Charlie Wilson's War

I didn't let my distressing mail (see below) deter me from my New Year's Eve custom of going to a movie last night. It's a peculiar tradition of mind that reflects both my normal anti-sociability (I go alone and am not partying with others) and my occasional desire to be among people in a public place. Movie theaters are places where people still acquire the components of a shared culture, and I'll consider it a sad day when each little group watches a DVD in its own isolated home-theater and never knows the thrill of a collective response to a work of art or artifice.

Anyway, you will have noticed that I went to Mike Nichols' film of the non-fiction bestseller Charlie Wilson's War. It's the tale of a Texas congressman who became a leading fundraiser for the Afghan mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation. The wonder of it is that Wilson appears not to have been an ideologue or even a particularly determined Cold Warrior. In the film, we are shown that he's sort of sleazy, and the best parts of the story show Wilson juggling his plans to fund the Afghans with his efforts to fend off a federal investigation by an offscreen Rudy Giuliani. But sleazy is probably an exaggerated description of Wilson as Tom Hanks portrays him. In the film, the congressman is a standard-issue lovable rogue. Hanks portrays this part well, even though it disturbed me to see that his face has come to look as if it were made of putty rather than flesh. Early on especially, there's a good amount of early-80s grunginess as Wilson cavorts with bimbos in a hot tub and puts them on his staff -- pun intended, I guess. But once Wilson is cleared by Giuliani's investigation, the film turns into a mere sequence of events, punctuated by some cheesy looking scenes of Afghan warfare. Finally, Wilson is shown failing to win even minimal funding for Afghan reconstruction after the Soviets fled the country, with the clear implication that thus the seeds for September 11 were planted. The Afghans as a whole are portrayed as sympathetic victims of Soviet evil, but Ned Beatty as another congressman gets to mouth reservations about Muslim fundamentalism that are supposed to resonate after the show is over.

The best I can say for the movie is that it makes me want to read the book. There's a genuine mock-epic story here, but you get the impression that the relatively short feature is only skimming the surface of it. I was left wondering what really made Wilson tick, even though it may prove that he really was just a vapid character. I was even more curious about the "sixth-richest woman in Texas," the Christian fundamentalist she-devil portrayed by Julia Roberts as a Machiavellian bimbo. The historian in me suspects that she could be a movie unto herself, since it was people like her who helped put modern-day Republicans into power. I wanted to know why she was as we saw her, but this film had no time for explanations. I was less interested in the brusque CIA man played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, since his part seems to have been inflated to give the actor more opportunities to rant. The real man was probably more important to the real story, but once the movie ceases to have an actual plotline, Hoffman seems increasingly superfluous.

Since the film is informative in its own right, I would recommend it for people who never plan to read the book, but I can't count it among my favorite films of 2007. Zodiac still tops my personal list, with Grindhouse and No Country For Old Men virtually equal behind it. We're getting There Will Be Blood later this month, and I expect that to rank near the top, and In The Valley of Elah will probably make my final cut as well. Charlie Wilson's War would probably make my top ten list simply because I didn't see more than ten movies in the year just past, so it's nothing the filmmakers should be proud of.

Postscript: If you think mine was a killjoy review, here's a pretty dogmatic one from the History News Network, with a link to a happier assessment from neocon military historian Max Boot.