NUMBER ONE. Raise your hand if you're weary to puking of arrogant, bellicose rich folk from Texas blithely spending your tax dollars on their warmongering.
NUMBER TWO. For anyone who's lost blood, kin or a lover in Iraq or Afghanistan, here are disturbing things. One scene in particular: raggedy Muslim guerrillas blow a helicopter out of the sky using an American-provided RPG. We're meant to cheer it, but it gave me a bad chill. Bookended with sentimental bits from a ceremony in which Congressman Wilson is given a medal, Charlie Wilson's War takes pains to remind us that back then the Afghans wore the white hats, as they were being invaded by the black-hatted Russians. But one leaves the cinema uneasy: where are they now, the three billion bucks' worth of weapons we gave the Mujahidin back in the '80s? How many were trained right back at us in Taliban hands? The weapons were distributed through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, whose golden boy in Afghanistan at the time was an eager anti-Western zealot called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who received the lion's share of the weapons.(1) After 9/11, he was officially declared a global terrorist, heavily associated with both Bin Laden and the Taliban. How can we cheer the distribution of these weapons, while the war is not yet ended?
"This is a fight of good against evil," says Ned Beatty's congressman in a speech to the beleaguered Afghans, presaging very similar words spoken by another fellow from the White House after 9/11, only the black hats are on the Afghan heads by then.
NUMBER THREE. Julia Roberts has been given an impossible and thankless task. She plays a wealthy and powerful conservative Christian who has thrown all her considerable political weight and fortune behind the cause of arming Afghanistan out of old-fashioned rightwing born-again anticommunist ideals. She tells Congressman Wilson straight out that she's been saved by Jesus Christ and that means a great deal to her. Then, for the remainder of the film, she's Mae West. Her decolletage is as low as her morals. She'll match you highball for highball, casually bed you if you take her fancy, call the younger girls 'sluts' for no apparent reason but jealousy... In short, this is Hollywood's traditional way of winking at us about humans of faith. "She's not really a Christian," Hollywood is whispering to us. "She's a big sinner like the rest of us, so it's OK to like her." I'm no Christian, and I'M offended by it.
NUMBER FOUR. In fact, there is much to offend most thinking women, not just Christians, but also feminists (are there still feminists?), strippers and bellydancers. In this alternaversion of 1980, if anyone had ever burned a bra it was because there's not a woman in the world with a tit unperky enough to need one. Congressman Wilson unabashedly surrounds himself with a provocatively-dressed posse of eye-candy. Because Aaron Sorkin wrote it, his gaggle of bunnies manages to channel CJ Cregg long enough to punch out a press release during a crisis, but mostly they exist to make Wilson look smart by confusing Pakistan with Afghanistan, startle visitors with dirty talk, gaze at him with starry eyes, surreptitiously provide his endless intake of whiskey, perhaps do the odd strategic bellydance when a state official needs distracting. Mike Nichols has a post-feminist party with it, letting his camera linger leeringly on their asses, gleefully fomenting an undercurrent of catfight between the bunny-gaggle and Roberts' aging beauty queen... because what's more fun than women fighting over men while men do important stuff like talking about guns?
ALL THAT SAID, THERE ARE GOOD THINGS ABOUT IT. A generous third of this movie is very funny indeed, in that Aaron Sorkin way, with the magnificent one-liners that catch you by surprise, and these three actors--Tom Hanks, Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman--use just the right underplayed spin to zing them home. Hoffman is invincible at this kind of thing. I wished his part was better. (Did anyone NOT know he was going to break the window, about five minutes before he broke it?) Had anyone other than Hanks, that soul of affability, played Wilson, it'd have been a shambles. There'd have been too much sleaze... as I'm certain there was in the real-life version. Somehow Hanks emerges unsoiled. In a hottub filled with strippers and Hollywood slimedogs, cocaine everywhere, nobody wearing anything but stiletto heels, Hanks comes away with an air of gentlemanly forbearance, as if he's only there out of politeness, to let the kids have their fun. Anyone else would've seemed either satyrlike and randy or sheepish and embarrassed. (Imagine Val Kilmer in that hottub. Now imagine Michael Madsen. Now Joaquin Phoenix. See where I'm going with this?)
When it comes down to it, Charlie Wilson's War is troubled by a schizoid self-image. It wants to be a serious political essay about what we did wrong in Afghanistan; it wants to be optimistic, sentimental and pro-American; it wants to be a lighthearted sex romp. If the war weren't still going on, even while we're here, sitting in the dark in the theatre, there'd be a chance they might have carried it off. As it is, it doesn't work. It'll be one of those things that you catch on cable in years to come and think, "Oh, that's pretty funny. I'll watch until the next commercial."
(1)Junger, Sebastian. Fire: "The Lion In Winter", WW Norton, NY, 2001.
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