"W." had me laughing, giggling even, with glee. I have been looking forward to watching this for a long, long time. And it was every bit as exciting to watch as I anticipated! It had me rewinding key scenes and watching them once or twice over. I loved the rhythm of the film, the way you step right into the action and right into the heart of the debate (about troop levels, for instance -- I immediately rewound to watch again: How was this information presented? What assumptions were made?). I loved the acting - the portrayals of all the people surrounding W. were very persuasive, not to mention
Josh Brolin himself. But Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Thandie Newton as Condi Rice were
amazing, too.
I say it had me laughing. Why? Because it was so much fun -- to step inside W's world. To follow him as he moves from being a perfectly normal person, confused and lost, trying to find his way, all the way to the War Room. To feel his pressures with him. To begin to understand why he changed, what forces moved him.
You know what's going to happen but you don't really know how it was
for him. This movie gives you a chance to pretend you do. You see him running drills with Karl Rove, prepping his talking points on the campaign trail for the Texas governorship, and you see how he transformed himself from a fun-loving boy into a driven politician. Slapping those answers down like cards on the table. And he always had a gambler's "I go with my gut," attitude, didn't he? Brolin really makes me believe that. That feels like the President I knew. Perhaps he overdoes some of it, turns characterization to caricature in a few places, like the way he eats. Was Bush really always smacking like that, talking with his mouth full, licking his fingers? I don't know. There are moments Brolin does it and it seems over the top (like when W's meeting Laura for the first time, and you wonder why she'd be attracted to a guy grinning with sandwich in his mouth). There are other moments Brolin does it -- like right in the middle of Cheney's push for new "psychological" interrogations, where Cheney mentions off-handedly that these methods would also be used on U.S. citizens who aid or abet terrorists and W. says yup, that does "makes sense" (lick, slurp) but you've got to sell it to those "latte-sipping liberals" -- in that moment, it feels like it might be true.
Most of the time, throughout the movie, I liked W. and I liked especially the portrayal of him surrounded by all these people whose groupthink motored the decision-making process. You can see the motor running. I liked the interpretation that W. was not stupid, nor ill-meaning, but that he was in fact more of a feeling than a thinking person, that he reacted to situations based on his relationships with people and his instincts about them. His admiration for Cheney is clear. I liked all of this because it helps to make sense of what happened; it gives us an opportunity to try to understand why we went to war with Iraq -- how the administration crawled toward that decision, inch by inch. And where the influence was.
I liked the movie a lot and I'm probably going to watch it a second time, later this weekend, before I send it back to Netflix.
The only problem was the ending. Unfortunately, Oliver Stone decided in the last few minutes of the movie to abandon his highly-skilled portraiture in order to confess an ideological judgment. There are three issues I take with the ending scene: First, though it's clear that W. lost sight of the ball, and the metaphor was apt, it feels disrespectful. And, after everything we've been through with W, to see him so confused again in the last few seconds doesn't even feel
accurate. Finally it leaves us with another question: Why did he lose sight of the ball? Why?
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