W. asks why?

In theaters Friday: High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Passengers, Saw V, Synecdoche, New York

New on DVD: The Incredible Hulk, The Strangers

I saw W. last weekend, and while my expectations were in check, the film was something of a surprise. It reminded me how narrow-sighted it is to see people only as the sum of their decisions, whether good or bad. And as poor as Bush’s second term has been, he’s still flesh and blood, a man driven by reasons intellectual, personal and social to do the things he has done from the Oval Office. Those reasons are the fertile ground for Oliver Stone’s even-handed film. Bush’s critics, something like 70% of the U.S. population at this point, want to reduce his poor decisions to one of these reasons, but it’s a complex combination of all three, and that what makes this portrait interesting.

Speaking of complex, the Dubya of Stone’s world, and perhaps the real world as well, is founded on the tempestuous relationship he maintains with his father, George H. W. Bush, played here by James Cromwell. Neither father nor son fully understand each other, and it is this friction that grips the 43rd president’s rise like a vise.

Josh Brolin gives a commendable portrayal of the president here, making him likeable and relatable on a certain level and incredibly frustrating on many others. Brolin has W.’s precise voice and mannerisms, but he avoids camp and caricature, creating a well-rounded man, a man who wandered well into his 30s from job to job, drinking too much and carousing with the best of them. A man suddenly driven to make a name for himself. A man who never liked being called George Bush, but preferred “Dubya” or “Geo” as Elizabeth Banks’ Laura calls him in the film.

The film jumps in time from flashbacks to Bush’s youth—Yale hazing, jail, job-hopping, and his father’s 1992 loss to Bill Clinton—to the events leading up to the Iraq War. Throughout, W. ’s Bush is a charismatic, everyman who in the beginning meant well, but very quickly got in over his head, his eyes too focused on his father’s approval to notice the rising waters and the sharks circling within them. And what sharks they are. Richard Dreyfuss’s snide Dick Cheney provides Stone with a well-oiled villain. Cheney’s slithery takeover of a cabinet meeting—the one where Bush decides to go to war with Saddam—most closely resembles Darth Vader working the bridge of his Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back. Dennis Boutsikaris’ Paul Wolfowitz, Scott Glenn’s Donald Rumsfeld and Toby Jone’s Karl Rove cheerlead him on.

Bush puts each of these sharks in their place. He tells Cheney—whom he playfully calls “Vice”—to “keep a lid on it” in meetings because “I’m the boss, the decider.” He tells Rove to listen to Colin Powell and not speak, and he even says that Rumsfeld “must be living on another planet.” These lines are on-point, but unfortunately Bush comes off like a too-lax father, one who trades sarcastic barbs with his wayward sons but never actually disciplines them. Instead he joins their game.

W. is flawed, but is a good starting place to understanding the rise of our current president. The film is too talky in places—the opening “Axis of Evil” scene being the prime example—and the absence of any scenes depicting W. in the Air National Guard is a glaring omission. One more scene showing Powell’s transition from staunch opposition to an Iraq invasion to the move’s chief proponent before the U.N. Security Council would have gone a long way to explaining his arc and the real influence of Cheney on Bush administration policy.

I enjoyed several sequences here, but the overall package doesn’t quite come together. It is a shame that a film with a title ending in a period meanders for its final 20 minutes in search for a suitable finale. But that’s the handicap a filmmaker accepts when producing a picture about a sitting president. This story isn’t over. But for as much emphasis as Stone places on the father/son relationship, W. should have culminated with a scene between the Bushes 41 and 43. An appearance by Bill Clinton would have worked well, too.