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Charlie Wilson's War

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

Based on an amazing true story, Charlie Wilson’s War stands a much better chance of popular success than any of the “current climate” movies so far. Why? Well unlike, say, Lions For Lambs, it’s a movie in which its big stars actually get to twinkle and, while it’s unquestionably a politically motivated film that compares the US’s attitude towards Afghanistan during the Cold War with today’s snafu in Iraq, there’s not a soapbox in sight.

When we first meet the titular Congressman (played by Tom Hanks), he’s naked in a hot tub in Las Vegas with some strippers, a JD and Coke, and actual coke. Of course, this is how we imagine all politicians behave behind closed doors, but it’s still startling to see how openly debauched Wilson was. He was a ladies' man, a boozehound; a human. But even while all this is happening, we glimpse the complexity that made Wilson an unlikely hero. The conventional approach would be to have Wilson discover the error of his hedonistic ways, before a big emotional moment when he realises the scope of the crisis in Afghanistan and, dammit, decides to do something about it! Real life, though, isn’t so conventional and so, in the opening scene, Wilson spies a news report about the Russian occupation from his perch in the hot tub, and is immediately inspired to act.

What then follows is a breezy romp in which Wilson – with help from his occasional lover Joanne Herring (Roberts), the sixth richest woman in Texas, and blunderbuss CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Hoffman) – uses all his political nous and charm to vastly increase funding of Afghani rebels, all without the American people or, crucially, the Russians finding out. In scenes where Wilson tries to broker a truce between Israeli and Egyptian government agents, you’re reminded that Nichols directed one of the best comedies about the absurdity of war: Catch-22.

But it’s during the sparkling Aaron Sorkin-penned exchanges between the Oscar-laden leads that the movie takes off. Hanks infuses Wilson with a bounce and charm we haven’t seen from him in years, while Roberts brings a regal air to the underwritten Herring. Still, if the virtually unrecognisable Hoffman doesn’t at least get nominated for an Oscar for his turn as the tactless but tuned-in yin to Wilson’s yang, then someone should start a sub-committee to investigate. From his intro, where he smashes his superior’s office window in a righteous rage, and his farcical first meeting with Charlie, everything Hoffman says and does is a perfectly modulated hoot.

Given the subject matter, though, darkness inevitably lurks beneath the larks, and it’s here that Nichols occasionally loses his grasp of the movie’s tone, from a disconcerting sequence showing Russian gunships strafing an Afghani village to a couple of jarring shots of a red-eyed Wilson alone in his apartment, struggling with his demons. Cutting from these to light comedy is a struggle even for this master of the form.

Only towards the very end, when Wilson runs aground in the face of American indifference to finishing what it started, by stabilising Afghanistan politically and socially – a failure which, it could be argued, led to the unchecked growth of Islamic extremism and even the present-day farrago in the Middle East – does the movie successfully cross the line from wry comedy to rueful drama. The last shot of Wilson beautifully illustrates the regret of a man who knows that it’s never going to be enough; of a man who can see the future and doesn’t like it one little bit.

Ben McEachen, January 2008

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