A few quick thoughts on Oliver Stone’s new W:

I went into the theater prepared to like this film, hoping for some of the same cracked genius that made Nixon such a great piece of work. Unfortunately, W. is dreadful: badly written, poorly acted, boring, with a sense of drama that’s as lost as last year’s Easter eggs.

No Country for Old Men is one of my favorite American movies of the past several years, and Josh Brolin was first-rate in it. Oliver Stone would have been better off casting Will Ferrell, though, since Brolin’s performance as the president feels like an impersonation of an impersonation. Truly awful. For comparison, Anthony Hopkins didn’t look or, really, sound much like Richard Nixon, but his performance didn’t have the quality of a Rich Little impersonation, either — his character transcended the limitations of playing a man whose career is part of fresh, living memory. Brolin fails to achieve that. One fully expects Tina Fey to pop out of a closet or the actor playing Rumsfeld to shout, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

Much of the George W. Bush story is tied up in language, in his use of words, the timbre of his voice, his accent, and his oddball malapropisms. But nobody in this movie sounds right. I’ve rarely heard a convincing West Texas accent in a movie (not that you get the chance very often to judge) but the actors in W mostly fall into the trap of going Deep South, sounding like they’re from Georgia or Kentucky. Elizabeth Banks couldn’t sound less like Laura Bush; she sounds like Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke. And if the real George H.W. Bush had one tenth the fierce charisma of James Cromwell, he’d not only have been re-elected, he’d still be president. Everybody else is in a farce; James Cromwell is in Julius Caesar. Toby Jones cannot be taken seriously as Karl Rove (where’s Phillip Seymour Hoffman when you need him?).

The local color is pretty pale, too. Little things jump out: Rep. George Mahon’s name gets mispronounced /mah-HONE/ as though he were some Irish-American mob boss missing the last syllable of his surname, instead of /MAY-hon/. Kent Hance, the Democrat (later a Republican) who gave George W. Bush his only electoral loss, is portrayed as a Jeebus-invoking fundamentalist hick; the real Kent Hance is a slick business lawyer and university chancellor. There are way more cowboy hats in evidence in this movie, about 50 times more, than one would see in the real 19th Congressional District of Texas — or in a western-wear store, for that matter. Stone touches on the fact that W. sees himself as more of a Reagan than as his father’s political son, but he never even mentions the issue that probably cost W. his congressional election, that of taking a principled Reaganite stance critical of farm subsidies. In the movie, W. complains that he got out-Christianed and out-Texaned, and there’s something to that, but he also got out-farmered. It could be ignornance or politics, but that fact remains invisible. (And it’s still an unfortunate fact of life; the present representative of the 19th, Randy Naugebauer, is a 99-percent conservative who is slightly to the left of Karl Marx on farm subsidies.)

Missing the psychedelic charge of Nixon, W. feels like a not-especially-convincing docudrama interrupted by overextended Saturday Night Live skits. (Is “overextended” redundant in that usage? Probably) The characters aren’t real enough to carry the historical weight of the story or unreal enough to be pure entertainment.

Never mind for now the tententious politics of the movie, and we can certainly set aside the question of historical accuracy, this being an Oliver Stone production. The biggest mistake the film makes is the mistake that Bush’s critics have always made: It condescends to its subject. Whatever else he is, Bush is not some frat-boy simpleton who just Forrest Gumped his way into the White House. There’s more to Condoleezza Rice than nasal scorn. Dick Cheney is a lot of things, but he’s not the Dr. Strangelove that Richard Dreyfuss gives us here. It’s tempting to condescend, because to the condescender it feels as though he elevates himself, even though he doesn’t, and it’s a handy substitute for argument when he doesn’t have one. Scorning high-and-mighty officeholders is a great republican virtue, of course, but the project to reduce Bush and his colleagues to a coterie of imbeciles — a “league of morons” to quote another disappointing film — is an intellectually dishonest exercise. And it shows in this film, which leaves one with the impression that Stone believes that there is something deeply wrong with the Bush administration but isn’t quite able to understand it. Understanding it would mean taking account of the complexities that have shaped American politics in the past decade, which would also mean letting go of some of liberals’ cherished myths, especially the myth of Bush as oedipally driven naif surrounded by oil-mad Svengalis.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This item has been amended since its first posting.]