W and Nixon, Stone's presidents compete in theaters and on DVD

I caught W., Oliver Stone's The Bush Years bio-pic last night. As homework, I watched the newer, longer (3:30 or so) Stone "Election Year" DVD of Nixon last weekend.

And I have to say, despite W.'s shorter length (and thinner, shallower, less complex subject), Stone still has it. He may not have been able to make this film with the unlimited resources of Warner Brothers (Lionsgate is distributing it). But the man is still able to attract the very best talent out there and still able to put a historical subject on the couch for a little cinema analysis better than anybody in the movies.

Stone landed the red-hot Josh Brolin (brilliant) as his title character, the just-as-hot Elizabeth Banks as Laura (she's perfect, too). There isn't a misstep in this cast--Ellen Burstyn as Iron in Pearls as Barbara Bush, James Cromwell even matching Bush Sr.'s patrician whine, Richard Dreyfuss suggesting a darker Dick Cheney than he plays (but Stone doesn't question his or Bush's motives), Jeffrey Wright giving us a Colin Powell who isn't the over-loyal pushover he's been in the press, Bruce McGill a terrific George Tenet of the CIA, and Thandie Newton as the very picture of Condi Rice, a "yes" man in a skirt, her pinched voice and flinching expression every time somebody tells her she's the one who let 9/11 happen recognizable to anyone who watches the news.

September 11 isn't in the movie, robbing it of possible emotion punch. But Bush's long, wandering years are just as vivid as Nixon's formative scars, the childhood, in both cases, forming the adult man who became leader of the Free World. Drinking, honky-tonking, lazily drifting through jobs, rich and powerful daddy bailing him out, the guilt, the trying to impress daddy by finishing daddy's war, it's all here, whether you buy into it or not.

I don't think conservatives and Bush die-hards will go to this, but there isn't much here that should make them flinch. Stone plays it so straight that it won't be easy for Bush haters to embrace, either. Nixon and W., like all Stone histories, take liberties with facts to reach for larger truths (in Stone's mind). Nixon is history and psychology, writ large. W. is just as psychological. But the history is like what we say that newspapers produce -- history's first draft.

Toby Jones is one of the most gifted mimics in the cast. The onetime Capote paints a Karl Rove portrait that is less Dark Lord and more canny opportunist, a guy who knows his history, his politics and his business...the getting W. elected business.

Scott Glenn's Donald Rumsfeld suggests a little of the arrogant cluelessness of the guy, a gambler guessing wrong, a puffed up "I know best" bully whom history is already deriding for being so wrong so often most of the world lost count.

The real revelations to me were the way Bush himself comes off, not as detached and out of the loop, but as a full of himself, determined to show he's in charge, yet plainly overwhelmed when things get off script. Brolin should land a nomination for this, though it's no sure thing. Hollywood and the country may be over and done with Bush by the time Oscar rolls around.