Cynical Cinema

Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman take on the Russia-Afghanistan war in Charlie Wilson’s War, a movie about a real-life American congressman named Charlie Wilson (Hanks), who virtually single-handedly provided the Afghan fighters with the weapons to destroy the Russians and drive them out of the country.  It’s a comedy-drama, where Hanks and Hoffman are hilarious together.  (Hoffman plays a senior CIA official who is about the most politically incorrect guy you would ever find in a political movie.  Charlie Wilson is a womanizing, drug-using, completely corrupt politician who all of a sudden finds a cause worth fighting for.  His office is great - his staff is just a bevy of hot young women (Amy Adams among them), he calls them, collectively, “jailbait”, and he sleeps with every hot woman who crosses his path.  One of these women is Julia Roberts, whose role in the film is pretty pointless, except to steer Wilson in the right direction.  After visiting a refugee camp populated by displaced Afghanis in Pakistan, Wilson steps up his efforts to help them out.  That help involves getting the freedom fighters weapons and training to be able to shoot down Russian planes and helicopters.

 One of the best things about Charlie Wilson’s War is that at the end of the movie, his crusade to help Afghanistan has not changed him as a person.  He is still a shallow playboy who sleeps with all kinds of hot women.  That is nice to see.  In fact, at one point a scandal involving a Playboy model and some cocaine threatens to derail him, and the point is made - if the press hears “strippers and Playboy models and cocaine”, then they will be so focussed on that, that they will completely ignore anything that is being done elsewhere in the House of Representatives.  As long as that scandal is at the forefront, Wilson can do anything he wants, policy-wise, and no one will pay any attention.  Which is how he plans to get the money to help Afghanistan.  This is actually a great idea for a movie in itself - a politician creates his own sex-and-drugs scandal in order to push forward policies that are controversial!  It could be a pretty cool movie, on the level of a Bulworth or some such thing.  Think about it, Hollywood!

And that is one of the biggest criticisms I have of Charlie Wilson’s War.  It is very Hollywood.  So many details are glossed over.  Julia Roberts exists only because she is a hot chick with a marquee name.  This issue is a complex one - the Russians can’t know (for sure) that it is the Americans who are arming the mujahadeen, because this could tip off a real American-Russian war.  So Hanks has to get Russian-made weapons from Israel, ship them to Pakistan, at which point they can be handed over to the Afghanis such that they can fight.  In the meantime, tensions between Israel and both Pakistan and Afghanistan are escalating, and the CIA is training the mujahadeen.  (We don’t see Osama Bin Laden here - thank God, it would have been just too heavy-handed.)  When the movie is over, it all seems so simple.  Perhaps that’s the idea.  For the US to do the right thing, all it would really take is one congressman with an agenda and the tenacity to see it through.  So we are then to assume that there is not one congressman in Washington today who has the fortitude or the balls to do something about Rwanda, or Darfur, or what have you?  That may well be the point of this movie.  But it’s pretty devoid of substance.

The end of the movie is a celebration of American ingenuity and the capacity of one man to change the world.  However, it is also a cautionary tale of what happens when you change the world and then just up and leave.  I think we all know what happened with the freedom fighters in Afghanistan.  They became the Taliban, they became Al Quaeda, and they used their CIA training to attack the United States.  The movie assumes we know this, and I guess we do.  And this is the only moment in the movie that has the ring of relevance today.  I would have loved to delve more into the slow germination of the anti-US sentiment that was going on with these people at the same time that they were being armed and trained by the US.  The collision between high-minded, idealistic US foreign policy, and the inept implementation of that policy that results in the hatred spewed toward America throughout the world.  But Charlie Wilson’s War is more content to show Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman bantering.  Which is funny, and entertaining, but it really isn’t enough to make this movie great.  (Although I will say this - as far as movies about Afghanistan go, this one is miles above Rambo III.)