Word: sonly
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...Bush, the "good" son (played by Jason Ritter), is a fleeting presence in W., as is mother Barbara (Ellen Burstyn), and Neil, Marvin and Dorothy are virtual no-shows. The secret sibling is Stone himself, who, like Dubya, came from a wealthy family and entered Yale in 1964. He left after a year and wound up in Vietnam, where his destiny ambushed him. Perhaps the political biography Stone really should put on film is John McCain...
...That's just smart storytelling, courtesy of screenwriter Stanley Weiser, who worked with Stone on Wall Street, the 1987 "Greed is good" film that speaks more eloquently to our current morass than W. does. The larger tale the movie tells is of a slow-witted alcoholic, the wastrel son of a powerful family who found Jesus - and Karl Rove (Toby Jones) - and, with these two guiding him, a purpose and propulsion to his life...
...easier to identify whom the film would like to be about. That's George Herbert Walker Bush, the forgotten-but-not-gone 41 to his son's 43. As played by the 6 ft. 5 in. (2m) James Cromwell, Poppy Bush looms over W. (and W.) as a commanding, commandeering figure. According to the film, he's the master manipulator who sprang Dubya from jail after a rowdy Yale prank, "took care of" a woman his son didn't want to marry and "pulled strings" to get the boy into Harvard Business School. He hates the damage W. has done...
...gruff machismo that both dominates the film and, given its ostensible protagonist, distorts it. When, toward the end, the octogenarian Poppy is shown muttering sage dismissals of W.'s Iraq escapades, we realize that the film is actually the story of a proud man perpetually disappointed in his son...
Susan A. Waxenberg ’78, a New York attorney, said that the son of her classmate Anna A. Manatis ’78 is now her godson...