I’ve been eagerly awaiting Oliver Stone’s new film W. for several months now.  I must admit when I saw the first teaser trailer I thought it was going to be a roast-fest at the expense of a president I am less than fond of.  So, somewhat deviously, I was looking forward to the chance to see Bush exposed and raked over the coals.  There’s a ton of material I thought would do the job quite well – the rush to invade Iraq, the Patriot act, Guantanamo bay, presidential “signing statements,” invoking God to bless invading Iraq, pushing Powell out of the administration, faking evidence for WMDs, the Plame scandal, Katrina, etc.  And while W. at least acknowledges most of these instances of governing incompetence or arrogance the film is less about these details and more about the journey of George W. Bush.

And I found the character of Bush to be incredibly compelling.  This is a story of an underdog, a guy with a booming personality, an underachiever trying to find his place in his own family… and in the world.  Bush’s family name gets him out of the kind of trouble that would ruin many people, and the result is a man-boy who has a hard time taking responsibility for his actions and who lives in the shadow of his cold father.  There is so much that this president has done that absolutely makes my blood boil… and during the entire film I couldn’t help but root for him.  He has screwed up so many things in his life (and the film doesn’t shy away from his rocky past) that I found myself hoping that he’d pull it together, that he would find his place in the world, that he could kick his drinking habit, that he would become a successful politician… that he would become better than his father.  This is a man about which I can count areas of overlapping ideology on one hand (I think he has done a great job in funding AIDS prevention & treatment in Africa)… and yet I just wanted him to win.

With the exception of Richard Dreyfuss‘ Cheney and Jeffrey Wright’s Colin Powell the cabinet members are were a bit two-dimensional and at times bordered on SNL spoofs.  Thandie Newton was transformed into a spitting image of Condoleezza Rice but her performance seemed like it was better suited for comedy than a serious film.  But we can forgive Stone & Co. for not mining the depths of all the cabinet members characters, because after all this is a film about dubya.  The cabinet members really are orbiting the central personality and taking the time to develop them as characters would have been really tedious.  Casting Josh Brolin in the lead role of Bush was a stroke of genius.  Brolin rose above the SNL spoofishness that some of the other characters seemed stuck in.  His portrayal of Bush was brash, insecure, but above all really compelling.

Brolin’s performance helps remind us why even if the guy doesn’t make a good president, he’s still very likable.  For all the calculating, macheovelian policy of characters like Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld they lacked the “heart” and people skills of someone like Bush.  For his part, he seemed less invested in the overall big picture of the technocratic policy elements and trusted his neo-conservative cabinet members to do the thinking for him – just so long as everyone acknowledged that in the end he was the decider.  Then he would help “translate” their macheovelian politics into words that “real Americans” could grab onto.

So if you’re looking for a roast of Bush, you may leave feeling like you got to know the guy’s story and that despite his politics you can connect to his character on a human level.  It’s probably a good reminder, especially for a Christian like me, that every person is bigger than their faults and everyone’s story is more complex than what simply meets the eye.