Then there's the matter of the actors' transformations. There seems to be a lot of effort being put into making Josh Brolin look like Bush, to the point of outfitting him with a prosthetic nose. There was no such cosmetic trickery when Anthony Hopkins played Tricky Dick in Stone's Nixon. There, the essence of the character was conveyed by Hopkins's deportment, not an assortment of glued-on facial features. Here, by trying so hard to capture Dubya's countenance, Stone seems to have overshot the mark a bit and landed somewhere in comedic territory. Brolin doesn't look so much like George W. Bush as he does the punchline of one of Conan O'Brien's "If They Mated" bits. It's like Tom Brokaw and David Boreanaz had a secret love child together, and this is him.

It may have been better to leave Brolin au naturale, save for the hair color and the addition of a few wrinkles. Considering the subject matter, it's easy enough to fall into caricature without laying on the latex. But perhaps like the script, W.'s look is "still evolving."