Director: Oliver Stone, 15, 129min

Stars: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss

On general release

In many ways, Stone’s portrait of George W. Bush was doomed even before the first frame was shown. The Bush Administration is too recent and the memory too raw. Anyone who had a flicker of awareness of the news over the past eight years will have a strongly held opinion of just how this story should unfold. Likewise, everybody who watches the film will have an opinion on what the director has done wrong.

So, how to approach a seemingly thankless task? The politically outspoken Stone confounds expectations by leaving the antiBush polemics to the likes of Michael Moore and takes a human, and perhaps an unexpectedly gentle, approach to his subject.

The President, played with commitment, but only a passing physical resemblance, by Brolin is shown as a bumbling habitual loser with crushing issues about his father. He is redeemed by his relationship with a sympathetically portrayed Laura Bush (Banks) but undermined by a mocking score – the rousing Yellow Rose of Texas is used at one point, but the most obviously derisive is the Robin Hood theme, which accompanies the President and his inner circle as they take an incongruous walk on the Bush estate.

You perhaps can’t blame Stone for playing the film and its subject for laughs. With his resting facial expression of vacant gormlessness and verbal contortions under pressure (“He has mis-underestimated me for the last time,” says a grim-faced Bush about Saddam Hussein), the President is easy to dismiss as a figure of fun. It certainly makes the film a very entertaining experience.

Perhaps it’s easier to write the man off as a buffoon who was badly advised by a Machiavellian group of self-interested parties (Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney is chilling) than it is to accept the more complex possibility that Bush was an effective and instinctive career politician who, knowingly or unknowingly, made several massive misjudgments.

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