Perhaps it was too soon to make this well cast movie about that president of the United States who made Mrs Malaprop seem like she had the greatest command of the English language in her ludicrous misuse of language. The insights are thin and suggest a lot of guessing along the lines of Freudian psychoanalysis was going on rather than anyone telling the screenwriters what really happened behind the closed doors of the Beltway.
The non chronological editing format makes emotional involvement problematic despite the story's clear attempt to make the story of a man living in his father's shadow empathetic. He fails to find a way to stand on his own two feet through his own unaided achievements and thus almost becomes a Shakespearean tragic hero brought down by his own character flaws. However, director Oliver Stone is not Shakespeare and cannot really bring this off. All he has is the tail wagging the dog so common to politicians of a man who wanted to be a war president but could not find or invent a worthwhile war.
Despite easily being the worst US president of them all, you do however manage to feel some sorrow for him because of the clever playing of Josh Brolin who manages to inject some three-dimensionality into the otherwise somewhat flaccid screenplay. He paints a picture of a lost soul hiding this behind his alleged born again Christianity. While Stone, himself, is content for his movie to be nothing more than an earnest critique of Pyrrhic nature of current US foreign policy. The two are not quite working on the same team, dramatically.
The casting is good and Richard Dreyfuss and Thandie Newton, in particular, are clearly having a lot of fun impersonation Richard Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, respectively.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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