Set in Pittsburgh, the narrative centers on two mothers so appalled by the inner-city educational system that is leaving their children sub-literate that they set out to change it by closing down their children’s elementary school and starting one of their own. This is perfectly legal, but doesn’t begin to cover the obstacles mounted by administrators, union officials, school boards and teachers terrified of losing their pensions, not to mention the powerful and implacable bureaucracy that makes progress impossible. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Jamie Fitzpatrick, a poor but spunky working-class mom who juggles three jobs to keep her dyslexic eight-year-old daughter in a school that neglects her needs. Viola Davis is Nona Alberts, a dedicated teacher at the same school, whose son has learning challenges of his own that require home tutoring. These children face inadequate teachers, overcrowded conditions and the kind of institutional apathy that passes students yearly who cannot read or write, just to get rid of them. Seizing on the new fail-safe laws that entitle disgruntled parents to turn the schools around, Jamie decides to bite the bullet and try. The process is designed for failure. First she has to rally 50 percent of the parents and teachers, then she must plow through miles of red tape, make appointments to petition the school board and plead her case—if she’s lucky enough to get a hearing. Against all odds, the reluctant Nona and the indefatigable Jamie build their case like a bridge, screwing in one bolt at a time. Printing flyers, staging rallies, baking cookies, ringing doorbells, cornering parents in the streets and parking lots, they are fueled by passion, and their never-say-quit idealism rubs off on others. Jamie begins as a concerned parent who wants to get her kid into a better school but can’t afford to move and meets nothing but rejection from the school principal—and she ends up a militant activist who “won’t back down.” In the process, the two women and the teachers and parents they convert to their cause are taught a few lessons themselves—about friendship, commitment, humanity and pride. If you don’t mind a few sentimental cobbles, there is still the dual magic of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis, two stars who know a thing or two about conveying courage on the screen.

This is Norma Rae with chalk and erasers in place of a sewing machine, except for one major difference—this time it’s the unions that stand in the way of progress. With that in mind, it’s little surprise that political conservatives at the press screening I attended booed loudly. For the most part, the direction by Daniel Barnz is clear and substantial, and the screenplay, by the director and Brin Hill, is meticulously researched and stumble-free. As a message picture, its heart is in the right place. Too bad it doesn’t always manage to rise above a swirl of predictable Hollywood clichés. Jamie’s crusade pays off and lands her a boyfriend in the bargain, the children overcome their learning disabilities in record time, and the ogres on the school board reverse their opposition in a victory for the good guys that is too good to be true. And forgive my cynicism, but I had a hard time finding it credible when the conniving union representative (Holly Hunter) who threatens to destroy the women’s idealism applauds her own union’s defeat, even though it costs her her job. Oh well, she says. She can always go back to teaching.

rreed@observer.com

WON’T BACK DOWN

Running Time 120 minutes

Written by Brin Hill and Daniel Barnz

Directed by Daniel Barnz

Starring Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Holly Hunter

3/4

Viola Davis (left) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Getty Images)

Won’t Back Down, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as a parent and teacher struggling to turn around a failing school, is a movie that clearly wants to say something, even if The Observer had a hard time hearing what they were saying because of chanting protestors.

The film, directed by Daniel Barnz, premiered Sunday night at the Ziegfeld and was attended not only by the cast, but by the New Yorkers for Great Public Schools Coalition, an umbrella group of parents that gathered across the street. The protestors oppose the “parent trigger” laws that inspired the events of the film, through which parents can take over a failing school and possibly turn it into a charter school. Shouting “Move on over corporate takeover,” the group protested the film's financial backers, right-wing billionaires Philip Anschutz (of Walden Media) and Rupert Murdoch (CEO of News Corporation).

Mr. Barnz told The Observer: “The whole movie is about the benefits of protesting. There are many scenes of protesting in the film. I happen to know that what they’re protesting is different from what the movie is actually about. They’re here protesting parent trigger laws and as I explained to you this is not a parent trigger movie.” The film’s fictional law requires both parents and teachers to vote to take over the school.

“You don’t want a movie to feel like it’s an issue thing. You want it to feel like a human drama. I mean Oscar Isaac’s character, his whole narrative is about someone who’s a big union believer and is struggling with that in the course of the movie.”

