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...film is called W., and for a lot of moviegoers, hearing that Oliver Stone was directing a biopic of the still President of the U.S., the W. could have stood for a pleased or outraged What!? Stone made his rep, or his rap sheet, with ferocious retakes of recent American history: the Vietnam War in Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth; the investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination in JFK; and, in Nixon, the life of the only President to resign his office. All those subjects allowed for a certain ambiguity, but Stone...
...Approaching George W. Bush, a Chief Executive with a shattered record and abysmal approval ratings who's now ignored or avoided by even his fellow Republicans, might seem way too easy a task for Stone. Historians have for years placed Bush at the bottom of presidential rankings, and The Daily Show, considering his legacy, chillingly guessed that Dubya is aiming to be not only our worst President but also our last...
...Stone gets points for speed and efficiency - he shot the picture over 46 days this spring and summer on a tiny $30 million budget and gave it a rich, polished look - but not for the scope of his vision. W. isn't tragedy or farce; it's illustrated journalism, based mostly on extant Bush biographies and memoirs of early Bush appointees. All the incidents are there but not the insight. What's missing is the one thing Stone films have never lacked: a point of view...
...forced guzzling of whiskey is the gentleman scholar's equivalent of waterboarding. The other pledges are frightened, but Dubya (Josh Brolin, who's game but not great) impresses his brothers by not only rattling off their names but also appending a goofy nickname to each. In two lightning strokes, W. provides a reference point for the Bush Administration's interrogation techniques of terrorist suspects and imagines an early example of Bush's frat-boy camaraderie, later visited with a bullying bluffness on the White House press corps...
...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...