W.

Did you know the President ran for office because he had a calling from God Himself?

Tonight we attended the Washington premiere of W., Oliver Stone's new movie (opening nationwide this coming weekend) about George Walker Bush. It was a full theater, including half a dozen rows of press. The audience was surprisingly supportive of the President, and when the movie tried to portray the President's malapropisms in a negative light, the only titters of laughter I heard came from the press section.

The movie weaves scenes of the Bush presidency with the history of his life since his Yale undergraduate days, with a repeated dream motif of Bush in the outfield of an empty baseball park. While some are calling the film a biography, I'm going to have to call it semi-biographical.

Certainly there are a lot of statements and materials about the President's past, plus public accounts and news footage of him over the past twenty years, so there is history available. The problem was, many things were used completely out of context, and the conversations and positions of high level governmental officials in private White House meetings are purely conjecture and highly speculative.

Josh Brolin, as the President, put in a surprisingly strong performance. He had down a lot of the President's mannerisms and way of talking, though he did, I think, from time to time, cross the line a bit into caricaturism. On the other hand, Richard Dreyfuss's performance as Vice President Cheney was chilling. Certainly, Dreyfuss will be up for a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for this movie.

Scott Glenn did a fine job as a particularly smarmy and obnoxious Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Toby Jones was effective as Karl Rove. Elizabeth Banks sympathetically did a great job as Laura Bush, and James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn portrayed the elder Bush couple.

I did have problems with the casting for then-National Security Adviser now Secretary of State Condolezza Rice. Thandie Newton did the job, but she didn't capture anything of Rice at all except the hairdo, and I felt almost offended at some of her portrayal. While not as bad, Jeffrey Wright was okay, but I don't think he had the strength or the command presence of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The movie offers two basic themes for George Bush's life.

First, they overemphasized the presumed tension between father and son and GWB's constant quest for paternal approval from GHWB. They went so far that GHWB, long known to be a gentleman and statesman, came across as a bully and a jerk. Of course, this led to one of my favorite lines in the movie (one you've probably seen in the trailers), where GHWB is dressing down his son and his party boy behavior and says, "Who do you think you are...a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one."

The second theme is the President's evangelical Christianity and how it seeps into every aspect of his life. They protray him closing every staff meeting with prayer, something I'd not previously heard reported by departed staffers in their memoirs. They also have a scene where he announces to his long-time pastor that he has heard a call from God to run for president, because something is going to happen and the country is going to need him.

Naturally, the movie spent a lot of time dealing with the Iraq war, and they got pretty judgmental about it being prosecuted solely for the preservation of the oil reserves in the Middle East. Again, the writers were speculating. There's no doubt in my mind now, though, that Oliver Stone must be against the Iraq war.

And thus was the movie. It's rather longer than I expected, coming in at about two hours and ten minutes. Would I go see it again? Not if I had to buy a ticket. Should you see it? Maybe. If you're in Washington, you're a political science or government student, or you're involved in party politics (of either flavor), you should see it, simply because it's going to be discussed in the next few weeks, as well as the implications it casts about the war. For others, you should see it eventually, but you can probably wait for the DVD to come out.

Speaking of coming out, on my way out of the theater, I was stopped by reporters from Swiss Television wanting to interview me about my impressions. I declined, though, so you don't have to stay up late tonight watching Swiss TV to see me.