The film’s stars, wearing grave political faces in addition to red carpet gowns, were ardent about education reform but wary of appearing anti-union. Ms. Gyllenhall said that she came from “the most progressive left. I wouldn’t be allowed to go home for Thanksgiving if I made an anti-union movie.”

When asked by The Observer about the film’s goals, Lance Reddick, who plays Ms. Davis’s husband, said, “I don’t know. I just know that things need to change. The other thing is I’m not really about gutting teachers unions because I’m a member of three unions and I wouldn’t be able to make a living if I wasn’t.”

Mr. Barnz, Ms. Davis, Ms. Gyllenhaal, and Rosie Perez also sat down earlier in the day at the Education Nation Summit to speak with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner. The summit showed a few of the film’s tear-jerking scenes between real-life panels discussing education reform.

At the pinnacle of Victorian prudishness, when ignorance and disease were the order of the day, rusty surgical tools were prevalent and bleeding with leeches was a popular treatment for everything from gout to gonorrhea. Hysteria was the term used to diagnose nervous conditions in women suffering every sexual disorder from frigidity to an overstimulated uterus. This is the true story of Dr. Mortimer Granville (played by the charming Hugh Dancy), a progressive doctor devoted to advancing the suppressed sexual pleasure of women, enriched with witty dialogue, elegant production values and an intelligent screenplay that expands the historical canvas of life in London to include class prejudices as well as social hypocrisy. Disillusioned with the medieval practice of medicine in an England of chaos (this is also the year of Jack the Ripper and the Elephant Man), Dr. Granville was ready to denounce his Hippocratic Oath when he found employment as an assistant to Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), an elderly “specialist” experimenting with the treatment of housewives with sex problems and a foremost expert on the subject of “hysteria.” Eschewing warm baths and horseback riding in favor of vaginal massages, his business was already booming. But when the younger, more appealing Dr. Granville develops his own brand of manual finger manipulation, eager patients filled the waiting room with renewed reason to come out of their corsets. What nobody ever thought possible was the mysterious fact that all of these stressed-out women were experiencing something nobody had considered: They were just plain horny!

The result was heaven for the patients, but hell on the doctor’s hand. Suffering from severe cramps and nerve spasms that required the use of a cast, the good doctor turned to a goofy prissy-pot friend with a passion for gadgets named Edmund St. John-Smythe (a hilarious Rupert Everett) to invent a motor-driven stimulus that could be applied to a woman’s lower anatomy without overtaxing the wrist and fingers. The result was nothing short of a revolution. In the plot trajectory, Dr. Granville also attracted the attention of the elderly Dr. Dalrymple’s two daughters: placid, proper, obedient and favorite daughter Emily (Felicity Jones) and headstrong, outspoken Charlotte (a marvelous Maggie Gyllenhaal), a suffragette who disgraces her father by running a settlement house for the impoverished prostitutes of the East End slums. There is evidence galore that the vibrator contributed to the sexual independence of enlightened free-thinkers in the future of liberated women everywhere. Muffled praise of the vibrator eventually gave way to cries of “Heigh-ho, the dildo!”

Instead of provocative prurience, Hysteria brims over with humor and sweetness. Far from dogmatic, it is agreeable, lyrical, carefully scripted and acted with great feeling by an exemplary cast. The film is also an eye-opening footnote to history as it depicts a time so backward that women with libido challenges were declared insane and sent to asylums or punished by court-ordered hysterectomies. Don’t miss the closing credits, displaying a wonderful collection of museum-quality illustrations of changing styles and designs from the mid-19th century to the ugly plastic drug store models of today. The liberating vibrator may have started out in Victorian England, but eventually made it to the Sears Roebuck catalogue and, in the final and funniest scene in the picture, even Buckingham Palace. A clever, quick-witted, informed and terrific movie!

rreed@observer.com

HYSTERIA
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer
Directed by Tanya Wexler
Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy and Jonathan Pryce

Chris Colfer (Getty Images)

The second half of this year's Tribeca Film Festival slate was revealed today, with Spotlight screenings of Julie Delpy's 2 Days in New York (her follow-up to 2 Days in Paris, costarring Chris Rock), Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Chicken With Plums, and Tanya Wexler's Hysteria (starring Maggie Gyllenhaal in the story of the invention of the vibrator).

