W.

Director: Oliver Stone
Screenwriter: Stanley Weiser
Starring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss, James Cromwell, Ellen Burstyn, Thandie Newton (interviews)
Running time: 129 mins
Certificate: 15

Oliver Stone's W. begins and ends on an empty baseball field, presenting George Bush (Brolin) as a man laced with regret. In these poignant bookends, Stone highlights the idea that Bush is a being of simple pleasures - he has achieved the unimaginable with limited intellect yet his one true dream, to be a pro baseball player, will always be out of reach.

This much talked about political drama is not an anti-Bush polemic, but a fairly balanced portrait of a footloose and fancy-free Texan playboy who quits booze, finds God and overachieves on an unimaginable scale. The film flits between two story strands: the first shows Bush and his cohorts Dick Cheney (Dreyfuss), Karl Rove (Toby Jones), Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) and Condoleezza Rice (Newton) plotting the invasion of Iraq; the second follows Bush from his days as a Yale freshman to his defeat of Al Gore in the 2000 US Presidential election.

W. is a fascinating and thought-provoking character study delivered at hurricane-like velocity with an out-of-his-depth protagonist at the eye of the storm. Stone's excellent grasp of pacing - thanks to a neatly structured script by his Wall Street writer Stanley Weiser - means that W. is never in danger of disengaging its audience. Eschewing the traditional biopic format, it rattles back and forth through time to show Bush in the White House, then sheds light on just how he managed to get there.

This film is the third in Stone's loose Presidential trilogy. Though it isn't at the standard of JFK or Nixon, it's easily his best film in recent memory. A lack of hindsight is what makes W. a very good film as opposed to a great one. Thrown together at speed to capitalise on Bush's exit from the White House, the movie never adds new insight to the Iraq war debate or the US's botched attempts to establish a democratic government there. Stone puts across too much that is still fresh in the memory, and you feel that a decade's worth of breathing space between this administration and the film would have given fresh perspective.

The moments of brilliance in W.'s White House stages - including a Dr. Strangelove-esque war room squabble where Rumsfeld compares Powell's insistence on staying out of Iraq to Neville Chamberlain's efforts to appease Adolf Hitler - are often offset by unneeded asides such as the infamous pretzel choking incident and a token Tony Blair (Ioan Gruffud) cameo. Brolin, however, is outstanding, delivering the performance of his career with Bush's mannerisms and crooked arm swagger nailed down to a tee. His display of cowboy bravado masks the lead character's insecurities. In one of his many Bushisms, he tells puppet master Cheney to "keep your ego in check, I'm the decider".

As this film contemplates Bush's presidential reign, the more apparent it becomes that he's a 21st century version of Being There's Chauncey Gardner (Forrest Gump before Forrest Gump). Both characters are fools in possession of the common touch, and find those around them projecting onto them what they want to see. Inexplicably, that alone carries both all the way to Washington.

In W., Oliver Stone has made a film that skewers Bush as an incompetent and dim-witted politician, yet finds compassion in the subject matter's quest to step out of his father's shadow. It's a damning verdict on Bush as a world leader, though it's hard not to come out of W. without some admiration for the man's character. In the closing scene, you almost want him to catch that baseball. Almost.


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