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"W."

Rating:

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

October 17, 2008

Oliver Stone doesn't do comedy, intentionally. But perhaps he should: The half-baked, hayseed "Hamlet" he's created in " W." -- his very speculative biopic about our current president -- feels alive only when it ventures into the comically absurd.

Despite Josh Brolin's genius and the fully realized portrayal he gives this character called George W. Bush, the movie operates at a paradoxical, dramatic disadvantage: It spends more than two hours trying to interest us in the fact that its subject isn't interesting. It could have been a public service announcement.

The Stanley Weiser screenplay fails by attempting too much -- it begins just after 9/11, lurches back to Yale, Skulls and Bones, a pregnant, paid-off girlfriend; a night in jail, a growing attraction to alcohol and resistance to steady employment, all shadowed by a lifelong tension between W. and his father. ( James Cromwell, masterfully, imbues the elder Bush with affection/ revulsion.)

With his father an emotional ghost, W. is a lost soul -- literally at times, when he actually looks around and wonders where he is.

The Bush cabinet is an interesting lot, but the effect, unavoidably, perhaps, is like a " Saturday Night Live" skit rather than solid drama: Richard Dreyfuss plays Dick Cheney as quasi-Quasimodo; Jeffrey Wright is a froggy, too-sympathetic Colin Powell, and Thandie Newton's Condi Rice is a combo of Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" and an unoiled amusement park ride. It's one weird performance.

The history is suspect, of course -- Dubya, rather than Lee Atwater, is credited with Willie Horton, for instance -- but the problems lie in the movie's DNA: Stone wants Bush to be both village idiot and evil mastermind. He can't have it both ways.

PLOT The amazing, almost true adventures of George W. Bush, as refracted through the warped prism of director Oliver Stone.

CAST Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, Thandie Newton

LENGTH 2:09

PLAYING AT Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE Feels longer than the Bush administration.

STAR BUCKS

Stone rolls at the box office

Director Oliver Stone may or may not hit box-office pay dirt with his controversial "W." Here's a look at Stone's five highest-grossing films to date. (Perhaps it's instructive to note that his 1995 presidential biopic, "Nixon," grossed about $13 million.)

Platoon (1986) - $138,530,565

Any Given Sunday (1999) - $75,530,832

JFK (1991) - $70,405,498

World Trade Center (2006) - $70,278,893

Born on the Fourth of July (1989) - $70,001,698

SOURCE: Boxofficemojo.com