W.

Everything about the new film W, from its compact, guerrilla-style production schedule earlier this year to its mid-October release, right before the election, suggests that director Oliver Stone wants his film to serve as the epitaph of the Bush administration. Instead, it plays like a highlight reel of live-action political blog posts from the 2002-2004. We get all of George W. Bush's youthful fecklessness, his wacky malapropisms, a decent thumbnail sketch of the run up to the Iraq war, and some dime store psychoanalysis, but nothing that a politically aware person hasn't heard or read about hundreds of times by this late date.

W is Stone's most restrained film in many years, both visually and thematically. There are no randomly inserted mystical Native Americans, for one thing. Also absent are the overexposures, jump cuts and assorted gimmicks that comprise Stone's cinematic bag of tricks. The only time the old, wild Oliver Stone makes his presence known is in a sequence depicting W's conversion to evangelical Christianity. There are a lot of close-ups of blue-eyed Jesus and Bush's pastor, Earl Hund (Stacey Keach) praying fervently. Even this scene is devoid of the queasy, hallucinatory intensity of Stone at his most inspired. It's too bad, because without Stone's vivid personal stamp, W is a beige, by-the-numbers biopic content to touch on the highlights (and lowlights) of Bush's life while failing to offer any real insight. That born again conversion, which had such a tremendous effect on Bush's life and fate, carries no weight and makes no imprint on the rest of the film. It's just one more incident of import to be checked off the list before moving on.

Stone's interpretation of George Bush is as conventional as the presentation. Bush starts out as a charming, aimless hellraiser, crushed by the expectations and disappointments of his powerful father. After years of drinking and business failure, he is rescued, first by the love of Laura Walsh (Elizabeth Banks) and then by the love of Jesus Christ. Fueled by unresolved daddy issues, Christian fervor and his own innate charisma (with a little help from political operative Karl Rove, played with smarm to burn by Toby Jones), he takes the Texas state house, and then the White House. There, in the aftermath of 9/11, his subconscious need to one-up his father is yoked to the imperial fantasies of his Vice President (Richard Dreyfus, in the role he has aged to play) to launch a reckless invasion of Iraq. Along the way the audience is treated to a greatest hits collection of Bushisms, from "is our children learning" to the near-fatal encounter with the pretzel to the immortal "fool me once..." The combined effect is one of empathy cut with gentle mockery. Stone seems to be saying: Bush might not be bright, but he means well.

After two hours, that's not much to hang a movie, or an analysis of an eight year presidency, on. Still, there are more mundane pleasures to be had while watching W. Josh Brolin is funny and relatively subtle; he avoids caricature while still channeling Bush's most indelible mannerisms. Some of the behind-the-scenes machinations of Bush's war cabinet make riveting, horrifying viewing even if the overall sense is of drastic abridgement of crucial details by Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser.

The question that lingers after watching W is: since none of this is news to any person who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to politics for the past eight years, and it's hard to imagine why someone who hasn't paid attention to politics would watch a movie about George W. Bush, what exactly is the purpose of this movie? It may well be that making this movie is catharsis for Stone and company, a chance to cleanse the artistic palette of George Bush and all his attendant pathos and absurdity: a cinematic washing of hands before the dawning of a new political era. Whatever the motivation of the filmmakers, and whatever one thinks about Bush's legacy, his impact on the country and the world deserve a more thoughtful epitaph than this movie.