I would like to tell everyone to go see the film W. for its stunning depiction of a presidency gone awry; but that would be dishonest and I wouldn’t want to be anything more like our current president.
It’s not all bad. The film is at times a fascinating character study of a flawed human being. Josh Brolin is uncanny as George W. Bush and James Cromwell turns in an admirable performance as his father, the one person W. strives to impress and gain acceptance from.
Where the film goes wrong is in its altering portrayals of W., past and present. The film starts present day, then puts us back in W’s Yale fraternity rush of 1966, then back to present day, then back to Bush’s alcoholic college days, his early political career, where he meets Laura, back to present day, to 1977, to 1986, back to present day. I’m being a little facetious and inaccurate here, but you get the picture that the script jumps around a lot, making for a frustrating viewing.
Oliver Stone has a good track record with political fare, (JFK and Nixon are both seminal films), and that’s part of the reason why this effort is so wearisome and disappointing. W. is, at once, a patchwork of ideas and a juxtaposition, portraying an incompetent president whose chief motive in life is to one-up his father. Brolin succeeds in portraying a W. that we, ultimately, empathize with – simply for his shortcomings if anything else.
Make no mistake about it, our president was a booze addled misfit who, unfortunately for all of us, sought his father’s approval in the political arena. In the eight years since his inauguration, our country couldn’t be worse off.
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