W.

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W.

43% Liked It
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W.

Bruce McGill, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn, Ioan Gruffudd, James Cromwell

Whether you love him or hate him, there is no question that George W. Bush is one of the most controversial public figures in recent memory. In an unprecedented undertaking, acclaimed director Oliver ...( read more  read more... )Stone is bringing the life of our 43rd president to the big screen as only he can. W takes viewers through Bush's eventful life--his struggles and triumphs, how he found both his wife and his faith, and of course the critical days leading up to Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

Id: 10986930

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W. Recent Reviews
  • gor41
    August 19, 2009
    gor41
    Enjoyable, interesting journey through W's life which tries to explain his character (flaws) without overtly demonising him. Brolin inhabits the role, ably supported by a raft of fine performances.
  • JDFortuneFan
    August 16, 2009
    JDFortuneFan
    For starters Oliver Stone jumped the gun on making a film about Bush. This film could have waited ten years for the making. Kudos to Josh Brolin for taking on the role and having the Bush mannerisms down perfectly. The characters of Powell and Rice were poorly written and very...( read more) caricature. On a whole, the cast gave great performances throughout the film. Aside from the film being released while Bush was still a 'sitting President', the film is also a complete mockery (some of which is heresay) of George W. Bush and his cabinet. Stone cannot be criticized for his directing and styling, those really work in the film. Overall, the film just left a bad after taste.
  • katharinec
    July 18, 2009
    katharinec
    Eh.... okay, so it was good for what it was, but what it was was a film that was made before it should have been. Unlike The Deer Hunter (which focused on zeitgeisty themes instead of specific factual events and was thus completely appropriate to make so shortly after Vietnam), t...( read more)his film completely jumped the gun. There is obviously still so much we don't know about the Dubya Whitehouse, about Dubya himself, and a lot of stuff will continue to come out. This film aimed to be a biopic trying to explain the man and a period in our history, but because it was biographical and not zeitgeisty in focus, it was completely presumptuous to make so soon. Stone should have waited to make it later or not made it at all and let someone else do the job right when enough time had passed to make this an endeavor that would actually add insight. It was just hasty.
  • jamilyn0276
    June 28, 2009
    jamilyn0276
    Oliver Stone is a class act and he has brought us some great presidential tales, like Nixon and JFK so why not add one more to the list.
    I liked James Cromwell as George Bush Sr. In this and Josh Brolin was spot on and outstanding as W. I loved that Elizabeth Banks played Laura ...( read more)Bush. I just love her. I just wish there would have been more of her in the film.
    The film focuses more on his tactics in office with the war, with a little history laced in. I do wish they would have focused more on George and Laura and their family, instead of making it so left wing. All in all I have to say it was a good film.
    It's a long film, running 2 hours. I thought they could have taken the time to end it better, I really didn't care for that. But, I do think W. is worth the watch.
  • EarthlyAlien
    June 18, 2009
    EarthlyAlien
    "I believe God wants me to be president!"

    The most shocking thing about Oliver Stone's W. isn't that it portrays George W. Bush as a charismatic simpleton with out-of-control daddy issues, it's that Stone actually seems to like Bush. I'm not saying he thinks he wa...( read more)s a good President or that he agrees with, well, just about anything Bush did during those dark eight years. But it's impossible to watch W. and not come to the conclusion that at the least, this is a man that Stone sympathizes with. Stone's Dubya (as he's frequently called by his friends) is a confused, often well-meaning man in over his head, out of his depth, and completely unaware of his own limitations.

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    Stone's approach to Dubya as a lovable shlub is brilliant, enabling him to dodge many of the pitfalls a project like this is fraught with. Even though the film's marketing materials seem intent on reducing Bush to a crass running gag, the film itself is never mocking or mean-spirited. Bush may be something of an idiot, but he's a lovable idiot, perhaps even a harmless one, or would have been harmless had the American people not been stupid enough to give him the reigns of power. Stone tells his story by mixing fact with wild conjecture. We see re-enacted events which were on the record and thus accurate, as well as a number of things which Stone invents wholesale as a way of getting across his take on the character. Interestingly, it's in those wholly fabricated scenes that Stone shows the most affection for George. His public persona is often his harshest, in the privacy of his own bedroom Bush comes off as a kind and frequently bewildered man.

    Stone's approach to the material is the right one, unfortunately his film is a structural disaster. He knows in general how he wants to portray the president, but beyond that he has no real theme or goal. He leaps through time, telling different parts of Bush's story at different places, with nothing of any substance connecting it all together. Many of the biggest moments in the film serve no purpose, except as a way to let the audience revisit Bush's greatest hits. For instance, early in the film Stone hops through time to show us George's famous pretzel choking incident. We leave an unrelated scene to watch him gag and fall on the floor, and then we're jumping to something else, with no further mention of his near death experience. It's as if Stone was in a rush when he wrote it, as if he had a list of things he wanted to cover but didn't have a clear idea of what he was trying to say with any of them, other than "hey, here's Bush!"

