Now there’s absolutely no question that Josh Brolin is brilliant as Bush. It’s clear he’s put the work in to get the mannerisms and recognisable attributes of the President down to a T. The only real distinguishable difference is that Brolin is much better looking than Bush is, but it’s forgivable when everything else is as spot on. Brolin will likely get an Oscar nomination for his performance here and I can say with confidence that it’s warranted. Unfortunately apart from Brolin (and, perhaps, you could stretch to Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush) everyone else portraying a real life person comes off as impersonation rather than embodiment. Brolin is Bush here, whereas people like Jeffrey Wright (as Colin Powell), Toby Jones (as Karl Rove), Richard Dreyfuss (as Vice President Dick Cheney), and especially Thandie Newton (as Condoleezza Rice) just come off as if they’re impersonating these people rather than being them. As far as I’m concerned this was a crucial area for W. to get right, and perhaps in retrospect there’s nothing that could have been done to avoid this.
Where W.’s strengths lie is in the sections depicting Bush’s younger years, effectively when the politics is seldom seen or mentioned, and when we delve into the fact that he was once a heavy drinker and see the pressure on him from his father, to name but a couple of aspects. Thanks to Brolin’s convincing portrayal of the man, it’s easy to believe what is shown here as the truth (it may not be, but on the film’s merit alone it’s at least believable).
Where it falters greatly is when it delves into the political side of the story; although perhaps necessary to tell, that doesn’t stop it from being far too in-depth and undoubtedly inaccurate in places. You can take liberties with facts about the life of the man, to make it more cinematic and such, but where you can’t is with pure facts, especially if you’re presenting them as truth. It happened to some extent with Stone’s JFK and it's very much present here; if someone sat down to watch W. without having a single clue about what has actually gone on they would take this stuff as truth when it probably isn’t, at least not entirely. The film is dragged to an almost complete halt when politics are being discussed in-depth (a scene where Bush and his advisors are discussing the control of oil in the Middle East particularly springs to mind). People will go to see W. too see the man, not the politics, and unfortunately we get force fed the latter far too much.
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