W.: C+

It's not that I don't think a movie about the life and times of George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush and our 43rd President, doesn't need to be made—and that one made well, and I mean extremely well: full of perception and curiosity or satire and viciousness, wouldn't on its own merits be some sort of cinematic event (coming as it would not minutes after the shadow of the man had begun to fade) both for skill in structuring and for purporting some sincerity or force of emotion about our current Commander-in-Chief. But W. is not that film; and as much as director Oliver Stone wants us to believe that he is both a curious pragmatist and an outraged satirist, he comes across—really—as neither. Instead he directs this semi-biographical, semi-comedic, semi-tragic film as if from a place I thought Stone didn't even know existed: restraint.

Things start out fine, though, as the director and his writer Stanley Weiser seem to have chosen a certain path from the very beginning: black comedy. We open on a trademark Stoneian symbol of the President standing in an empty ball field (remember now: he used to own The Rangers), arms wide open—embracing the empty stands full of imaginary hoots and complimentary applause. It's a joke, a pot-shot, a jeer at both the lunacy and megalomania of the world's most infamous cowboy. And it works for what it is: the viciousness of the delivery making up for the hollowness of the attack itself. And so then does that tone carry over, through the ensuing scenes as the audience gets a feel for Weiser's structure—how he loops the present Pre-Iraq/Post-9/11 to the past, before "Jr." became "Dubya." Stone's camera darts back and forth, in hazy pointed jags, through the Oval Office and then back to a Yale fraternity hazing, and then back again, already building for the viewer a foundation from which to mock George Bush's (Josh Brolin) every move.

And then it shifts. The angry sarcasm that pools at the feet of those early few scenes dries up quick as the tone morphs from activist comedy to biography. Less and less do we see of those more recent unstable times, and more and more do we see the son as he tangos with his father (James Cromwell) over those post-college days when the alcoholic young man can't seem to find a job—or even keep down a stable way of life. Sounds a bit clichéd, right? It is, and the device is nearly as trite: used to upend the previous platform from bared teeth into open minds—bleh.

But the transition isn't terrible, and that's not the point. Using the rails of Weiser's articulate, cleanly elegant scenes of dialogue as a jumping off point for his more abstract symbolism, the director finds himself unnecessarily entranced with the background of the man he seems only to want to rake over the coals. And that's a big mistake, since as he is pulled in two directions, so is his audience. It doesn't help that the film is overlong at roughly two hours, and that the perfectly adequate presence of a biographer's eye becomes unwelcome as it begins to cloud over with Stone's overreaching. (Did we really need Thandie Newton doing a terrible, terrible, Condie Rice?) There's a big plus in most of his casting—Brolin is an exemplary Bush Jr., shooting past imitation into an ctual, characteristically fascinating, performance—but a big minus in the film itself. Shot, edited, and marketed in just under nine months, W. is exactly the kind of film we don't really need, from exactly the kind of filmmaker we do. He bottles a sizzling subject, and douses him all with water, leaving us to choke on the illusion of smoke and wet ash.