Whenever a movie takes a political stand instead of spinning sugar-coated Technicolor fantasies, 20% of reviewers will automatically dislike it. I just made up the figure, but you know what I mean. Some reviewer will say, “This movie criticizes the war in Iraq, and we should be supporting our troops over there!” Actually, the movie says no more about Iraq than it does about World War I or the Korean War. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is about Democratic Congressman Wilson (Tom Hanks) drumming up $500,000 for a covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The generalization the film makes is that the US often goes into places with the military and the best of intentions and then doesn’t stay to make sure all the effort results in some long-term good.
Then some critic with an overweening social conscience will say that the movie squanders a chance to be hard hitting and instead is cavalier in tone. A constant motif in the movie is encapsulated when either Charlie Wilson or his eccentric CIA man (I forget) says, “There’s no reason we can’t have fun doing this (serious work).” Director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin portray Washington politics as a mix of serious issues and tom-foolery, emotional reactions and hard-nosed intelligence, and idealism interwoven with real politik. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it rang true to me.
The serious nature of the picture is manifest in its basic structure: It is framed by an awards ceremony. The picture opens with Charlie Wilson being presented with some prestigious award but his expression is difficult to read. The bulk of the movie shows him triumphantly raising funds for the Afghani resistance fighters, but then he is unable to get his congressional committee to cough up a million dollars for schools and reconstruction once the Soviets have be driven out. The picture closes with the awards ceremony again, but this time we know some of the people in the audience cheering enthusiastically, and we understand why Charlie Wilson’s expression was so difficult to read—although he was delighted to win the war, he was crushed to lose the peace. The strength of the picture is the complexity of Charlie’s character. He is an inveterate womanizer who, while sitting in a hot tub with naked babes, asks the wasted bartender to turn up the volume on the television so that he can hear what Dan Rather is doing in Afghanistan. He is an atheist and a Democrat secretly in love with a right-wing, born-again Republican Texas millionaire, who is married. He is naïve and savvy. He is frivolous but when someone has a hidden agenda in an important conversation, he calls them on it. He is self-centred but altruistic enough to be more worried about Afghanis in refugee camps than about protecting himself from cocaine charges. He took great glee in solving the immediate Afghani problem of shooting down Soviet helicopters, but he was devastated when neither he nor any other congressmen had foreseen and planned for the long-term solution of social reconstruction.
posted on Saturday, January 12, 2008 7:35 PM by JimBell