W. (2008) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Oliver Stone
Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell,
Richard Dreyfus, Jeffrey Wright, Scott Glenn,
Toby Jones, Thandie Newton, Bruce McGill,
Ellen Burstyn, Ioan Gruffudd, Stacy Keach
Released just weeks before the election of Barack Obama, Oliver Stone's nonlinear dramatization of the life and career of George W. Bush is glaringly superficial, and that seems to be the point. Some significant chapters in Bush's story - the National Guard, 9/11, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina - are either mentioned in passing or ignored altogether, and for anybody who's been alive and awake since the election of 2000, most of what's here will be old news. You'd like to see a filmmaker with Stone's passion and conviction really mess with this material, shake it up, take a bigger risk, and sooner or later some other filmmaker will. But if W.'s resentment of his father is the sharpest insight Stone can come up with, it's not exactly groundbreaking. Maybe there's a dilemma when you're telling the story of somebody whose story hasn't completely played out yet, or maybe the key to George W. Bush is his superficiality. Stone's last shot is a tight close-up straight into Bush's eyes, leaving it unclear whether he's made a movie about a man whose inner workings are concealed beneath the surface, or (more likely) a man who simply has no depth at all.
