Charlie Wilson's War
Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Mike Nichols, and Aaron Sorkin want us to forget about "Rendition" and "Redacted" and "Lions for Lambs." Entertainment and foreign affairs do mix. They've made a movie that strains to prove it. "Charlie Wilson's War" brings us the true-life tale of a Democratic congressman from Texas, played by Hanks, who concocted a covert operation to arm Afghanistan's mujahideen during the Russian invasion. Roberts has a ball playing a slatternly socialite, and we have a ball watching Philip Seymour Hoffman as a coarse CIA agent. What sounds heavy, feels unbearably light. Picture "The Birdcage" with shoulder-guided rocket launchers.
I'm only half-complaining. "Charlie Wilson's War" sure beats the series of lectures, position papers, and political tracts we've been getting all year - urgently concerned anti-entertainments from people like Robert Redford. This movie, directed by Nichols from Sorkin's screenplay, is, in its way, an apolitical comedy about politics. Or at least a naïve one, since those weapons likely eventually made their way into the hands of Al Qaeda.
This movie, too, takes a position: Forget Oliver North, come admire the brave liberal who helped the Afghan people defend themselves against those nasty Soviets. But when it's not jaunting off to refugee camps in Peshawar to jerk our tears, the movie Nichols has made is an amusing bauble that accessorizes perfectly with his other issue movies.
As Wilson, Hanks gives the part a honeyed drawl and an active intelligence you'd have to squint to detect. Wilson is somewhat shrewd and somewhat clueless, but inexplicably attractive and expectedly smooth. He likes to party (we meet him soaking in a Vegas hot tub with some strippers), and he enjoys the perquisites of government. His office is the best of both worlds. In a ludicrous mock-chauvinist joke, four of Wilson's staffers are chesty, big-haired broads (the credits call them "Charlie's Angels"), but they're capable, maybe even smart. Watching them band together to make their boss's drug scandal vanish is like watching spin-doctor night at Hooters. (The splendors of Amy Adams go wasted. As Wilson's prim chief of staff, she's not in on many gags.)
We know Charlie Wilson is to be taken only semi-seriously when he looks up from that Vegas Jacuzzi, sees Dan Rather reporting on the mujahideen for "60 Minutes," and falls instantly in love with the Afghan cause. Ah, screenwriting. Eventually, he makes an ass of himself while trying to cut a deal with Pakistan's military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (Om Puri) and, in a funny sequence, brokering an arms deal between Israel and its enemies in front of a belly dancer.
Based on the late CBS News correspondent George Crile's book about Wilson, Sorkin's script relies on political-comedic oversimplifications that are meant to push the story along. As with Sorkin's better TV writing, this tale has a slick surface that Nichols and the actors have a good time treading. Hoffman is especially terrific, playing the miserable, petulant, hideously coiffed fed who really knows Afghanistan. The movie is, more or less, his.
Roberts is more problematic. She shows up as Joanne Herring, the Houston socialite who lets Wilson make love to her (we see only the postcoital talk). She wants him to bring down the commies in Afghanistan and uses her impressive international connections to him help do it. Roberts has big blond hair, an accent as thick as her mascara, and poufy dresses that might as well have been sewn with yeast.
She and Hanks have the delicious, movie-star click you'd expect. But she looks a half-century too young for a part that seems to cry out for Elaine Stritch and Joanne's righteousness helps sour a movie that didn't seem to know what to make of her in the first place. She's a grandstanding Christian know-it-all, whose contradictions ("I talk about God for one reason. We need Him on our side") seem lost on her. In one of the most depressing moments in the movie, she walks by Charlie's Angels and hisses at them: "Sluts."
That moment is typical of the kind of farrago "Charlie Wilson's War" is. In the name of entertainment, it wants to moralize its pleasures away. Lest we forget this is about suffering, too, the movie shows Wilson at that refugee camp being visibly moved by the amputees and burn victims and starving Afghans begging for rations. Then we get a shot of tents that stretch on for as far as the eye can see (this is one of Nichols's ugliest-looking films).
After that trip to Peshawar, suddenly nothing is that fun anymore, even as Hanks begins to lace the character with Clintonian absurdity, such as Wilson's explanation of how he fell in love with America after he could manipulate voters (who happened to be black). The mix of ribaldry, sex, war, and humanitarianism feels unseemly. Never more so than when a shot of an Afghan village littered with the charred debris of an exploded Russian helicopter is chased with a shot that lewdly rises up Amy Adams's hind parts. Thematically, this movie is as promiscuous as Wilson.
It's hard to leave "Charlie Wilson's War" without feeling queasy. Contrary to what Sorkin and Nichols seem to think, the problem is not that topicality and entertainment don't mix. It's that audacity and self-congratulation don't. See, we made an important movie that doesn't feel important, the filmmakers seem to say. We made you think, but we also made you laugh. To that end, the movie is sandwiched by a runny awards ceremony honoring Wilson's daring. You would be forgiven for thinking it's the Oscars.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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