Josh Brolin, left, as George W. Bush and Toby Jones as Karl Rove in W.
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But as the film connects the biographical dots, it loses its way. The tone lurches from the sweetness of the George-and-Laura love story (she's played very appealingly by Elizabeth Banks) to the chilling cartoonery of the Iraq-war planning, in which his advisers are sketched in varying styles, from wicked parody (Thandie Newton's Condoleezza Rice) to creepy acuity (Richard Dreyfuss's Dick Cheney) to an absolving rectitude (Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell). All these scenes show Bush in action but not inside. The person remains an enigma. The movie is an X-ray of an invisible man--by the film's end, the W. still stands for Who?
It's easier to identify whom the film would like to be about. That's George Herbert Walker Bush, the forgotten-but-not-gone 41 to his son's 43. As played by the 6 ft. 5 in. (2 m) James Cromwell, Poppy Bush looms over W. (and W.) as a commanding, commandeering figure. According to the film, he's the master manipulator who sprang Dubya from jail after a rowdy Yale prank, "took care of" a woman his son didn't want to marry and "pulled strings" to get the boy into Harvard Business School. He hates the damage W. has done to the family name: "Partying, chasing tail, driving drunk. What do you think you are--a Kennedy?"
As President, Poppy is depicted as having the strength to use U.S. military might to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and the wisdom--not the weakness--to stop short of Baghdad. Stone seems to admire him more than any other President he's depicted. (In JFK, Kennedy was a hallowed ghost figure.) His Bush Sr. might be a Lyndon Johnson who somehow got the country in and out of Vietnam with a win and few U.S. casualties. This 41--this war hero, this fearless leader--could never have been impersonated on Saturday Night Live by Dana Carvey.
Cromwell is exactly the guy for the job; he's played a President three times before in films and on TV. He gives Poppy a gruff machismo that both dominates the film and, given its ostensible protagonist, distorts it. When, toward the end, the octogenarian Poppy is shown muttering sage dismissals of W.'s Iraq escapades, we realize that the film is actually the story of a proud man perpetually disappointed in his son.
An Unexamined Life
Jeb Bush, the "good" son (played by Jason Ritter), is a fleeting presence in W., as is mother Barbara (Ellen Burstyn), and Neil, Marvin and Dorothy are virtual no-shows. The secret sibling is Stone himself, who, like Dubya, came from a wealthy family and entered Yale in 1964. He left after a year and wound up in Vietnam, where his destiny ambushed him. Perhaps the political biography Stone really should put on film is John McCain's.
Well, he went ahead with this fairly judicious docudrama, in the seeming belief that a story with so many melodramatic twists and cataclysmic consequences needs little editorializing. The result is that rare Oliver Stone film that is not exhilarating, or enraging, but boring, because the director doesn't have a fresh take on Bush.