Oliver Stone’s forthcoming biographical film about George W. Bush is being characterized as surprisingly sympathetic, but the director’s need to see policy errors as deriving from psychological pathologies is dubious at best.

Although most film industry analysts expected Oliver Stone’s film biography of George W. Bush, W, to be in the vein of his other heavily fictionalized and tendentious accounts of U.S. history (such as JFK and Nixon), Stone says the film is sympathetic and fair to Bush the person while being critical of his policies as president.

Reuters quotes Stone as saying he intends no malice or even judgment in the film:

"It was not our intention to bring malice or judgment on George W. Bush and his administration. He and his administration clearly speak for themselves," Stone said.

Stone’s intention, he suggests, was to find the source of Bush’s politics in his personal life and the ideas he holds. The Reuters story identifies his strong interest in Bush’s psychological makeup:

"The movie tries to understand Bush and make him a human being," Stone said. "I have tried to be fair and balanced. I have tried not to take sides."

Stone makes Bush’s relationship with his father, former President George H. W Bush, the dramatic centerpiece of "W."

Critics are beginning to weigh in, and tend to agree with Stone. Whether they are being truthful or disingenuous we will find out when the film is released this weekend.

The AP critic, for example, writes that the film shows Bush as a bad president but apparently not intentionally so (as if that were really in doubt by any reasonable person):

"W." does present Bush as a man unfit to lead. And while Stone cannot resist injecting that theme with moments of sharp satire, he generally casts the president as a deeply tragic figure in far over his head, whose personal demons hold consequences for everyone else on the planet.

The film makes much of Bush’s drinking problem and his often troubled relationships with his father, mother, and brother Jeb, suggesting these personal "demons" were what caused him to make mistakes as president, according to reports. The AP critic quotes actor Josh Brolin, who portrays Bush in the film, as taking that point of view:

"I strangely found a lot of respect for the guy in his ability to tackle his demons. The opposite side of that is him feeling maybe that his demons were exorcised, when indeed they just came out in a different form through his presidency. The opportunities he saw that may have manifested through those, war being one of them."

This search for reasons to believe "the personal is the political," as is the common cry among left-wingers, is manifested in the dramatic action of the film:

Stone doesn’t hold back on unflattering dramatic moments, showing a drunken Bush dancing on a bar or crashing a car into his parents’ trash cans and nearly coming to blows with his father in the living room.

Such scenes are balanced with tender private times between Bush and his wife and moments of humility early in Bush’s born-again conversion.

I take an entirely different point of view on Bush and his presidency. I agree that he was on balance a bad president, but I don’t think he is either a bad man nor an unusually troubled one. On the contrary, the major fault most people have seen in him over the years is a certain breezy excess of confidence and concomitant lack of circumspection before plunging into major actions.

That is an explanation that fits the facts far better than the apparent psychological pathology Stone is seeking. After all, sometimes very good and thoughtful people are just wrong.

Oliver Stone, for example.