    As a character study though, W. is fascinating. Josh Brolin turns in an incredible performance, his Bush is spot on. What he does is something more than mimicry, you can see it in his eyes, he's there searching for George's soul. He's a dead ringer for the most powerful man in the world, and Brolin is inside his head. The film's other performances come in varying flavours of success. James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn are both stately and understated as Papa and Mama Bush and Thandie Newton slips so fully into the shrill persona of Condoleezza Rice that she's completely unrecognisable as herself. Richard Dreyfuss and Jeffrey Wright also turn in fine work as Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.

    Elizabeth Banks, on the other hand, is left stranded by Laura Bush, who was written into Stanley Weisner's script without a personality. It's a shame, too, since her story is, aside from Dubya's, one of the most baffling. When they meet at a backyard barbecue she's a spunky teacher devoted to reading, education, and voting Democrat. For a moment, Banks shows fire as she flirts with Bush and teases him about his politics. But that's the last glimmer of personality we get from her, and we never truly understand how a woman like that ends up married to a right-wing conservative and borderline illiterate. Apparently Stone's answer is that Laura shuts her mouth and simply does whatever her husband says.

    W. ends long before the modern era, with the Iraq war just starting to go sour in the first half of Bush's second term. An intense desire to please his father coupled with family connections, slick campaign managers, and an innate ability to connect with people on some primal, beer-drinking buddy level have pushed Bushie into a position he has absolutely no desire to be in, and once he's there he convinces himself he's on a mission from God and starts going with his gut. In the process, he's manipulated by those around him. Cheney ambushes him at lunches, pushing his agenda and Bush, who doesn't like reading, goes along with it. While his advisors talk about complicated issues like empire building and oil, he distills everything into pre-school like concepts and regurgitates them back as "hey let's go spread freedom."

    And that's probably Stone's greatest achievement with this film. I honestly don't believe a man that clueless would have the intellect to forge a persona. When Bush says he's doing what he's doing to make the world a better place you actually believe him. It's when you watch the snakes behind his back with their eyes on Iran's oil that you realize he's not the one to blame for what happened between 2001 and 2009, but those who put him in that chair. Stone's W. is not an evil man, merely a foolish and fatally naive one, a man who belongs running a baseball team and not sitting in America's highest office munching on pretzels. Stone's take on Bush's character is ultimately flawed, but fascinating. W. is neither as shocking or vilifying as you may be expecting, but it is entertaining.

    "You fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice... you ain't gonna fool me again."
  • kellylouise2
    December 8, 2009
    kellylouise2
    Upon viewing this film, I felt a little skeptical and astonished at the same time.. how can a nation be so foolish to choose this man to represent and lead their country and be so oblivious to the ruthlessness, ignorance and inadequateness of their government? How is that even po...( read more)ssible? It was never a secret that Mr Bush failed miserably at his presidency, but it is very difficult for me to understand why people have actually voluntarily voted for this man. As for the film, though, I liked how it demonised him as a politician and humanised him as a man; it mocked him and sympathised with him at the same time. Especially the relationship with his father was captured very well I think, which was quite an essential part. But aside from that, I don't think the movie digs deep enough. Or perhaps, George W. Bush just isn't deep enough.
  • alexbasketball
    December 1, 2009
    alexbasketball
    i just couldnt get into it and i ended up falling asleep... i think its just because i dont care about the subject.
  • anospi
    November 29, 2009
    anospi
    Felt a little disjointed and without a central thread, but the acting was top notch right across the board. It was sympathetic to Bush, but as a film really enjoyable if only for reasons of nostalgia.
  • MovieGuruDude72
    November 26, 2009
    MovieGuruDude72
    Oliver Stone has never been one to tell the truth 100 percent of the time. More like 65 percent on a good day. Just watch JFK. Some of that stuff was made up. HOWEVER, one cannot look past the fact that maybe, he got it right in this film. Josh Brolin's immense acting talents wer...( read more)e needed to play George W. Bush, a man who is either the dumbest person on the face of the earth, or the most brilliant madman of our lifetime. Either way, Brolin was Dubbya for this film. His mannerisms and vocabulary were dead-on. His ignorance and aloof-at-the-wheel personality were portrayed wonderfully by Brolin. What I didn't necessary agree with was James Cromwell as Bush Sr. They made Bush Senior look like the Incredible Hulk relatively speaking and Laura Bush? Was she really that big a moron? If she was she did a miraculous job of re-inventing herself in later years to earn some respectability. That's the rub of this film, you're not quite sure what's real and what's fiction. A staple of Oliver Stone.
  • themasterpiece69
    November 25, 2009
    themasterpiece69
    This movie is just okay.
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