W.

Weak tea from Oliver Stone, broad strokes and little insight, a shallow biopic of a shallow man. Richard Dreyfuss and Josh Brolin turn in finely-tuned caricatures; the other performers, less finely-tuned. I've been looking forward to this film, though I still had low expectations. My biggest question, having just seen it, is why make it? Bush is neither lionized nor demonized, and he's only vaguely humanized; I can't figure out what the point was.

W. is an interesting cultural artifact, however. Have any other sitting presidents been the subject of a film? As divisive and ruinous a president as W has been, is this film simply a symptom of our exhaustion? Is it too much to ask the filmmakers to find an angle and play it to the hilt, assuming they're not interested in real subtlety and nuance? Maybe even Stone just doesn't have the heart, as surely the American people do not, to really press this subject. One day, perhaps, someone will make the George Bush film that George Bush deserves.

I think, given some distance from these terrible times, someone might have the balls to really sharpen the knives and make the brutal, pitch-black comedy this might have been. Or even, the great tragedy as we've seen it unfold these last eight years. But, for the moment, we long to forget...