Charlie Wilson's War

Review By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

Here we go again. Some more politically charged celluloid to add to the bunch. This time ‘90s screen darlings Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts team up to give us a dose of based-on-true-life historical events in Charlie Wilson’s War. With Mike Nichols directing, a script by Aaron Sorkin, and the recent glow of Golden Globe nominations, I was expecting to be wowed. I was expecting that this seemingly unbeatable combination would finally produce a political movie worth seeing. Perhaps a more frothy and fun take on past world conflicts would do the trick. Not quite, as it turns out.

Hanks is Charlie Wilson, a little-known Texas Congressman who facilitated a covert arms plan to rid Afghanistan of the Soviets during the Cold War. He’s your average politician—scotch in the mornings, Playboy bunnies in Las Vegas at night—but after visiting an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan and seeing how defenseless the country is to Soviet attacks, he takes up their cause. With the help of the wealthy right-wing socialite (and Wilson’s occasional bed-buddy) Joanne Herring (Roberts) and CIA bureaucrat Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), he sets his under-the-radar plan quietly in motion. And it actually works. Too bad years later it came back to bite us in the ass.

The film shows that Wilson successfully got the Soviets out of Afghanistan, but Congress ultimately rejected his plan for reconstruction. Our botched attempts at meddling in world affairs are once again made embarrassingly clear.

First and foremost, the film has a strange feeling about it. For a young person, it is unsettling and ironic to see the U.S. supplying Afghanistan with heavy-duty weapons, and hearing characters say things like “Kill the Russians!” It’s just a completely different world than we know today. The movie’s light and satirical tone also seems rather off-putting, given the serious implications these actions had and the grave consequences we now face. But, it’s a bid to take a cooler, more relaxed approach—shake things up a bit after dismal efforts like Rendition and Lions for Lambs failed to generate viewers at the box office. For this reason, audiences may be more open to appreciate it.

Aside from the global politics and eerie foreshadowing of things to come, the rest of the movie is not much to entertain. Hanks has fun playing the sleazy, womanizing-type, but it’s hard to figure out if Wilson truly cares about what he is doing or if he simply likes having power. It’s almost cocky the way he tells people how he increased the weapons budget, but then again he’s the one person who actually chooses to act and make a change.

Roberts plays Herring, the big-haired, heavily made-up Southern Christian with strong political convictions, a healthy knowledge of world affairs, and a fearlessness to speak her mind. Roberts fails to fully transform into this character, instead opting to pile on the wigs and costumes. She’s missing her familiar spark and spunk that would ...