"Spotlight is an entry point for general audiences--it's a little more pop-culture-y. You'll see movies that already have distribution, and world premieres with a recognizable face or a director who's done many films before," said Tribeca Director of Programming Genna Terranova, citing Morgan Spurlock's Mansome, a documentary about male grooming, and Struck By Lightning, a film written by Glee co-star Chris Colfer. "It's a great movie for a younger set--the Glee set--which can range from teens to people much older," said Ms. Terranova.

The Cinemania program features edgier films from around the world, including the Tagalog-language thriller Graceland, the Finnish cyber-drama Rat King, and the American revenge drama Revenge for Jolly! Artistic director Frederic Boyer, formerly of Cannes's Directors' Fortnight, noted the more populist bent of his new position: "To bring very popular film--just for the audience, the mix is really interesting and a challenge."

The full slate for this year's Tribeca Film Festival is here.

Maggie Gyllenhaal (Getty Images)

Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose last big screen role was in Crazy Heart in 2009, is reportedly gravitating towards the planned HBO series adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The Daily Mail reports that the series is shaping up towards a planned 40-episode run, with a two-hour pilot directed by Noah Baumbach. As sauerkraut chef Denise, she'd be joining a previously reported cast including Ewan McGregor as Chip Lambert and Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest as their parents. "There are rumours that Rhys Ifans might end up doing a cameo as a Lithuanian," reads the Daily Mail-ese. Apparently, expanding the novel out into 40 hours means that not merely will that offbeat, out-of-nowhere Lithuanian subplot not disappear, but that the Lithuanian characters will be played by name actors, albeit famously creepy ones!

After all, the themes of years past--“Superheroes” in 2008 and “The Model as Muse” in 2009--resulted in numerous disasters, including lamé turbons (Kate Moss), strange lighting strike patterns (Lake Bell), thigh high boots (Madonna) and inappropriate cleavage and leggage (Blake Lively). Judging from this year’s looks, the famous ladies have wised up and classed it up. Truthfully, the disasters were far fewer than we’ve seen in the past.

Stay tuned for a full red carpet report from Chloe Malle, but for now enjoy a slideshow of our favorite looks from last night. 

USER-FRIENDLINESS
Any idiot can use an iPhone—and we know, because we’ve seen it happen. BlackBerry gets a few points for most models’ physical QWERTY keyboards, which are less prone to typos than iPhone’s virtual keys; but Apple controls for this problem with text-correction software, and its completely intuitive touch-screen operation wins the category.
Advantage: iPhone

DURABILITY
iPhones crack when they’re dropped, unless you invest in bulky shells and cases; by contrast, as Wired’s GeekDad blog has pointed out, BlackBerrys still work after being run over by a full-size pickup truck.
Advantage: BlackBerry

BELLS AND WHISTLES
iPhone wins for both built-in features and apps. In addition to the 3GS’s built-in video camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, music and video player, YouTube connectivity and quick Internet browsing, the iTunes App store offers tens of thousands of applications. BlackBerry App World pales in comparison.
Advantage: iPhone

OPTIONS
BlackBerry’s online store currently offers 21 models, with a range of prices and features; iPhone buyers can pick only between 3G and 3GS. BlackBerry is also supported by 45 carriers in the U.S.—iPhone is currently only available on drop-heavy AT&T.
Advantage: BlackBerry

CELEBRITY USERS
As we know all too well, Tiger Woods’ iPhone has gotten him into trouble; but Uma Thurman, Ryan Reynolds, Nicole Kidman, Emma Watson and Michelle Williams have fared better with theirs. There doesn’t seem to be much family loyalty: Miley Cyrus is a devoted BlackBerry user, while brother Trace carries an iPhone; Jake Gyllenhaal uses an iPhone, while Maggie sports the BlackBerry; Beyoncé is a BlackBerry devotee, while sister Solange is an iPhone girl. Many celebs also prefer not to choose: Cameron Diaz, Taylor Swift, Lindsay Lohan, Adriana Lima and Vanessa Hudgens have all been spotted with both devices.
Advantage: Draw (If it seems like everyone in Hollywood, from Amanda Seyfried to Zac Efron, is glued to a BlackBerry, that’s because BlackBerrys are frequently given gratis to celebs; in the past five years, the phone has been on offer in gift bags at the Oscars, the AMAs, the Golden Globes and the Grammys. Apple’s sole spokesmodel is Justin Long.)

