I had the same issues with Oliver Stone’s W. that I do with every biopic. As vir­tu­ally every fea­ture film biog­ra­phy attempts to do the job of a book, they inevitably fall into the same trap: they become high­lights reels that merely illus­trate key moments in a real-life figure’s life, span­ning decades. With a few excep­tions (Amer­i­can Splen­dor, Con­trol), any nar­ra­tive through­line is impos­si­ble; mean­ing, there is no story. Stone attempts to tie together his frag­mented exam­i­na­tion of the life of George W. Bush with the theme of his rela­tion­ship with his father, George H.W. Bush. In this view, Junior both loved and hated his father, and both wanted to impress him and to pre­vail where he per­ceived that he failed (it’s clear now even to this staunch paci­fist and Demo­c­rat that Bush the elder was wise to not extend the first Gulf War into a nation­build­ing exer­cise in Iraq).

Gen­tle­men! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!

Screen­writer Stan­ley Weiser chooses the con­cep­tion of the phrase “Axis of Evil” as the start­ing point, and ends the film with the infa­mous press con­fer­ence in which the arro­gant Bush was unable to name any mis­takes he may have made in office. Stone flashes back many times to Bush’s prior life as a trust fund wastrel, but skips almost every­thing that I would define as defin­ing moments: becom­ing a born again Chris­t­ian, decid­ing to run for pres­i­dent, announc­ing to his staff that they are going to war in Iraq (it’s a mat­ter of record Bush said “Fuck Sad­dam. We’re tak­ing him out.”) and of course, Sep­tem­ber 11 itself.

I’m George W. Bush, bitches!

The most obvi­ous fail­ure of biopics is that they typ­i­cally become oppor­tu­ni­ties for famous actors to do impres­sions of his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. In this case, the sub­jects are so fresh that many of them are still in office and on tele­vi­sion every night now, so the dan­ger is that W. could come too close to the easy satire of Sat­ur­day Night Live Week­end Update. That said, Josh Brolin is excel­lent as George W. Bush, in a per­for­mance that cap­tures many of the man’s pecu­liar tics but doesn’t come across as a forced car­i­ca­ture. Sim­i­larly, Richard Drey­fus is remark­ably restrained as Dick Cheney, a role that many other actors would have been tempted to use as an excuse to chew the Oval Office scenery. But unfor­tu­nately, Thandie New­ton (as Con­doleezza Rice) struck me as the only cast mem­ber doing a forced impression.

Offi­cial movie site: www.wthefilm.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.