As the days of our current Commander-in-Chief's presidency come to an end, Hollywood is churning out its own version of history. Director Oliver Stone's much-hyped W. spans from George W. Bush's college days at that one Ivy-covered institution in Connecticut to the end of his first term, operating in disjointed vignettes that fail to provide a thorough portrait of our 42nd president.
The film overemphasizes Bush's daddy issues with "poppy" George H.W. but sprinkles in comic zingers and embarrassing biographical moments (anybody recall the pretzel-Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0
oking incident of 2002?). What results is a movie that awkwardly straddles the line between psychoanalytic case study and Saturday Night Live parody.
Most of W.'s cast members make a noble effort to embody the essence of their famous characters. Josh Brolin is dead-on as "Bushy," and other actors, like Richard Dreyfuss (as veep Dick Cheney) hit their marks; some, however, like Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, seem too stiff and purposefully imitative to make this biopic truly memorable.
Heavily-edited news footage from the past decade is set to a diverse soundtrack, and the scenery is impressively realistic, but the film's attempts at aesthetic quirkiness don't do much to erase the possibility that the world may not be quite ready to digest cinema à la Bush.
W.'s uneven tone may operate better in the future when its audience is more distanced from today's biases and sketch-show portrayals, but for now, Stone runs a not-too-convincing campaign.
