state multiplexes prior to the 2008 presidential election. His subject, George W. Bush III, is in the throes of a lame duck administration, sputtering through his lowest public approval scores in eight years. The film suffers from the haste; it feels incomplete and, at times, incoherent. Despite these issues, W raises significant and compelling questions about the life and times of George W. Bush.

Allow me to dispel a few notions first. W is not an anti-Republican film, so check your party affiliations at the door. It's an examination of Bush's reckless adult life and how he got himself into his current fine mess as an unpopular head of state. The centerpiece of the film is the adversarial relationship between George H.W. Bush and his paternal approval-seeking son. The film paints Bush as a man who is constantly and angrily overshadowed by his string-pulling father. Maybe GHWB never let "Dubya" become his own man. Maybe the elder Bush tried too hard to tame his wild son. Maybe that's why his son morphed from endearing "Junior" to his contemporary caricature of a persona. Maybe the boy is truly an unruly stallion born into a political family but who had no business running for elected office. Each of those possibilities are suggested by Stone and scenes—from Bush challenging his VP Dick Cheney (an excellent Richard Dreyfuss) to daydreaming on an empty pro baseball field—that reveal layers of the President's enigma of a personality.

Josh Brolin isn't merely a dramatic doppelganger. He loses himself in the role of the hard drinking, good ol' boy from Texas who eventually evolves into an in-over-his-head huckster known for committing verbal gaffes and doodling during Cabinet meetings. Most of the film's laughs are intentional and conducted at Bush's expense.

The film hopscotches chronologically, jumping back and forth between oval office meetings to Bush as he sows his wild oats. Stone strives to locate some definitive correlation between then and now by displaying the roughneck version of Bush that the public vaguely knows of. Separating fact from fiction requires a little post-film research, but as a form of entertainment, the film compels when Stone analytically cuts into Bush's troubled relationship with his father, who bails him out of scrapes and leads him to several jobs he habitually quits. The younger Bush is a ruffian, always in trouble and in possession of a weak worth ethic. As his "poppy" says, "You're a Bush and you better act like one. That entails working for a living." Stone suggests that young George never had the background or backbone for the most important job in the world, but simultaneously elicits sympathy for his divisive biographical subject. Bush's presidency isn't merely marred by an unpopular war; it labors under the looming shadow of his father's administration. Stone hints that the Iraq War and subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein is his way of one-upping and revisiting the sins of his superior father and that Bush doesn't care who suffers because of it.

Brolin believably shines as he transforms Bush from cocky upstart into a graying, verbally stumbling politico. The dream sequence where he goes mano y mano with dear ol' dad, who accuses him of ruining the good Bush name, in the Oval Office is complete with aerial shots, where we look down at him with derision. It's a brief, haunting moment that generates compassion for what may or may not be a conflicted man. Stone grounds the film when he splices reenacted speeches with images of real politicians, blurring the line between what's real and what's fantasy. W, like the man it profiles, shows its slip and would have benefited from nips, tucks, and trims. But it never backs down from asking the toughest question: Why and how the hell did Dubya get elected?

— Amy Sciarretto
10.21.08

Usually, when the span of time surrounding a movie's release is relevant enough to be worth mentioning, it's because the film was born out of an artistic era or a creative period, like film noir or French New Wave. When a less than reverent presidential biopic comes out while said commander in chief is still in office, the context provided by the timing is a lot less obvious -- but make no mistake, it's still there. Making a distinctly historical film about a history that's still happening places W. simply and unmistakably in its own artistic context: postmodernism. After all, it's hard to get more self-referential than a movie that lets modern times reflect upon themselves.

However, this isn't totally apparent for the first 20 minutes of W., and it's hard to say if that's Oliver Stone's fault or ours. Watching the movie, it takes a little time to let go of all those pesky preexisting expectations, and adjust to what at first seems a tad lowbrow and simplistic. But by the same token, walking into W. expecting Natural Born Killers-esque manic black satire, or JFK-esque subtle, multifaceted subtext isn't going to help your viewing experience. In W., the story can't possibly be told in complex terms because the perspective is first person, and the person in question just doesn't have those kinds of perceptive tools. This is how Stone gets subtle: the hero doesn't narrate the story with a Texas-drawled "Dear Diary" voice-over, but the movie still effectively provides Dubya's experiences from his own perspective. It's obvious enough from the zillion super close-ups on his bewilderedly determined expression (and the fact that there's a dream sequence), but most of the time, the vantage point manifests itself in the way the events unfold -- and it works brilliantly once you get the hang of it.

After the period of adjustment is over, it makes perfect sense for the story to be so literal and straightforward -- or at least appear so on the surface. It alternates between two timelines: one that follows Dubya from college through the 2000 election, and one that follows him from 9/11 through the full-on nosedive of the Iraq War. There are no intricately woven metaphors, no mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma, just a direct narrative about a fairly unspecial guy with some daddy issues, who endeavors -- but usually fails -- to deserve the opportunities that family string-pulling allows him. When there's symbolism, it's painted in strokes broad enough to fit on an IMAX screen -- he bends over to pray in the War Room, for instance, and it cuts to an upward shot where a huge, hard-edged, blindly bright ring-shaped lighting fixture encircles his head.

Dubya's failures and shortcomings are readily apparent enough -- even to people who haven't seen the movie -- so Stone doesn't have to deviate from the main character's perspective for us to understand the disaster left in Dubya's wake. He trusts that we don't need the filmmaker to vilify or even mock Dubya from the third person, and despite the aforementioned halo (which, of course, is a depiction advocated by the character, not the filmmaker), he also doesn't paint devil horns on the members of the administration like Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton). They bear their share of guilt as exploiters, yes men, and even blinded ideologues, but Stone never resorts to portraying them as the evil power mongers who used this poor simpleton for their own nefarious ends. Well, maybe Cheney.

If anything, the supporting cast are just a hair over the line between character and caricature -- a choice that ends up being the cherry on top that first-person narrative. It provides inescapable novelty (who doesn't like to see a spot-on Colin Powell impression?), but it also illustrates Dubya's blunted and simplified image of everything around him, the way he sees every important figure and idea in slightly cartoonish opaqueness. Certainly this conceptual hub of the movie depends on star Josh Brolin, whose ability to overcome his own rugged, chiseled jaw and portray Dub's weakness so believably in this regard is pretty mind-blowing (and equally novel). In the end, it's clear that this basic weakness of both mind and confidence was at the root of all the president's epic failures, and while the character of Dubya himself doesn't appear totally self-aware about it, the audience has no trouble figuring it out -- a sure sign of the film's success. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide