"W."

W. ***½

Ironic as it may seem, Oliver Stone’s W. is one of the notorious director’s best films. It doesn’t quite reach the rarefied air of Platoon or Wall Street—Stone’s most fully realized movies—yet W. turns out to be a strangely effective (and affecting) cinematic experience.
To Stone’s great credit, W. features none of the revisionist history and slipshod storytelling that rendered JFK and Nixon so problematic. If anything, W. is told in a straightforward narrative fashion. There are no overt attempts to hoodwink the moviegoer in evidence, only a stray flashback or two in order to provide the screenplay with gentle portions of layering and context.
W. stars Josh Brolin in a bravura performance as George W. Bush. In Brolin’s hands, the future President comes off as a genuinely sympathetic character, a victim of his own privileged upbringing and of high-minded fatherly expectations that he cannot possibly hope to meet. Indeed, much of the film concerns Bush’s desperate, flailing efforts to garner the attention of his patrician father, George Herbert Walker Bush (played superbly by James Cromwell).
The movie traces the younger Bush’s development from his early days as a Yale fratboy and his hard-partying years as a West Texas would-be oilman and entrepreneur to his attempts to break into politics, including his failed bid to win a seat in Congress.
For W., the turning point away from his foolhardy youth and early adulthood involves his courtship and marriage to Laura (Elizabeth Banks). A kindhearted librarian, Laura seems to accept her future husband—in contrast with his aristocratic father—for the person whom he already is, as opposed to what he might become. W.’s transformation is complete when he swears off alcohol after his fortieth birthday and becomes a born-again Christian.
But the great tragedy of the younger Bush’s story—at least within the strictures of Stone’s film—is W.’s inability to come to terms with himself after taking ownership of the Texas Rangers, and later, after winning the Texas governorship despite the protestations of his disbelieving father and mother (Ellen Burstyn).
In Stone’s narrative, Bush’s White House years—and the ultimate ineffectiveness of his Presidency—are the logical result of his inability to stay put, of his failure to stop trying to live out his father’s dreams and begin living his own. As if to provide Exhibit A for this perspective, Stone takes great pains to illustrate the shoddy leadership behind the Weapons of Mass Destruction gaffe that the Bush Administration adopted as its pretext for the current war in Iraq.
In a subtle piece of filmmaking, Stone traces the massive communication failures, both intentional and unintentional, between our intelligence agencies and the President’s Cabinet that elevated the WMDs into the national consciousness. But even more fascinating are the behind-the-scenes power struggles amongst such well-known personalities as Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), Secretary of State Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn).
And at the center of it all sits President Bush, still dreaming of baseball and the opportunity to test his mettle in a simpler, far-flung world well beyond the far more complex realities of Washington, DC, and the world stage. For Bush, his inability to live up to his father’s loftier expectations turns out to be a personal tragedy—as well as our own.