Word: w
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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...
...Rice) to creepy acuity (Richard Dreyfuss's Dick Cheney) to an absolving rectitude (Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell). All these scenes show Bush in action but not inside. The person remains an enigma. The movie is an X-ray of an invisible man - by the film's end, the W. still stands...
...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...
...played a President three times before in films and on TV. He gives Poppy a 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...
...Dubya's unexamined life - his pursuit of devastation policies with such messianic self-assurance - is not worth filming. Yes, the tragic hero usually comes to realize his crippling flaws, but maybe the greatest sin of a powerful man is in never, ever doubting himself. W. gives Bush a climactic wrinkle of copelessness, but the movie is mostly content to motor on familiar tracks. Like its central character, it seems never to have questioned itself about its mission or even asked if it had one. For this normally crazy-brilliant auteur, the last and lasting W...