New Stone film takes on Bush

George W Bush is still president. In these troubled times, when executive decisions are needed every moment, what Bush thinks and does really matters. He is super-relevant - right now.

Yet long before Obama's victory, owing to a bipartisan mix of boredom, embarrassment, rage and an urgent need to get on with the next epoch, Bush became an utter un-person, an un-president. He is the year-before-yesteryear's man.

Oliver Stone could make a movie about Warren G Harding or James J Polk and it would feel more up to date than a whole film about poor old Dubya.

As a portrait of an American president, it is very different from Oliver Stone's earlier films, JFK or Nixon. It is measured, mature, presidential almost. This is a film without an attitude - without an overt one, anyway.

W is admittedly better than Stone's reactionary and treacly 9/11 movie World Trade Center, and it has an intelligent, interestingly restrained performance from Josh Brolin, who avoids making the man himself look like a dope, and also gives some idea of how profoundly lonely he must be.

But, in so firmly repudiating comedy and satire, Brolin also removes most of the dramatic fizz. Texas and southern politicians are, or should be, larger than life, hilarious figures, swaggering instead of walking, in Bush's own famous words.

They can be like Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson or Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett. But Stone and Brolin always stay very respectful, and the film itself carries its self-imposed sense of heavy responsibility as carefully as a tightrope walker carries his beam.

The film is determined to tell you only what you know already. Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser never dig deep.

W begins with the lead-up to the Iraq invasion: Bush is shown chairing a war cabinet, including Dick Cheney, played by a splendidly arrogant and ferocious Richard Dreyfuss, Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) and a frankly odd-looking and mostly silent Condoleezza Rice - played by Thandie Newton, who for this thankless role looks as if she spent longer in makeup than John Hurt did for The Elephant Man.

During her first few scenes, Rice sports a weird, mute grimace of unease, lip contorted to the side. Ioan Gruffudd has a tiny cameo as the British prime minister: five parts Blair to one part Prince William.

The long slide towards hostility is interspersed with flashbacks from Dubya's own early life. First, there is the young buck, humiliated in a boisterous frathouse initiation at Yale, high jinks that Bush later ponderingly compares to what he understands are "stress position" interrogation techniques at Guantanamo.

The young Yalie impresses his fellow students by remembering all their names and nicknames - the one demonstration of intellectual firepower the movie permits him.

Later, Bush is shown failing to hold down any summer jobs at all, and getting bailed out of all sorts of scrapes by his daddy, George H W Bush, played with withering disapproval by James Cromwell. At a backyard cook-out, Dubya meets his future bride, Laura (Elizabeth Banks), an apolitical librarian.

She is touched by Dubya's attempt to impress her by announcing that he is actually reading a book: Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative.

A drunk Dubya challenges his dad to an absurd punch-up; later he finds God, quits the booze (no AA though) and gets a governorship, having sworn never to be out-Texaned or out-Christianed after an early, bruising failure.

He advises his father on the triumphant 88 election: perennially driven by a conflicted, almost Oedipal need to earn his dad's respect by helping him, but also by vanquishing him.

There are some very coy omissions. Stone mystifyingly declines to show the moment of Bush's sensational "recount" victory in 2000, though it's mentioned during a perfunctory dream sequence in which Bush Sr tauntingly sits in Dubya's Oval Office chair. And, Stone tactfully misses out Katrina, and 9/11.

That legendary moment when Dubya got the awful news whispered into his ear while listening to a children's book being read aloud (an unimprovable image of America losing its innocence) and then the reputed panic and going to ground - it's as if it never happened.

Presumably, this wouldn't fit in the sensible, grown-up and frankly timid film Stone wanted to make.

This movie is one big pulled punch. Dubya himself becomes a blank hole of neutrality and balance.

Almost anyone else shown here would have made a more interesting subject for a biopic.

A film about Bush Sr: fretting and raging while his son screwed up the second Iraq war - that would be interesting.

A film solely about Dick Cheney bullying his C-in-C, with Dreyfuss really letting rip - that would be interesting.

Or a film about the delicate Laura Bush, a woman in the eye of an unsought storm - that would be interesting. (It may yet arrive with an adaptation of Curtis Sittenfeld's novel American Wife.)

Any of these would give the film-maker some slant, some angle, some purchase on this story. And make Bush more interesting into the bargain.

In January, comic Will Ferrell is to showcase his Dubya impression on Broadway in a one-man show: You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush.

I have a feeling that's going to be an awful lot more insightful than Oliver Stone's solemn demi-hagiography.