Jeff Bridges is not aging well, but when he stopped shaving, he started acting. The acting shows in Crazy Heart, an otherwise boring slice of country-fried steak with an exceptional performance by the gravel-voiced good old boy that raises the film several notches in the direction of unforgettable.

Bad Blake, a once-famous country western singing attraction now reduced to one-night gigs in bowling alleys, drives his truck into Santa Fe, pours out his urine from a gallon milk jug, slugs down enough whiskey to float a cargo ship and leaves the stage in the middle of his show to vomit into a garbage can. The next morning he rolls his gut out of bed and hits the road again, leaving a haggard fan behind in the motel sheets. It’s a routine he knows by heart. Moaning in an inaudible croak like a cross between Tom Waits and Harvey Fierstein, he’s a sort of first cousin to Robert Duvall’s Oscar-winning role in Tender Mercies, a 1983 movie that was also about a down-for-the-count country singer trying to put the broken pieces of his wasted life back together. (Mr. Duvall produced Crazy Heart and plays a Houston bartender in it.) But Tender Mercies was supported on the literary columns of an Oscar-winning screenplay by Horton Foote, who knew how to take his time and examine his characters with a flashlight to the soul. When Crazy Heart takes its time, it’s more like stretching a short story into a feature film. Well directed but sketchily written by actor Scott Cooper, the film relies a great deal on the star to flesh out what is only implied. It’s a lot of work, but Mr. Bridges is merely miraculous.

A 57-year-old has-been who is slowly killing himself with alcohol and cigarettes, Bad Blake is also a variation on the revolting creep Mr. Bridges played in The Big Lebowski, as well as the white bearded, pot-bellied version in The Men Who Stare at Goats. The once handsome, clean-cut embodiment of reliable Hollywood aristocracy has just about got a patent on stumble-bum reprobates. Bad Blake refuses to reveal his real name or discuss his four failed marriages, but he’s impressed enough with the pretty young reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who comes to interview him after one of his shows that he takes her to bed, befriends her little boy and thinks maybe he’s finally found the girl who could mean more to him than another meaningless one-night stand. But first, he’s got a trying gig in Las Vegas as the opening act for his arch-nemesis Tommy Sweet (a miscast, unconvincing Colin Farrell). A lot of guitar-plunking Nashville crooning ensues, followed by a potentially life-altering decision. What happens in the 111 minutes of Crazy Heart can be written on the head of a bobby pin, but there’s no arguing about the sweet impact of the central performance.

Whether you like the film depends on how much you like hillbilly music and Jeff Bridges. He’s pretty dog-eared and over the fence by now, but he sings the original songs with real conviction, and there’s something about him that’s as down-home as a bowl of grits with sawmill gravy. Anyone who remembers his father, Lloyd Bridges, with the legendary Kim Stanley in both The Goddess and John Frankenheimer’s Playhouse 90 production of Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night knows he comes from great acting genes. His performance as Bad Blake—lonely but aloof, talented but self-destructive, desperate for roots but a victim of his own addictive demon—leaves no shadowy corner of a complex life unexplored. He’s aging like a sweaty, chain-smoking King Lear.

rreed@observer.com

Ms. Gyllenhaal was approached by a tabloid reporter who asked her if her little daughter, 2-year-old Ramona, likes rummaging through her closet.

"I'm sorry, who are you interviewing me for?" Ms. Gyllenhaal asked. The Transom couldn't quite make out the answer, but then overheard: "Oh, you know, I'm sorry. The ones with the paparazzi pictures I just try to avoid," she said, starting to move away. "I know it's not your fault."

Ms. Gyllenhaal told the Transom that she would not be attending Fashion Week because her daughter is starting school, but wanted to be here for Mr. van Noten. "I'm a huge fan of Dries' clothes. I love them. I wear them all the time. I think he's my favorite. I felt like he's given me so many beautiful clothes and designed things for me and I really wanted to give something back to him."

