Philadelphia Weekly

The lamest of lame ducks, the man The Daily Show cuttingly calls our "still-president" hardly needed something like this right now. Hobbled by Nixonian approval ratings and largely ignored by the media--save for those special occasions when he appears on prime-time television to tell us we should be completely terrified--George W. Bush kinda feels like an afterthought, even if he's still ostensibly leader of the free world.

His spotlight stolen by a dumber, meaner drag version of himself from Wasilla, Alaska, Bush is now a national punch line, so disgraced and irrelevant that his own party is attempting to run a "change" campaign, leaving Dubya as stale fodder for a quickie biopic by our most notorious national muckraker, Oliver Stone.

But there's something tricky about this Stone fellow--the guy makes loud, unsubtle pictures, and yet he never quite heads in the direction you were expecting. They say only Nixon could go to China, and I'd argue that only someone as aggrieved and outraged as Oliver Stone could make a movie as crazily empathetic and deeply felt as his 1995 Nixon--sloppy as it was. Most recently this famously paranoid conspiracy theorist was hired to helm World Trade Center, so he turned in something aspiring to the somber formality of John Ford's WWII melodramas.

Which is all a long way of getting around to saying that with W. Stone has accomplished something I would've thought impossible: He made me feel sorry for this miserable son of a bitch.

As soon as this hasty project got under way, a pal with access to the script joked that it's too bad Bernardo Bertolucci already used the title Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, nailing it dead to rights. W. presents the Peter Principle on a global stage--a desperately sad tale of a limited man in over his head, working through his private Daddy issues with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

It's also awfully funny. Josh Brolin nails the Shrub's stiff body language and awkward ape hugs, stammering comical malapropisms and insidious smirks at inopportune moments. But he's never stupid. Blessed with a formidable animal cunning, Brolin's Bush is arrogant and incurious; an important distinction from the way the man is oft characterized by Michael Moore and his ilk. Dubya may often sound like an idiot, but I don't buy him as dumb--just fatally blinkered by his infuriating from-the-gut certainty.

Stanley Weiser's screenplay runs on parallel tracks, alternating the hedonistic misadventures of an overgrown boy-king with our long approach to war in Iraq. These latter scenes are by far the finest. Stone's camera sneaks up on the Hollywood stars playing famous public figures in a weird prosthetic burlesque of everything we've only read about in the news.

Here's the haughty disdain of Scott Glenn's Donald Rumsfeld, the sputtering dissent of Jeffrey Wright's Colin Powell, and the deeply alarming cheerleading of Thandie Newton's grotesque, almost avian Condoleezza Rice. Through it all, Toby Jones' reptilian Karl Rove and Richard Dreyfuss' spectacularly sinister Dick Cheney hover on the sidelines, at one point taking seats side by side behind our president, conspicuously shrouded in darkness.

"There is no exit strategy. We stay," Dreyfuss purrs sideways from the corner of his mouth, pointing at a map of Iraq. It's one of the few lines in the movie that hasn't been sourced from one Bob Woodward book or another, and just a hint at what a wild movie W. might've been had Stone only gone hog wild and off the record.

Alas, the filmmaker plays it straight, hewing close to history, with James Cromwell muttering all sorts of patrician discontent as H.W. 41, the only one in the cast not bothering to mimic famous mannerisms. (He just acts like Farmer Hoggett, but this time very disappointed in Babe.)

W. is missing Stone's patented phantasmagoric editing and crazy-pants free associations. Far more conventionally shot and cut than most of his pictures, it still somehow retains Stone's weird strain of empathy, never more so than during a recurring fantasy sequence during which Brolin's Bush plays ball in an empty stadium, bowing to the cheers of an imaginary crowd, finally looking up to catch a pop fly ... only to lose it in the lights.

It's a thuddingly obvious metaphor. It's also the one we deserve for reelecting this man.