Oliver Stone's "W." -- A Catastrophe Worthy of the Worst President

You ever sit through the rough cut of your friend's independent film? Well, I have, lotsa times, God help me, so seeing Oliver Stone's W. really brought back some nauseating memories. It seems to run about eight hours and is so boring, so fatheaded, and so full of lame attempts at profundity that it's just like the rough cut of almost every terrible independent film ever made. You can practically feel the director sitting behind you while it unspools, breathing on the back of your neck and willing you to see the brilliance of his vision.

For reasons that elude me, the majority of major film critics are playing along with the director on this one, at least to the point of expressing their criticisms very, very gently. This makes me wonder if most of them were actually with Oliver Stone, at some point, in a seedy rented screening room where rough cuts are so often shown. Perhaps they felt the obligations of friendship that weigh so heavily after the screening, when the fatheaded pal asks, "So whadja think?"

One of the few critics who's apparently not a coercible friend of Oliver Stone's is Anne Hornaday of the Washingon Post who lets loose with this insightful heart's-cry:

Why this movie -- a rushed, wildly uneven, tonally jumbled caricature -- and why now? Why, when Americans and citizens around the globe are still coming to terms with the implications of so many Bush policies, would they want to pay money at the box office to see what amounts to an extended "Saturday Night Live" skit?

Why, when so many people are familiar with the vignettes that drive the episodic narrative of "W." -- the Time Bush Choked on a Pretzel, the Time Bush Quit Drinking After a Brutal Hangover, the Time Bush Invaded Iraq -- would they want to see it all reenacted again, albeit through Stone's occasionally stingingly satirical lens?

As Bush himself might say, the answers to those questions are between you and your God.

The only problem I see with Hornaday's take is that she makes the movie sound too good. Calling Stone's lens "occasionally stingingly satirical" is giving that lens way too much credit, and the strain of praising Stone is probably what caused her to overdo the adjectives and muck up her sentence so badly. Even comparing W. to an extended Saturday Night Live skit is way too generous: some of those skits are pretty funny for a minute or two, anyway, and now is exactly the dire time when we all want to watch those skits. But at least Hornaday's observation gets us closer the experience of the film itself.

W. really is a bunch of often-terrible skits spun together and splatted out onto the screen as if fired from a salad-shooter. The skits are all played in different tones, all of them going on way too long, and all of them hinging on the fascination of watching good actors impersonate George W. Bush and his circle of grotesques. There's Josh Brolin playing W. as a rube failing upwards into the White House, featuring great work on Brolin's part. But unfortunately Stone keeps undercutting the fantastic all-out black comedy he could've made out of that performance, instead sticking poor Brolin into the dumbest Oedipal melodrama I've ever seen in my life. There's Richard Dreyfuss' Dick Cheney--far too warm and personable, nothing like the Central Casting evil capitalist fatcat we've marveled at all these years. Thandie Newton's Condoleeza Rice doesn't get a lot of screen time, which probably helped her achieve this wonderfully vicious rip into Condi, a real skit masterpiece--get her over to SNL right away! And so on through Jeffrey Wright's tortured Collin Powell, Scott Glenn's checked-out Rumsefeld, Elizabeth Banks' nice-gal Laura Bush, James Cromwell's indignant WASP Poppyzzzzzz

Where was I? Oh yeah, how much this movie absolutely reeked. I only went to W. because the ads looked surprisingly good. I'd sworn off all Oliver Stone movies after Nixon. (God, what a stupid movie. Stone had Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon as such a hunched, deformed, creepy Quasimodo character he could never have gotten elected for anything but medieval bell-ringer at Notre Dame.) But this one looked different; the comedy seemed to be on purpose. There was Brolin doing this hilarious skewering of Bush, and I thought, jeez, maybe Oliver Stone has finally given up blowhard bathos and is playing to his strengths, turning his gift for the grotesque toward humor, where it belongs. But don't be fooled; the ads represent only the dedication of the film's PR team in searching through tons of idiotic footage and pulling out the few good bits for the preview. As is so often the case with movies lately, the marketers are smarter than the filmmakers.