George W. Bush says he is content to let history judge him. But he misunderestimated Oliver Stone, whose W. puts our departing president on the cinematic cutting board just weeks before the next election. I was concerned over the timing: Stone’s throwing red meat to Bill O’Reilly and the “base” is just the kind of diversion flop-sweating right-wingers are hoping for as the McCain campaign lumbers on. True, conservatives will carp over the more broadly satirical sections, and the distortions to the record as they see them. (The very idea of Oliver Stone, a Vietnam veteran resistant to swift boating, dipped in Oscar gold, and beloved by segments of the liberal media, is infuriating to the right.) But with so many noted Republicans, Republican incumbents, and Maverick himself running away from Bush’s meager achievements, it will be no easy task for pundits to prove that Stone is the only one kicking Shrub when he’s down. Besides, the movie picks him up from the gutter, and dusts him off a little bit. It’s a portrait Joe the Plumber might endorse, at least in part, if he had that tax cut he needs to afford movie night again.

W. is fitfully entertaining, but Stone’s slash-and-sympathy tactics make for a schizophrenic experience. He is a coarse filmmaker, largely adverse to nuance, and that bludgeoning quality gives his best pictures their lifeforce vitality. When brain matches brawn, you get a Salvador or a Platoon, and I’m partial to the time capsule called Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Any Given Sunday besides. But he overreaches, as with Natural Born Killers and Alexander, and played it safe with World Trade Center, as if he had lost his nerve. He hedges here, more skillfully. W. is a cheekily timed broadside, more sober-minded than Comedy Central’s “That’s My Bush!” (which despite a dead-on interpreter in Timothy Bottoms came and went pre-9/11, before its subject was better defined) and what for some was the wish fulfillment of 2006’s briefly controversial fake documentary Death of a President. We get a recreation of Bush choking on a potato chip as he watches a football game in the White House, but this is treated semi-solemnly, and leads to a flashback. (more…)