saw: w.
Insofar as Oliver Stone's W. is as disappointing a film as its namesake is a president, the exercise may be said to sustain some sort of meta exegetic verisimilitude. On its own terms, however, the movie simply doesn't rise to the level of its constituent talents. The screenplay frequently feels like a series of familiar leftist-blog snarking points, and Stone's movie-of-the-week direction and the chintzy production values don't do much to enrich or inform that impression. The supporting cast is an embarrassment of riches: clearly numerous purported "liberal media elite" wanted to take part in this barn-burning; but in the absence of either historical sweep or topical immediacy, the film feels strangely becalmed, stranded in some basic-cable Bermuda Triangle. What little Stone does to enliven the proceedings—portraying Texans through a haze of gluttony that recalls the final line of George Orwell's Animal Farm—just feels lazy and passive aggressive. Only Thandie Newton's monster-in-the-closet creepshow portrayal of Condoleezza Rice—suggesting she wandered in from a Michael Jackson video directed by Tim Burton, and rendering Jennifer Jason Leigh's Kate Hepburn riff in The Hudsucker Proxy a lithium stupor by comparison—aspires to a level of oddball hatchetry that, failing authenticity, sustains amusement. You almost wish she and Dubya could have starred in their own hyper-hypo office-stalker rom-com, away from the dour demands of pseudo-factual rectitude. Grade: C-