W. Was released in the wrong time. Probably 10 years too soon. If you stumble upon this film now, you will be entertained. Because this story and this character are just absurd. Politics aside, Brolin does a good job portraying W.

I suggest watching VICE first and then back to back this one and you will appreciate it more.

7,1/10.

With his "in the moment" biopic "W." the normally volatile Oliver Stone wisely saves his judgments for history when hindsight will be 20/20. Achingly subdued and slightly satirical, Stone plays it straight and to the bone. Here he presents us with the early years of our current lame duck president, showing Dubya rushing a frat-house at Yale, meeting Laura at a barbecue, living in the shadow of his father and brother, his troubles holding down a job, his failed bid to become baseball commissioner, and his defining moment when he gives up drinking and becomes born-again. All of which leads us to his first term and the Iraq War quagmire, where Dubya honest-to-goodness truly believes "God" wanted him to become president and that Iraq did have those rascally WMD.

In the lead role, Josh Brolin is an endearingly bumble-headed Dubya, and Stone presents him as a simple-minded man with good intentions who has been crippled by his "daddy issues" and has surrounded himself with the most cynical, self-serving, and corrupt administration in modern American history. The supporting cast is a hoot, with highlights including Thandie Newton eliciting big laughs just with her facial expressions as a wicked and moronically faithful Condi Rice, Elizabeth Banks giving a winning portrayal of Laura Bush, and Richard Dreyfuss playing Cheney as the most insipid megalomaniac American politics has ever seen.

Stone accomplishes three major coups here that should surprise those who expected a one-sided liberal smear job. First, he humanizes George W. Bush. The director does this with savvy editing showing the back-story of why Dubya does the things he does (i.e. why he uses nicknames for everyone or why running three miles every day is so important to him),and then juxtaposing that with the inane decisions he has made as president. By utilizing actual transcripts from press conferences, news coverage, and meetings, Stone and scribe Stanley Weiser allow Bush and his administration to speak for themselves, and it's both comically cathartic and occasionally frightening to see it dramatized so well. Second, he redeems the presidency of George "Poppy" Bush (a somewhat miscast but still effective James Cromwell) by showing what a restrained and thoughtful Commander in Chief he was compared to his naive and too-eager-to-please son. Thirdly, he redeems the legacy of Colin Powell (a surprisingly good Jeffrey Wright),who is shown here as the only person in the administration with any hindsight or foresight, and the only sane voice who questioned the motives for entering Iraq, though he eventually caved in and played along. His "f-you" to Cheney towards the film's final act is priceless.

As the actual presidency still has a few months to go at the time of the film's release, Stone's biopic was never written a true ending, leaving us with a symbolic image of Dubya looking up to the sky in center field waiting to catch a ball that will never drop. It may be another twenty years before we can pass any accurate judgment on Dubya's legacy, and likewise, Stone's film will have to wait. It's going to be a long time before anyone catches all those balls George W. Bush's administration threw up in the air.

I saw this movie at my friend's insistence, and watching it while drinking a beer seemed more fun than sitting at home. In retrospect, only the beer was worth my time. Not that it's an irredeemably bad film... some of the sections depicting George Bush's early life are interesting, and the whole thing is technically well done. But when the film gets into his presidency, we're treated to impersonations rather than performances.

W (Josh Brolin) is the prodigal son of the wealthy and influential Bush family, and the film depicts a series of unfocused episodes or vignettes that led up to his assuming the presidency of the United States. Bush is depicted, probably correctly, as a man virtually without intellectual curiosity. His family life is left very much untouched outside of his relationship to wife Laura, perhaps out of respect for the Bush children who after all did not ask for such scrutiny. I did enjoy the aspects of the story that touched on his relationship with his father, President George Bush (James Cromwell). Nothing else in the film had much interest or gave us much information outside of what's readily available.

I think it was a mistake for Oliver Stone to make this film during Bush's presidency, when there is no fresh perspective and when audiences are already so used to seeing the man on TV that attending the theater to see him represented seems pointless. And it not only seems pointless, but in Oliver Stone's rambling and unfocused film it actually is pointless in my opinion. What's the idea behind this film anyway? "George W. Bush is a human being." Wow, give the man a cookie. It might be interesting to people decades from now but at this point everything in the film is common knowledge and a lot of the things you see in the film you might as well just watch the original footage on youtube. There are also a lot of jarring performances -- Thandie Newton's take on Condoleeza Rice comes off as cartoonish and silly, and yet Jeffrey Wright's take on Colin Powell seems nothing like the man we've known in public service for decades. It's as if half the performers thought they were doing a re-enactment while the other half were being directed to play it broad from the hip.

Oliver Stone deserves the blame for this stinker. I simply cannot fathom why he's considered by so many to be a good director. He had some talent as a screenwriter, but his whole task as director seems to be to produce glossy post-cards of history that probably never happened. He's like a Cecil B DeMille for our times. Not that I doubt the overall points that the film makes about our 43rd president, but more I wonder why anyone feels the need to make them at this point. The film does not address any of the worst aspects of Bush's career in the presidency and lets him off the hook by portraying him as a mere incompetent who was persuaded by Rove and Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) to be a devil's accomplice. Real history must be more complicated than whatever happens in Oliver Stone's head. This film is afraid to step on anyone's toes so it ends up being dull. It should have gone one way or the other -- courted controversy by depicting Bush as a kind of hero or villain. Instead we get a very tepid representation of him as a well-meaning loser. Whether it's close to reality or not should be for historians and true political observers to say, but I don't see much point in basing a film on such a middle of the road interpretation.