Laziest review ever: W.

Sorry I've been away. It's been a very busy month. I will write more (much, much more) when the election is over. For now, here is a review of W., presented in bullets of likes and dislikes. Simple and to the point -- just how George W. likes his memos.

Pluses:

• Solid acting. Brolin does a good job of avoiding caricature. Cromwell as Bush senior is just as strong; he keeps the "Daddy Issues" thread from becoming an Oedipal bore.
  
• Structure. I thought the temporal back-and-forth structure of Weiser's script was effective. It accentuated Stone's central goal: to illustrate the shocking transformation of Bush the burnout to Bush the president. Placing the two time periods beside one another created an effective, funny split-screen image of Bush.
  
• Entertaining. Simply, it's a slight film, and slight films don't take much of a toll mentally. The film deserves credit for presenting presidential politics in an engaging way without over-the-top imagery and historical revisionism (see JFK and Nixon) or SNL-style parody.
  

Minuses:

• Though I liked the structure, I can't recall a single sequence in the entire film. Sure, there are scenes, but the film jumps around so much that each moment stands in isolation. Though it might sound trivial, this is a serious flaw. Almost every scene begs for a lead-in or a follow-up, to reveal how Bush prepared for or digested the iconic moments of his presidency. Stone recreates the "Mission Acclompished" moment, which is fine, but imagine how much more revealing that scene would have been if we saw Bush in the aircraft before landing. What was he thinking then? Did he have any feeling that this could be a major political blunder? In another scene, we see Bush speak to injured soliders in a hospital, a not uncommon image within the news media. The scene is meant to be tragic, but it's not much different than seeing the president speak to soldiers on CNN. If we saw how Bush responded emotionally and tempermentally to the image of wounded soldiers, however, that would be something. Would Bush lose sleep, would he be tempted to shift policies, would he care? Those are the questions I had going into the film, and, of course, Stone answered none of them.
• Reliance on "iconic" moments. This goes along with the first point. Perhaps Stone wanted to avoid allegations of overreaching and bias to such a great degree that he decided to focus on what cannot be refuted: the images on TV. Right-wing critics can't say Stone fabricated Colin Powell's UN address or Bush's "Mission Accomplished" address. I think those moments should have been in the film, certainly, but Stone uses them as placeholders for actual insight into his characters.
  
• Most scenes can be boiled down to one simple purpose. This relates to the above two faults. Becuase the film leaps so much in time, Stone essentially forces himself to cram "an important moment" in every scene. Thus, every scene could begin with a title like "Wherein W. decides the oil rigs are not for him," "Wherein W. decides he will become born again," "Wherien W. addresses the State of the Union on Iraq's nuclear ambitions," "Wherein W. is shown as a rusty, inexperienced politician," "Wherein W. decides he will run for president." Simply, W. shows us the dots in George W. Bush's life, but rarely does it connect those dots. It'd be easy to transcribe the film into a bullet-pointed PowerPoint presentation, to strip every scene of the fat to reveal an obvious plotpoint. Though I liked the film's structure chronologically, I didn't like the Crash-style development of plot and character. These moments felt like necessary pitstops in a meaningless tour of the president's life.
  
• Use of Bushism in dialogue. This was just silly. Maybe a viewer 20 years from now will hear Bush's "is our children learning?" line and laugh, but Stone obviously isn't making this film for future audiences. Why else would he rush the production for a pre-election release date? As a 2008 viewer, the Bushisms have an awkward distancing effect. They're artificial and contrived, and they rupture the film's restrained tone, no less.
• The Daddy storyline. While I don't think the Jr./Sr. relationship is an inherently idiotic narrative thread, it lacks complexity and borders on trite. I might have felt differently about this, however, if the film had ended on a different note. (SPOILER FOLLOWS) Had the film ended with W.'s reelection, that would have been narratively satisfying. I wanted a scene between W. and Bush Sr. on the night of Bush's reelection in 2004. Did either of them make explicit that W. had succeeded where his father failed? Was it the elephant in the room? Did W. no longer feel he needed his father's approval because he had done what his father could not -- namely, catch Saddam and get reelected? These elements make for satisfying, ironic closure (ironic given how W.'s second term has gone), but Stone doesn't go there. Instead, the daddy storyline -- like the rest of the film -- just slowly fades away, seemingly arbitrarily.
  

Final grade: B-. I don't regret seeing it. I like the idea of a slight, unambitous film about a divisive president, but the execution was just so off that it'd be a real stretch to call W. anything other than OK.