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Stone Throws Curveball With 'W.'

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By CHRISTY LEMIRE

The Associated Press

Published: October 16, 2008

Updated:

All he wanted to do was watch baseball and drink beer all day. Sounds like a reasonable request.

Instead, George W. Bush ended up being chosen as leader of the free world. Twice.

That's Oliver Stone's surprisingly fair and balanced assessment of the president, who truly needs no further parodying, in "W." Bush is an easy target anyway, and he inadvertently supplies enough ammunition on his own without anyone else's help.

From the earliest announcements about the film, it seemed inevitable what we'd be in for: an evisceration. No other perspective could be possible from Stone, who previously dug up the White House dirt with the conspiracy-laden "JFK" and the campy and paranoid "Nixon." And he's rushing it into theaters so it arrives before Americans go to the polls.

Instead, Stone has come up with a rather conventional biopic, albeit one about a person whose decisions have affected the entire planet for the past eight years. Considering its potential shock value, "W." hits all the expected notes. It could be "Walk the Line"; it could be "Ray."

We see young Dubya as a drunk fraternity pledge at Yale University, where he foreshadows his legendary method of handing out nicknames during a hazing ritual; as a swaggering party boy meeting Laura Welch, the woman who would become his wife and his rock, at a backyard barbecue; and as a reluctant worker in the West Texas oil fields, where he asks in twangy Spanish before noon, "Donde esta la cerveza?" - "Where is the beer?"

He runs for Congress and loses, runs for Texas governor and wins, loses the booze and finds the Lord. He buys the Texas Rangers, and baseball-as-metaphor serves as a leaping-off point for the few flights of fancy Stone takes in this otherwise straightforward film. All well-documented stuff. (And among Bush's greatest hits, we get treated to flubs including, "Is our children learning?" "misunderestimated" and his famous botching of the phrase "fool me once, shame on you.")

Stone, working from a script by Stanley Weiser, doesn't provide much new insight on the 43rd president of the United States and often tries to explain away Bush's foibles and flaws with pop-psychology regarding his "daddy issues." In the most fundamental terms, Stone says that Bush waged war in Iraq to please his father, a cold, patrician man who paid attention to his son, whom he so derisively referred to as "Junior," only when politics were involved. Bush, in turn, still eagerly addresses his father as "Poppy" well into adulthood - and such details infuse "W." with steady, satirical laughs throughout.

As Bush himself, Josh Brolin certainly gets the innate humor within the frequent buffoonery - and he's got the voice and the demeanor down pat - but he also seems to recognize the tragedy of this figure, a man who was in way over his head for one of the world's most complicated jobs.

MOVIE REVIEW

W. **½

MOVIE BOARD RATING: PG-13; profanity including sexual references, some alcohol abuse, smoking and brief disturbing war images

STARS: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss and James Cromwell

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone

LOCATION: See movie times, Page XX, for local showtimes.

PLOT SUMMARY: Biopic of the man who is our president.

RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes

ON THE WEB: www.wthefilm.com

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