Josh Brolin plays current U.S. president George W. Bush Oliver Stone's new biopic, W. (Maple Pictures)

W. is Oliver Stone’s grudgingly earth-bound, warm-corpse biopic of the sitting — limping? Dragging? Sagging? — president of the United States. The unholy union of Stone and Bush is actually rooted in some common ground: both are 62 years old, controversial and brushed up against Yale in the ’60s (Stone dropped out; Bush scraped by).

Stone’s counter-cultural skepticism probably makes him a fabulous dinner guest, but it dogs him as a filmmaker. Too often, conviction snowballs into bombast, and films like JFK and Nixon are so mired in obsessive detail — relevant mostly to basement-dwelling polymaths — that Stone loses grasp of the story. When he harnesses that passion, the results can be electric. Platoon (1987) is still a tightly coiled indictment of Vietnam where Stone’s high drama is appropriate, and even his artistic failures are worthwhile testaments to his cojones. So it’s strange that the biggest problem with W. is that it’s so unadorned that it verges on — oh my — dull.

Stanley Weiser’s script is a bare-bones, selective biography — no Sept. 11; no Hurricane Katrina — that chooses Bush’s Snuffleupagus-quest for WMD in Iraq as his reign-defining bumble; it’s the force around which the rest of the movie gravitates. W. proposes that the president arrived at this political disaster via a sour psychological cocktail of built-in arrogance and daddy issues. The elder George Bush, called Poppy and played by James Cromwell, is dismayed by his eldest son’s succession of foul-ups, which include being jailed for drunken cheerleading and getting kicked off a job on an oil rig. (Note to new employees: “Got any beer? I’m hot,” is not a greeting most bosses appreciate.) The patriarch’s hopes for a Bush legacy lay instead with Jeb, the boy so shrouded in sunshine that apparently our eyes could not behold him; George W.’s brother is never shown, but he looms large.

Elizabeth Banks portrays the First Lady, Laura Bush, in W. (Sidney Ray Baldwin/Maple Pictures)

The New York Times reported this weekend that Stone had shot a more far-out cut of the film that involved Bush on a flying carpet over Baghdad, but he caved to some what-the-hell-was-I-thinking? inner voice and axed the whimsy. Instead, Stone sticks to a lot of key biographical moments that even the most rudimentary Bush scholar — or someone with Wikipedia access — will recognize. After a spontaneous early run for the House of Representatives ends in defeat, young Bush is adrift again, accompanied by the bottle. He’s constantly drinking and eating. (Other orifices get less attention, but there’s some suggestion that Bush was a minor-league ladies’ man.) Stone hints, not too convincingly, that a man whose appetites are never satisfied could turn those hungers to war, as if it’s a slippery slope from hamburger to Patriot missile.

Drinking emboldens young Bush, but it also feeds his failure. In the early days of his marriage to Laura (warmly played by Elizabeth Banks), she says nothing about it, but glances at the bottle glued to her husband’s hand like it’s her enemy.

Too little is made of exactly why George sobers up, but he does, and as often happens, with the call of sobriety comes a call from God. Stone handles Bush’s religious conversion with delicacy; his faith comes off as hard-earned, a source of personal rescue that he clumsily attempts to export everywhere he goes. Sitting in the Oval Office, he asks his staff to hold hands and pray, and they condescendingly oblige, tolerating his evangelical Christian beliefs the way grown-ups feed Santa Claus myths to their kids.

Josh Brolin nails Bush’s snowsuit-armed posture and the heh-heh good ol’ boy laugh. But he does something more interesting, too; rather than hit every little twitch exactly — like John Travolta in a more recent exercise in presidential mimesis, Primary Colors — Brolin digs down to find a very human vulnerability. Whether he’s really George Bush or not, Dubya is a plausible character. He’s not stupid exactly, but he’s clueless, and once he steps forward to claim what he presumes is his – namely, his father’s presidential mantle — W. is constantly foiled by his own shortcomings, linguistic and intellectual. Brolin furrows that brow and drops that jaw — more nervous heh-heh — in bewilderment. He’s flummoxed, but not entirely foolish, a guy whose reach far exceeds his grasp.

Yes, Stone gets his digs in — it’s likely no other American president has been depicted whining to his wife about his father while defecating in the White House bedroom. But above all, the film is a strangely sympathetic portrait; there is no monster in Brolin’s performance, but there certainly isn’t anyone who deserves the moniker “president,” either. The disaster is the collision of this man with that office, one W. seems to have stumbled into through a strange confluence of events, much to his own surprise.

A scene from W. In the background are members of George W. Bush's inner circle: from left, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (played by Thandie Newton), Vice-President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove (Toby Jones). (Maple Pictures)

Bush is surrounded by a team just one notch away from a Saturday Night Live parody. The sycophantic, plastic Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton) is only slightly less chilling than Richard Dreyfus’s Dick Cheney, who slips the president a document about “enhanced interrogation procedures” over his cottage cheese plate. (“Only three pages? Great,” says Bush.) But when W. gets a whiff of Cheney’s contempt, he reminds him: “I’m the decider!” This insider stuff is fun at first, then tedious, and ultimately anxiety-producing. Does anyone — dedicated Republican, appalled Democrat or freaked-out Canadian — want to relive the last few years of American politics? Who, at this point in history, wants to pay money to look upon a smug Rummy (Scott Glenn), a teeth-gritting Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) and a badger-like Karl Rove (Toby Jones)? Ain’t it over? The mild pleasures of backstage access quickly turn into a careening, unpleasant kind of déjà vu.

Both right and left will find the film reductive in pinning the Iraq “fiasco” (as Bush Sr. calls it) on Bush Jr.’s Oedipal drive to explode his father’s own claim to history in the region. Then again: who the hell knows? W. is a straight biopic, and it struggles the way most biopics do — by sticking to what we do know, it flags all the things we don’t.

W. calls to mind The Queen, another film in which very recent events were up for reinterpretation. But the latter attempted a kind of poetry in its speculation. In other words, it aspired to be a film, a piece of art, not just a document or historical artifact. While W. is surely filled with factual errors for pundits to pick over, it still feels too much like a History Channel re-enactment. By refusing to invoke his creative licence, Stone ends up with something milquetoast — a brand new criticism for his collection. If this is his contribution to the Democratic campaign, it will only assure Democrats of what they already know, while Republicans will dismiss it as minstrelsy. The rest of us will always wonder about that magic carpet.

W. opens Oct. 17.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.