They're not lunch buddies or anything. "I don't think we've ever actually met! We always talk on the phone," she said.

Nearby, the designer Phillip Lim was making the rounds. Mr. Lim is doing a men's and a women's show this year. "Being here is surreal right now. I just gussied myself up and ran from the fittings," he said. 

The Transom wondered what he thought of the state of Fashion Week, a topic that has gotten much attention from designers and CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg.

"You have to have Fashion Week because [otherwise] there is no reason for us. You would be taking away the lifeline," said Mr. Lim. "As far as shipments, I think the constant rush is a bit much. It should go back to being closer to the seasons."

And what about Fashion Week becoming too consumer- and celebrity-oriented?

"I think it depends on your mindset. If you want to have a party, have a party, but just prioritize and compartmentalize," he replied. 

The supermodel Iman, who was hosting a raffle with Barneys' [and Observer columnist] Simon Doonan, said she was not attending shows at all this year, but she would be stopping by Rachel Roy, Stella McCartney, Dior and Barneys for Fashion's Night Out. We asked whether she thought models look different nowadays.

"No! I'm a huge fan of today's young models like Raquel Zimmerman and Chanel Iman and Coco Rocha," she replied. "Everyone always says, 'They don't make models like they used to,' but I have no idea what they're talking about!"

When Ms. Gyllenhaal went up to present the award, she got shy. "I am a little nervous about being here today because I am not officially a part of the fashion world, but I like clothes a lot," she began. She proceeded to tell a story about the time she asked Mr. van Noten to design her wedding dress in May for her wedding in Italy to actor Peter Sarsgaard. She described exactly what she wanted over the phone. But when the frock arrived a week before the wedding: "This is nothing like what I was picturing!" she thought. And not in a good way.

But a week later, when Ms. Gyllenhaal took Mr. van Noten's creation out of the box again and put it on, she changed her mind. "It's like he knows better than I do what is beautiful and sexy on me!"

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, Mr. O’Hare no doubt wished to convey his thwarted desire for the young and beautiful—and married—Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). True, he’d been hamming it up all night.

Expression: Chew the scenery.

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, Mr. O’Hare no doubt wished to convey his thwarted desire for the young and beautiful—and married—Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). True, he’d been hamming it up all night. But when he gnawed on a wooden pillar of Santo Loquasto’s cramped set, I could have kissed him.

Mr. O’Hare made theater history for me, and I can never take that away from him. Furthermore, he made an agitated grrrrrr sound as he chomped on the pillar, and I don’t blame him one bit. The pillar was blocking the view (as were the other pillars). Did Mr. O’Hare—the uncharitable thought occurred to me—grow so maniacally frustrated with the set that he decided to eat it?

While there’s no weirder symbol of Austin Pendleton’s hyperactive, utterly un-Chekhovian production of Uncle Vanya than Mr. O’Hare sinking his teeth into the woodwork, the set design by the usually excellent Mr. Loquasto is an expensive blunder.

The three-sided stage at the intimate CSC has always been awkwardly confined. But the designer’s overstuffed set, divided up by those obtrusive pillars, only serves to cramp the playing area even more. Intended to represent the Serebryakov estate—with its 26-room house—the structure Mr. Loquasto built is more like a claustrophobic log cabin. There’s no sense of air or the outdoors, though Act I takes place entirely in the garden. (Chekhov subtitled the play “Scenes From Country Life.”)

Mr. Loquasto’s cumbersome set is also two-tiered, giving the production height instead of depth. Yet the upper rooms are rarely used by the director—and when they are, the clumsy outcome is the very thing Chekhov’s stage naturalism opposed. Thus Yelena traipses self-consciously up the staircase, and all the way down again, in order to say to Astrov, “I’m taking this pencil to remember you by.”

THIS Uncle Vanya proves again that star actors (principally Ms. Gyllenhaal and her partner, Peter Sarsgaard) are no guarantee of artistic success. (The starry Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout with the monotone Mary-Louise Parker makes the same point.) Ms. Gyllenhaal, better known for her film work, possesses too little stage experience to create a convincing portrait of Yelena’s tedium and corrosive vapidity.

