W. stands for Watchable

Oliver Stone's Bush biopic plays nice, provides entertainment...is that such a bad thing?

I found Oliver Stone's W. to be fascinating and very entertaining. My expectations had been set low, by wildly mixed advance reviews from national critics. In reading some of those reviews, it struck me that some critics wanted Stone to take a hatchet and a scalpel to Bush's presidential years, instead of focusing on the controversial president's backstory, daddy issues, and using only the build up to the Iraq war as narrative for W's presidency.

I've never been a fan of Bush the president, but found Stone's touch for the material to make an extremely watchable biopic. The movie plays like a star-studded West Wing episode with a backstory that's right out of a Douglas Sirk melodrama from the late 1950s. Stone is critical of the Iraq war, for sure, but presents Bush as a decent enough guy who eats compulsively (and chokes on pretzels), makes his staff pray at the end of meetings, and loves the play Cats. Josh Brolin is terrific as Dubya—certainly a sypathetic portrayal that allows for plenty of Bushisms ("Is our children learning?")—and the cast is impressive throughout. Richard Dreyfuss is especially good as a decidedly sinister Dick Cheney, Elizabeth Banks plucky and kind as Laura Bush, Scott Glenn stubborn and petulant as Donald Rumsfeld, and James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush. As Colin Powell, Geoffrey Wright may be a bit young but has enough gravitas to convey Powell as a deeply conflicted military lifer who has major reservations about the Iraq war. I found Thandie Newton's caricature of Condoleeza Rice to be just a wee bit over the top, though she's certainly not on screen enough to bog the film down. And Toby Jones does look a bit like Karl Rove, but I found this role to be underwritten in the screenplay—Rove could have been presented as a much more malicious and ruthless smear mercant—instead of  the way he is, as a clever political fairie who feeds Bush his talking points. The cast and story make for a breezy two hours, not nearly as polemic and controversial as, say Fahrenheit 9.11.

The movie I've been fascinated by Oliver Stone's films since his landmark, Platoon, back in 1986. I was 16 when I saw that movie, and it shook me to the core in a way no movie had. Up until Platoon, I saw the cinema as a place for fantastic escape. Going to the movies meant Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars and Poltergeist. But the excperience I had with Platoon was much different. The idea of being drafted and sent off to war was profoundly disturbing to this suburban film freak—l had nightmares for a week after seeing it. So Stone always gets credit, in my book, for making me realize how many different ways cinema can be effective and thought provoking, not merely entertaining. I enjoyed a few of his films a great deal, including the underrated Talk Radio and the incredibly sleazy U-Turn. Two of my favorite Stone films are JFK and NIxon, and W. completes a trilogy of presidential themed films that rank among the filmmakers best work.

Posted at 01:28 PM in Pete's Popcorn Picks | Permalink