First off, I should say that I laughed where I was supposed to while watching "Charlie Wilson's War." Director Mike Nichols has not lost his comic timing, nor has star Tom Hanks. Both used to be comic actors, right?

As Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, Hanks has some good lines. As Gust Avrakotos, a second-generation very rumpled Greek frustrated in the sleek WASPish world of the CIA, Philip Seymour Hoffman has even better ones (and also has good comic timing). And as a Chiristianist Houston hostess, Joanna Herring, who has taken up anti-Soviet Muslims as a cause, Julia Roberts also shows good comic timing and has a few snappy lines.

Tom Hanks -- at least the weight of the history of watching him onscreen that viewers bring with them -- is too nice and well-mannered for the role of the hard-drinking, fervently womanizing Charlie Wilson, though he is excellent at showing someone with resolve shrewdly using his being underestimated by others. Like Tony Leung trying to be despicable in "Lust, Caution," it's difficult to believe Tom Hanks "doing debauchery." It doesn't help that the only woman with whom he seems to have "gotten it on" over the course of the movie (which begins with him in a hot tub with two strippers, but more interested in Dan Rather reporting from Afghanistan) is Joanna Herring. (There is the constituent's daughter who turns up naked in his apartment, but does she have her way with him?)

I think that "Charlie Wilson's War" is quite effective as a comedy and a very slick aplogia for cowboy foreign policy going around the constitutional system of checks and balances. Wilson was a member of the United States House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which approved funding that was voted on by the full Congress without knowing specifics of what was being funded. The secrecy made it possible for Wilson to win over Rep. Jamie L. Whitten (a segregationist Democratic congressman from Mississippi who was a major proponent of DDT after The Silent Spring exposed its damages) to provide modern weapons and trainings to the Mujahedin, who were resisting at the edged the conquest by the Soviet Union (Red Army) of parts of Afghanistan. (There is also nothing beyond a remark in passing about the difficulty of funding the Contras to provide someone not already in the know that Wilson was the most vociferous proponent of US money going to the Somoza family, brutal and greedy even in comparison to other Latin American despots supported by the US.)

As a version of Whitten called "Doc Long," Ned Beatty begins a mass-fervor chanting of "God is great" (Allah akbar). Gust has qualms that God may sometimes be on both sides, though neither he nor anyone else among the movie characters points out that the Afghan "freedom fighters" want to expel the infidels to restore or continue feudal society -- of a modernly radical Islamicist "purity."

Reputedly Aaron Sorkin's script was neutered to avoid showing how sowing the wind (arming and training Islamists in Afghanistan) reaped the whirlwind (al-quaida). The most disciplined opposition groups in Afghanistan during the early 1980s were the most religiously fundamentalist. They bled the Soviets and occupation became burdensome, and the Afghanistan quagmire at least speeded the collapse of the Soviet Union (though that has been replaced by new authoritarian states). With the Red Army gone, the weaponry and know-how could (and was) turned against those insufficiently (or not at all) Muslim.

The movie includes regret that the US did not fund civilian projects in Afghanistan after the Soviets left, but provides "We won" uplift with crocodile tears for the Afghan people -- and considers not at all the long-range consequences of the short-term success.

It is a movie presenting a mythic cowboy triumph with entertaining characters and situations -- not least the intercultural contacts of Americans with despot General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a very Islamist president of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (played brilliantly by Om Puri). As history, let's say it is very, very partial. It's a movie--don't judge it as history, but also don't accept it as providing a very complete historical picture! As a comedy, it may be better than "Primary Colors" (which I thought was better than many other viewers did). It's definitely funnier (and more tightly constructed) than "Catch-22" or "The Graduate" and "The Birdcage" (both of which I thought was less funny than many others did) or "Heartburn" or "Carnal Knowledge" within the Mike Nichols oeuvre. As comedy with bite, it's inferior to "Wit" and to "Whose Afraid of Virginal Wolf?", both of which were plays with big female roles that Nichols brought to the screen

There is a standard "making of" featurette (17 minutes) with very little from very many people involved in making the movie, and a brief (12 minute) documentary about the hedonistic Congressman from Texas. Especially after finding so much of interest in Nichols's commentary track for Catch-22 and with so many questions begged by the movie, I wish there was a Nichols commentary track for CW'sW.

The sound and video transfers are both state of the art.



© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: Yes