Her voice, for one thing, crucially lacks tone and emotional range. She’s too preoccupied with being languid, and she’s inappropriately touchy-feely with more or less everyone around her. (The unhappily married, bewitching Yelena is not the sort of lady who snuggles.)

All actors have something in common with Chekhov’s Russian characters: They laugh and cry easily. And yet I’ve never seen a weepier Uncle Vanya than this one. (Isn’t the golden acting rule to let the audience do the weeping?) Ms. Gyllenhaal, I’m afraid, is the worst offender: She appears to be crying and laughing simultaneously—you can’t always tell the difference. She’s giving an ingratiating performance.

But with one outstanding exception (Mamie Gummer’s delightful Sonya), everyone in Mr. Pendleton’s wayward production is melodramatically out of sync. I admired Mr. Sarsgaard’s insinuating, spiritually dead Trigorin in the recent Seagull, but his 37-year-old Dr. Astrov is less the embittered crusading conservationist who sees through everyone (including himself) and more a grungy, confused adolescent with a crush. An excellent stage actor, Mr. Sarsgaard has yet to find the Astrov whose love for the idle beauty Yelena—for the superficial—is a lost cause.

But then, we have that elderly professorial buffoon Serebryakov (Yelena’s lucky husband), played in his opening scene by George Morfogen as if he were a gouty Methuselah, and in his later scenes as if he’d taken a miracle youth drug.

Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is about lives lived out in anomie, desperation and crushing isolation. It’s about the slow dawning of self-knowledge, and it’s about acceptance. With its contemporary American style wrapped in period costume, the broad new production scarcely conveys the nuances of the great play—and its middle-to-upper-class milieu not at all.

Though Mamie Gummer’s performance is also affected by the contagious weepiness, thank goodness for the compensation of her fine and openhearted Sonya. She delivers the play’s famous closing speech about endurance and hope beautifully: “And we shall find peace. We shall, Uncle, I believe it with all my heart and soul. …”

I’ve seen this young, immensely gifted actress two or three times now, and each time I’m struck by the honest reality of her work. Ms. Gummer is a stage natural with a glorious future. The time surely can’t be far off when we can stop pointing out that she’s the daughter of Meryl Streep.

WILL FERRELL’s You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush has arrived on Broadway about three years too late. Not that it makes any difference to Mr. Ferrell’s fans, who’ve turned the critic-proof show into a major hit. Besides, the likable star makes a wonderfully deadpan George Bush onstage, just as he makes a wonderfully deadpan doofus in his popular movies.

Or, as the 43rd president announces happily when he’s winched onto the stage of the Cort Theatre from a helicopter at the start, “I said to the pilot, why don’t you drop me in the faggy Theater District—and that’s what he did!”

You’re Welcome America, written by Mr. Ferrell and slickly directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), is an extended—sometimes overextended—Saturday Night Live sketch, with a guest appearance from a lap-dancing Condoleezza Rice (Pia Glenn).

This is a President Bush who calls President Obama “the Tiger Woods guy.” A giant projection of what he sweetly calls “my penis” appears on a screen: “That’s what I call shock and awe right there!”

You get the frat message? But the saving grace of the uneven show is the masterly cool of Mr. Ferrell’s stage debut. He effortlessly captures President Bush’s peculiar combo platter of simmering peevishness and faux Texan swagger. One of the show’s funniest moments has the young and incompetent George trapped down a mine shaft with his father. “Why are you the only one in the family who talks with a Texas accent?” Poppy protests. “It makes no sense!”

Another hilariously surreal comic riff involves a covert army of highly trained monkeys with spear guns who’ve been recruited to fight insurgent Iraqis and entertain children.

It must be said that as cutting-edge political humor goes, it went. The show is satirically toothless. Mr. Ferrell’s targets (including Rummy, Condi and poor old Brownie) are easy, familiar prey, his Bush impersonation fond, nostalgic and even comforting. But when he asked us, in all righteously embarrassing seriousness, for a minute’s silence for our fallen troops in Iraq—and received it—I no longer knew who was doing the asking, George Bush or Will Ferrell, and found myself wishing I was someplace else.

You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George Bush is to be televised live as an HBO special in March.

jheilpern@observer.com