Professor Doctor here – saw Oliver Stone’s ‘W.’ at the weekend - fascinating - very much like ‘The Queen’ in that obviously none of the private stuff can be attested to as fact, but it still feels real…oddly empathetic….some very very good performances – Richard Dreyfuss and Scott Glenn in particular, with James Cromwell great and Josh Brolin frankly amazing.

The protagonist of the film is, as always with Stone, Greek myth; when Barbara and George HW are on screen, toying with their son’s emotions, Oedipus is never far behind; it’s very similar to Stone’s ‘Nixon’ which was also surprisingly sympathetic.  Whether or not W has governed in the particular style we have come to know from him because his daddy always made him feel bad about himself is of course impossible to prove unless you’re his therapist; but there is real dramatic/sociological value in portraying him this way.  It is simply this: after years of caricature and demonisation, having a more ‘human’ George W Bush at least allows for the possibility of figuring out what went wrong, and why most of us still struggle to work out our own family angst in how we behave today.

Having said that, the script is more like a radio play, with a fair bit of clunky exposition, not much of a psychologically penetrating piece, but still a worthwhile document, a strange dramatic pantomime, with a fantastic final image.