I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it

I missed the first three minutes of Oliver Stone’s film about the outgoing US President, W., because the indolent woman serving behind the counter took ages to give me my ticket. That’s because she was serving someone else with ice cream, a beaming fat cow who was ordering herself a bucket of cherry and vanilla and butterscotch, a vat of frozen animal fats in which she would immerse herself for the next seven hours. ‘Ooh, and I’ll have a scoop of rum and raisin too,’ she whinnied just when you thought she was finally done, the veins on her neck bulging out and saliva dribbling down her grey chin. What annoyed me most was the fact that she was not a paying customer, but the bloody cinema manageress. And also that she didn’t realise this was my annual visit to the flicks and because it is a special event I expect everything to go smoothly. I used to go twice a week, in my youth, usually to watch black and white Rumanian films about coat hangers, or something; these days it’s a nice middlebrow film once a year. In 2007 it was Atonement; this year it’s W.

It almost wasn’t W., mind, on account of the reviews. All of the reviewers I trust — and quite a few I don’t — slagged the film off, or damned it with the faintest of praise. The excellent Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called it a ‘solemn hagiography’, a ‘frankly timid’ film that ‘pulled its punches’. Time Out’s reviewer whined that it ‘made excuses’ for George W. Bush and was neither ‘coruscating or edifying’.

It’s an odd thing. I thought the film was terrific — witty, well-acted (apart from by Ms Thandie Newton, who played Condi Rice as if she were a vaudeville turn) and humane.