There’s a scene near the end of W., Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic, in which the aperture closes slowly and the screen gets black around the edges. The shot represents the point of view of the president at a tense moment, and is designed to convey that he’s clearly panicked as he tries to answer an important question.

You see, the president isn’t very bright and he gets tunnel vision from thinking too hard.

When Stone’s film isn’t attributing the president’s supposedly disastrous decisions to the fact that he’s a silver-spoon simpleton, it’s that he has a raging Oedipal complex which prompts drunken fistfights with his more successful father. In an attempt to show up his dad, he gets elected president and goes on to ruin the world. The End.

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That’s W. in a nutshell. Incredibly, director Oliver Stone insists the film is an “empathetic” and “fair and balanced” rendering of the current president. However, rather than illuminate any aspect of the Bush presidency, the film actually raises more questions about the mindset of the people who created it.

For example, policy preferences aside, what evidence is there that George W. Bush is stupid? He may not be a member of Mensa, but the Harvard MBA did have higher SAT scores than Al Gore and a higher GPA at Yale than John Kerry. Nobody runs around calling them dolts.

As for Bush’s supposed Oedipal complex, his brother and former Florida governor Jeb Bush was recently asked about the film. “The Oedipal rivalry is high-grade, unadulterated hooey,” Jeb told the U.K.’s Telegraph.

According to Stone, his own father — a wealthy stockbroker — had numerous extramarital affairs and took his son to visit a prostitute as a teenager. His dad later got him a job in finance, an experience which proved formative for Stone’s influential film Wall Street. That film hinges on an almost-paternal relationship between Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko as an older and successful stockbroker and his younger protégé played by Charlie Sheen. That relationship eventually turns sour, once Gekko is exposed as fundamentally immoral. If you apply the same second-rate Freudianism at work in W. to Wall Street, doesn’t it look like Stone is the one working out issues with his father?

Doubtless Stone would feel that viewing his work through the prism of an apparently dysfunctional relationship with his father would fail to explain adequately his long and varied career — which includes, it pains me to admit in the wake of W. , some very good films. I’m sure Stone would view so reductive an approach to Wall Street as lacking in, well, empathy.

Of course, that street runs both ways. Responding in the Telegraph to Stone’s claim that he sought to make W. an empathetic film, Jeb Bush asked why the director didn’t try and speak to any him or any other family members. Good question.

Stone and his screenwriter relied instead on books “by authors including Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, Bill Minutaglio, David Corn and Frank Rich.” Aside from journalism professor Minutaglio, the list runs the gamut from liberal to really liberal. Little needs to be said about Woodward’s baggage; Suskind is the guy responsible for the Left’s “reality-based community” slur; David Corn works at leftist magazine The Nation; and Frank Rich is arguably the New York Times’s most liberal columnist. That is the “fair and balanced” perspective that informs Stone’s film?

The more plausible answer for why the portrait of Bush in W. is so unflattering and one-dimensional is that it’s a blatant attempt to influence the election. Oliver Stone’s political sympathies are well-known — earlier this year, he was a celebrity judge for MoveOn.org’s make-your-own-Obama-ad contest. Further, the same studio that produced W., Lionsgate, is responsible for the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary which was absolutely explicit in its desire to influence the 2004 election.