Film Review W

FILM REVIEW W

On par with Fritz Lang’s M for the shortest film title of all, Oliver Stone’s film is a biopic of US President, George W Bush, (Dub-Ya). Unlike other presidents he has covered, JFK, Nixon, etc, W is still alive.

The film plays much on his failures as a President, and in his early life too. An alcoholic, who struggled to keep any job his father secured for him, and who had a place at Harvard engineered by his father but chose not to take it, Bush rose to power in he White House himself, competing with his own brother’s campaigns in the same direction.

Much of the film focuses on Bush’s failings in the Gulf Wars, and his obsessive search for Weapons Of Mass Destruction that simply did not exist, and on the total dependency he had on his spin-doctors and advisors. Left to fend for himself, he often simply had no idea what to do or say.

Stone is by no means totally unsympathetic to Bush, showing his genuine struggle to overcome his alcoholism, his fears of being remembered as the worst US President in history, etc.

It’s a very talky film. Only the Gulf War sequences show any real action dynamics, but the casting, especially of Josh Brolin in the lead rile, and are excellent. Brolin deserved an Oscar for his role as the bumbling George.

Much of the story is well known and Bush’s poor delivery of speeches with invented words like ‘Misunder-estimated’ are well known. The film looks at its most satirical whensimply tellingthe truth. 

There are great moments, suchas the whole gang of White House advisors and administrators following Bush on a walk where he misses a side path and gets them all lost in the middle of nowhere.

A fun film that will for many simply leave us asking what itcan saythat we don’t already know. The (lack of) WMD’s led to a war that America tried to use to keep its presence in Iraq, before being driven off-sol by the Iraquis.

I am left wondering how long Stone will wait before doing a biopic based on the life of Barrack Obama

Arthur Chappell