I would not have seen this film, except that my neighbor won some tickets to the film and having just had a baby 4 weeks ago, begged me to take them off her hands. So there I was, on opening day, in a half-filled theater to watch W.
I did a search and couldn't find other reviews, but if this has been diaried I apologize.
Oliver Stone's biopic, in my opinion, is no home run. (This metaphor will make sense over the fold.)
Of course this film is not pro-Bush. It isn't one of those apologetic biopics about a bad president made after people's anger has had time to dry and crust. This is a seething critique of an often bumbling, unintelligent, and competition-driven man bent on war in order to "one up" his father.
There was one moment in the film that almost made me cry--it was when the actual war footage of the Iraq war was shown. It was the sight of the dead Iraqi people and the young US troops that got to me. My brother is a Marine. This was hard for me to take.
The film's format is mildly interesting--it vacillates between the past and the present, slowly bringing us to the "now" moment. The flashbacks are meant to explain, in part, contemporary Bush II's behavior in the context of his inferiority complex in relation to Jeb, his desire to please his father, and his desire to "better" his father. It also pins the creation of the Willie Horton ad on a young Bush Jr., as well as suggests that Bush Jr. thought that if Bush Sr. had "gone all the way to Baghdad" in the first Gulf war, he would have won reelection.
Interestingly, the film redeems Bush Sr. in some ways. While his politics are detestable, he is more of a thinking man than Bush Jr. (but is this really a revelation?) and hence more likable. It shows a Bush Sr. who sees his namesake as someone who's better out of politics--a C student at Yale, a former alcoholic fuck-up, and a "born again," a religious position Bush Sr. ridicules.
The film also completely redeems Colin Powell as an unwilling messenger of the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Rumsfeld machine. He is the only dissenting voice before the Iraq invasion and the film suggests that he is basically forced to hold up that vial of baking powder and make false claims about WMD's. He is the only one to point out that Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. I am not sure how much of this is true, but it certainly recuperates Powell's role in the entire debacle. I don't think Jeffrey Wright's considerable talents were put to the most use in this role; his character didn't get as much screen time as I would have liked.
Ditto for Thandie Newton who played Condoleeza Rice amazingly well. She literally transformed herself into the taciturn Rice (a person sitting next to me wouldn't believe it was Thandie Newton until the credits rolled). But she got almost no screen time or had any significant part. She was portrayed as little more than a "yes (wo) man" to Bush Jr.--which while true, also meant her character was completely undeveloped. Had Newton had one or two more critical scenes, I think she could have gotten an Academy Award nomination out of this.
Josh Brolin as "W" is excellent. He's got the voice down completely. If you close your eyes, you could feel the cold, sickening chill of W's twang. Scary. He should win an award. My only criticism of his portrayal is that he plays "W" too innocently. He plays him as a brute, as intellectually challenged, and as competitive, but he doesn't really get across Bush Jr.'s arrogance. The persistent smirk of self-satisfaction that the real "W" always sports is often absent in Brolin's portrayal. In this way, the film gives "W" too much credit.
Ultimately this film fails because it has nowhere to go. Throughout the film, "W" has fantasies of being on a baseball field and catching a ball. This film is like a ball that never lands (which perhaps they intended or realize given the ending, which I won't describe in case anyone wants to see it). We all know the sundry details of "W's" life, so much of what is revealed here is repetition and with the same political critique that has been leveled at Bush Jr. for years now. Therefore the film is a bit boring because it's all old news. It's so true to life that there is little to keep one interested.
The other thing is that US film conventions are set up to get the audience to identify with its protagonist. This film does not ask you to identify with W, but then also gives you no character with whom you could truly identify. Therefore the visual pleasure normally produced by cinema is absent. And this too could be part of Stone's intention, but given that "W" already produces such distaste and discomfort in 75% of Americans, the film would be better served by using an outside narrator to tell the story in a way that brings viewers in more. Without this, this film feels like sitting through a slightly fictionalized and somewhat artistic documentary from the History channel.
The good thing about the film is that if it is widely viewed, I think it will help Democrats in the pending election. It occurred to me, even, that this filmic referendum on the second Bush administration might have been released at just this moment (and not say, after January 20th) in order to get people to remember how horrific the past 8 years have been. If it does that, then despite its failures, I'm willing to dub it a must see.