W., round 1.

"Oliver Stone's unusual and inescapably interesting W. feels like a rough draft of a film it might behoove him to remake in 10 or 15 years," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "The director's third feature to hinge on a modern-era presidency, after JFK and Nixon, offers a clear and plausible take on the current chief executive's psychological makeup and, considering Stone's reputation and Bush's vast unpopularity, a relatively even-handed, restrained treatment of recent politics. For a film that could have been either a scorching satire or an outright tragedy, W. is, if anything, overly conventional, especially stylistically. The picture possesses dramatic and entertainment value, but beyond serious filmgoers curious about how Stone deals with all this president's men and women, it's questionable how wide a public will pony up to immerse itself in a story that still lacks an ending."

Updated through 10/14.

"A scrappy dip into the many lives of the infamous George W Bush, it could never live up to pre-release anticipation that it would deliciously eviscerate the Bush adminstration so vilified around the world in recent years," writes Mike Goodridge in Screen Daily. "Instead, rather like in Nixon, Stone serves up a dramatic portrait of the man steeped in the mythology of a wealthy family and political dynasty, who falls from favour with the same spectacular swiftness as he rose to it. And you can't help but feel that Stone was won over somewhat by Dubbya. As portrayed in a wonderfully brash and fearless performance by Josh Brolin, he is as charismatic as he is stupid, as idealistic as he is dangerously naïve."

"Brolin should be nominated for the Oscar," argues David Poland. "We'll see whether the crowd around Best Actor is too big for him to crack, but it is a letter perfect performance that looks much, much easier than most critics and audiences, I think, will understand."

"W. is not really a political movie per se; rather it's a movie about a man who went into politics but probably shouldn't have." The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt: "It's about how a father can misread a son and how a son can suffer in the shadow of a famous dad and how temperament gets molded by events both internal and external."

Recent interviews with Stone: Chris Ayres (London Times) and Oliver Burkeman (Guardian).

Online listening tip. Jay Parker of Georgetown University's Department of Government and David Thomson are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show, discussing JFK, Young Mr Lincoln and Truman.

Updates: "[C]agey Oliver is holding his cards to his chest and making you wait for the turnaround of the last ten or twelve minutes, which pays off (or at least paid off for me) in a way that - seriously, no jive - is something close to astonishing," finds Jeffrey Wells.

Pete Hammond reports on the star-studded premiere for the Los Angeles Times; so, too, does Anne Thompson for Variety: "At the after-party, Stone admitted that he was walking a 'tightrope' with W., because these are all well-known, real people. It's not satire, like Dr Strangelove, which is 'fiction, beautifully done,' he said. 'We couldn't go to Strangelove. We have Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central. They have done that. We have to find credibility, we have to eventually care about him - not sympathize. I didn't like Nixon, but I was able to empathize with him. Bush is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain now. All his policies are in place. We'll be dealing with this stuff for 20 years.'"

Dan Glaister for the Guardian: "The film has all the elements of the best psychodramas: an overbearing father, a straight-talking mother, a favourite son/brother, and a cast of sycophants and true believers. But it is the comedy - some very dark - that will stay in the minds of the audience."

Updates, 10/9: In the London Times, Chris Ayres finds that W. is "a disappointment and might have been better off on cable television as a mini-series."

Online listening tip. Stone's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 10/10: "Dare we risk four more years of catastrophic misrule by a W. alter ego?" asks Robert Scheer in the Nation. "For those indifferent to the serious implications of that question, I recommend Oliver Stone's new bio-flick, which brilliantly captures the 'banality of evil' that has controlled our political life these past eight years. This phrase from Hannah Arendt's characterization of the mundane cruelty that so marked the daily experience of European fascism has a frightening applicability to the Republican leadership that has done so much damage to this nation's reputation for democratic integrity."

Updates, 10/11: "The surprise about W. is that its left-wing creator made a movie that is not so much operatic or hysterical as utterly plausible.... [A]ll in all, the straightforwardness of W. suggests that Mr Stone set out to make a critical biography but was somehow spooked." Richard L Berke talks with Stone for the New York Times.

Lesley O'Toole talks with Stone for the Independent.

Updates, 10/12: "Speaking with me last week, Stone referred to JFK as his 'j'accuse' film - and rightly so," writes Alan Brinkley, a professor of history at Columbia. "Nixon, according to Stone, was a 'sober, winter' movie that attempted, mostly empathetically, to capture the loneliness and occasional despair of an unloved man.... Almost all of Stone's important movies are dark and pessimistic, reflections of his own (and much of his generation's) disillusionment with American politics and power. So it is somewhat surprising to see in his portrait of George W Bush a relatively sunny and sympathetic picture of perhaps the most reviled president in American history.... He is, Stone said, 'impatient, narrow-minded... a bully,' but also 'magnetic... a good father, good husband and good friend.'"

Also in Newsweek: "W. seems content to skim the surface of conventional wisdom," writes David Ansen. "You wish it could have explored the connection between Bush's alcoholism and his born-again Christianity with some depth or curiosity: what addicts and born-agains share is a terror of ambiguity, an absolute need for a belief system that removes all doubt. W. treats Bush's conversion with respect, but offers little illumination of this soulaltering turn in the road. W. might have had some impact had it been made four years ago. But it's both too late and too early for a movie about our sitting president. Its 'outrageousness' feels complacent. Controversial? Daring? In the fall of 2008, it seems neither."

Update, 10/13: John Homans profiles Stone for New York: "There's autobiography just below the surface in all of his movies. It's a species of boundless baby-boom narcissism - he has remade his private damage into what he put forth as the American story."

Update, 10/14: "W. isn't tragedy or farce; it's illustrated journalism, based mostly on extant Bush biographies and memoirs of early Bush appointees," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "All the incidents are there but not the insight. What's missing is the one thing Stone films have never lacked: a point of view."

Posted by dwhudson at October 7, 2008 5:16 AM