playing to an empty stadium

The last movie I walked out of was David Cronenberg’s dull, hollow Eastern Promises. It wouldn’t make anybody’s list for worst film ever (Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake holds that spot for me), but its plodding mediocrity was more than I could stomach. I felt the same sense of antsy dissatisfaction with Oliver Stone’s sluggish, defanged W. Neither a satire nor a traditional biopic of our current President, this one lazily glides through a score of anecdotes we’ve already heard and tries to pass it off as a narrative. By the time George Bush is traversing the range at his Crawford ranch with Tony Blair and Condaleeza Rice in tow, I knew I had seen enough. Yes, I walked out. My only regret is that I didn’t do so sooner.

Stone has made a career out of making inflammatory, revisionist historical epics. JFK pushes forth controversial conspiracy theories as fact, and Nixon eviscerates a worthy target with gleeful, fact-fudging verbosity. It’s a shame Stone left his boxing gloves at home this time around, because his take on Bush is notable only for its bland, apolitical, and almost objective interpretation. There’s a place for objectivity in hard news, but it doesn’t cut it in cinema.

We get the same story we’ve always heard. Hard-partying frat boy turns unlikely heir to a political dynasty. Stone tries to shape the tale into an Oedipal drama about W’s inability to please his father (a totally unconvincing James Cromwell as Bush Sr.), but it’s hard to buy this dim-witted politico as a tragic hero. And that’s about as much focus as we get. The political policy scenes that follow, especially those that depict the build-up to the current war in Iraq, lack the nuance of even a sub-par episode of The West Wing.

Brolin, who carried last year’s No Country for Old Men with gusto, doesn’t have the range to pull off a winning impersonation of W. We never really believe we’re watching the real thing, even when Brolin mutters an amusing “bushism.” He fares better, though, than the supporting cast, which plays like a rogue’s gallery of rejected SNL impersonations. Richard Dreyfuss hams it up as Dick Cheney, Ellen Burstyn wears an awful wig as Barbara Bush, and Toby Jones looks and acts nothing like Karl Rove. The worst, though, must be Thandie Newton, whose cartoonish interpretation of Condi Rice looks and sounds like a bad Halloween costume.

Elizabeth Banks, as Laura Bush, is the only actor who manages to turn in a fully-realized performance. If it were her story, I might have stuck around.