CinePhillyist Reviews... W.

Once upon a time, Oliver Stone enjoyed a reputation as the most paranoid man in Hollywood, seeing conspiracy theories under every rock and questioning the official explanations. So when Stone decided, earlier this year, to tackle the subject of our current president, who is responsible for any number of actual conspiracies to take away civil liberties and then cover up his own responsibility for same, I got a little giddy. This is, after all, the president that’s held people for years without any sort of review, with secret evidence and occasionally secret legal arguments, on a prison that the American government runs but claimed not to control. I didn’t want to hear my opinions parroted back to me, but I figured that the dramatic expansion of torture and electronic surveillance might have sparked his interest.

I figured wrong, as you might have guessed by now. Like a presidential candidate, Stone has conceived this move with his eye set straight on the swing voter, on the undecideds. (I’m surprised it doesn’t come with a dedication to Joe the Plumber.) The movie advances the opinion that maybe the Iraq War was sold under false pretenses, and maybe WMDs were not the true concern, while placing at the moral center the comforting bipartisan presence of General Colin Powell. Perhaps he thought that would evidence restraint, but it actually turns W. into the worst of both worlds: all of the doldrums of the old Stone without any of his crazy paranoiac energy.

So, for example, Stanley Weiser has larded up his script with actual quotes from Bush and his confederates. This is supposed to convey authenticity—you can practically see the footnotes—but the effect is spoiled because the seams between fictional and real dialogue is obvious enough to trip over. At best, you might find yourself nodding along, thinking you too saw that mentioned on the Huffington Post. When not properly sourced, the dialogue is likely to involve some kind of painfully on-the-nose declaration or something from the “as you know, Bob” school of exposition. Many times, I found myself thinking of David Mamet’s principle of screenwriting: a man doesn’t say, “I haven’t been laid in six weeks,” he says, “That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing.”

Within these confines, Josh Brolin does an admirable job of capturing George W. Bush. It may, if anything, be too good a job. At points—particularly during the famous 2003 State of the Union address—the resemblance, both emotional and physical, is so strong that it produces an uncanny effect, so that you could get distracted staring at W’s face or checking for seams where they edited in video footage of real political figures. Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney has less of an astonishing physical resemblance, but he brings to the role an oily, shadowy presence such that you can’t keep your eyes off of him, even when he’s leaning on a wall at the edge of the frame. W. would have been far better if the other participants had realized what he obviously did: that their job is to evoke, not to detail.

Image Credit: wthefilm.com