Bushed.(FILM)(W.)(Movie review)

WHO would have thought that the Bush era, of all seasons, would take the edge off Oliver Stone? The post-9/11 period has made radicals out of many people far more moderate than Stone, and madmen out of many people far more levelheaded. Yet the director who made his name by disturbing more cool-headed eras with paranoid, phantasmagoric agitprop--movies that grabbed Reagan- and Clintonera America by the lapels and bellowed, "Don't you see what's going on, you fools?"--has turned oddly, well, tentative of late. For many of his left-wing coreligionists, the last eight years have felt like a period whipped up from Stone's usual ingredients--a dash of JFK, a dollop of Nixon, a helping of Platoon. But Stone himself has seemed unsure of how to handle it.

Thus in 2003, while the country was consumed by the debate over the Iraq War, Stone released Comandante, an admiring portrait of Fidel Castro whose politics were as appalling as you might expect, but whose contemporary relevance was next to nonexistent. The following year, while Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was pressing the Left's conspiracy-theory buttons, Stone was out promoting the flabby, confused epic Alexander, whose attempts to say something profound about West and East, conquest and occupation, came out muddled and diffuse, overshadowed by Angelina Jolie's Transylvanian accent and Colin Farrell's beach-bum hair. Then in 2006, as Hollywood's paranoid stylings began to crest, Stone tackled 9/11 itself--but he did so in the most un-Stone-like way imaginable, playing it straight in World Trade Center, a rescue drama that was moving enough but felt like the work of a competent movie-of-the-week director, not a political provocateur.

Now comes W., a biopic of our current president, starring Josh Brolin as George W. Bush. The Stone of old would have kicked the film off with a young Bush snorting coke off a stripper's rump, and spent the next two hours piecing together a jigsaw puzzle in which Valerie Plame (surely Sharon Stone would be available) gets outed for knowing too much about Halliburton's war crimes, and Ahmed Chalabi (Tommy Lee Jones, perhaps, buried under prosthetics) does double-agent work for Iran while masterminding the Abu Ghraib abuses in his spare time. The post-9/11 Stone, though, doesn't quite know what he wants to say about George W. Bush, and out of that uncertainty America's most controversial director has produced a movie about one of America's most polarizing presidents that feels tepid, pointless, and tame.

W. is really three films twined together. The first is a family drama, a celluloid version of Jacob Weisberg's recent psychobiography The Bush Tragedy. It's the tale of how George H. W. Bush (James Cromwell) didn't love his wastrel son enough, and how the Iraq War was the price America paid for the 41st president's distant, demanding parenting of the 43rd. This movie asks us to sympathize with its protagonist--all he wanted was to show his father that he was just as good as Jeb!--even as we deplore the consequences of his presidency.

But Stone's attempts to craft a sub-Shakespearean tragedy out of the Bush dynasty's travails are undercut by the demands of the second movie that he's making, which is a paint-by-numbers exercise in Bush-bashing--a kind of greatesthits compilation that seems intended to ...