Charlie Wilson's War: Movie Review (2007)

Directed by Mike Nichols, written by Aaron Sorkin, 97 minutes, rated R.

The new Mike Nichols movie, "Charlie Wilson’s War," takes us back to the Middle East, this time Afghanistan, where the mood is light in spite of the blood being spilled by the Soviet Army.

Based on a true story and set in 1980, just after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the film follows Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), the Democratic senator from Texas who finds himself being urged to help the Afghani people by one Joanna Herring (Julia Roberts), a right-wing Houston socialite whose claim to fame, at least at the time, is that she was the sixth richest person in Texas.

That’s quite a distinction to have, and Roberts plays her accordingly — her Joanna is all arched eyebrows, cinched suits and blonde hair the size of the National Forest (though one assumes beneath all that hairspray, it would be difficult to find a renewable resource).

Since her character also is Charlie’s part-time lover — he has a lot of those, most of whom he meets in hot tubs filled with cocaine-snorting strippers — Charlie feels the pressure to move forward with her request.

After all, money is money, and since Joanna has plenty of it, the idea that Charlie might one day be without it is unthinkable. Best to do what his major donors demand of him. In this case, it meant raising the funds necessary to supply the Mujahedeen with the guns they needed to eliminate the Russians from Afghanistan.

Of course, history tells us that by doing so, Wilson essentially supported those who formed al-Qaida, but hey — what did he know? He was just working for the woman and, after visiting one of the Afghani outpost camps where he comes face-to-face with the dead, dismembered and dying, it’s also true that he was working to do what he believed was right. The Soviets needed to be stopped. With the help of his assistant Bonnie (Amy Adams) — not to mention CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman, excellent), who had the sort of critical insight and connections Wilson otherwise lacked — Wilson raised more than $1 billion in secret CIA funding to help shut the Soviets down.

The film, which Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing") based on George Crile’s book, is appealingly limber, a war movie with winks. It’s as comfortable darting around the bombs tossed at swank cocktail parties as it is dodging those tossed overseas.

After the dark, biting banter that drove Nichols’ last film, "Closer," "Charlie Wilson’s War" is akin to a playground. The writing is just as intelligent, but nobody is stung by the words.

This is a movie in which Hoffman’s Avrakotos can go berserk in his superior’s office, smashing windows and hurling insults, but the scene plays for comedy — there’s no danger to it. It’s also a movie that has a good sense for the times, but which sees them as less dire than the situation we’re in now. It condescends to the past, true, but the film’s complication is that it also has great affection for it, likely because it views those days as simpler than the worldwide mess we’re in now. The emphasis on this war, after all, is personalized, and what Charlie Wilson learns from it could change the world now.

Grade: B+