Movie-W.

Oliver Stone raised up conservative ire everywhere when he said he would make a biopic pick about George W. Bush's life. They denounced him immediately, and the whole project.

But Stone has a way of confounding people, and I think he does it here also in W
(2008). And this time Stone confounds both liberals who wanted a terrible portrait painted of W and conservatives, who were afraid of a movie that showed this Bush to be dumb, idiotic and criminally insane.

Stone does not do either. With Josh Brolin playing W. very well, with his speech pattern and body language down pat, this portrayal of Bush is a psychological profile of a man who always has to compete---for fatherly approval and for wider recognition of his own accomplishments. He is almost tortured be feelings of inadequacy, but must drive to do better...be a faster jogger than Clinton, to be a better decider than his father, even to be a better Christian than his reverend.

The whole cast, from Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney to James Cromwell as the senior George Bush, really gets what Stone is doing here, and all work together seamlessly for this one purpose---to show what drove this man to make the decisions he did...not the intelligence reports or outside circumstances, but what in the inner man made him have the NEED to go after Saddaam Hussein and invade Iraq. What made him make a dozen other ill-fated decisions?

This was a really good film, and there will be people on both sides of the aisle who decry it. But truly it does not portray W is the worst light, nor in the best. But it does show him as a man somewhat deeply conflicted, but without the insight to realize it.