Notes on Charlie Wilson’s War

? If Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks had wanted to make a screwball comedy about modern American covert operations that was also a not-so-covert commentary on the current war in Iraq, Charlie Wilson’s War would have been it.

? Yes, sir—killing Russians has never been such a gas. And to think Mike Nichols ( Primary Colors ), Aaron Sorkin ( The West Wing ), and Tom Hanks ( Forrest Gump ) are the one’s throwing the party.

? Not so hard to believe: We all know that the old Soviet Union was just horrible, and that the Cold War against left-wing fascism was a bipartisan effort. (Your laugh here.)

? In 1980, under the Carter regime, the United States was throwing chump change at the problem of Soviet helicopters blowing men, women, and children to pieces in Afghanistan until “Good Time” Charlie Wilson, representative from the second congressional district in Texas, happened to see Dan Rather (remember him?) dressed in Afghan garb among the Mujahideen on TV. The Afghan fighters were complaining of a lack of era-appropriate weaponry to fend off the communist invaders. Let it be known that Mr. Wilson was in a hot tub full of Vegas strippers as he watched Mr. Rather, a night on the town that would come back to haunt him when none other than Rudolph Giuliani, then a prosecutor, was going after corrupt congressmen.

? Giuliani fails to make charges of coke-sniffing stick, so Charlie is free to call in his IOUs and raise the covert-ops budget for Afghanistan, first from $5 million to ten, then from ten to, oh, a billion. Literally. A billion dollars.

? Throw in a wealthy Texan who love Jesus, hates communists, and comes with her own exegetical tools regarding the prohibition against fornication (Julia Roberts); the Democratic chairman of the foreign-relations subcommittee who hates the Islamic fundies almost as much as he hates the commies (Ned Beatty) but comes to see the light, old softie that he is; and a CIA operative who has something on everyone, curses like a Hollywood actor, and has all the tact of a suicide bomber—and the Soviets do not have a chance.

? Said CIA agent is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who appears in three films this year: Before the Devil Know You’re Dead , The Savages , and this one. While it appears that he is constitutionally incapable of giving a bad performance, there is always the risk that his career will go the way of DeNiro’s (into that dark night of irrelevancy) if he doesn’t scratch off a few commitments in the old DayPlanner.

? And then there’s Tom Hanks, who breezes through his performance like Jimmy Cagney doing a soft shoe with a machine gun in his hands. It’s hard to tell who’s having more fun here, Hanks or the audience. Sorkin has handed him a doozy of a screenplay, based on the bestselling book by George Crile. I never read the book, so either Sorkin preserved the most ironic and risible parts of Wilson’s/Crile’s story, or he enhanced them, as the screenplay glides effortlessly from one machination to another with all the zest and pinpoint accuracy of a spanking new Stinger anti-aircraft missile—supplied, by the way, in bulk by the Israelis to support Muslim Afghanistan. (Seems Charlie, though a self-described liberal, was also pro-Israel. This was 1980, after all . . . )

? Despite the sometimes farcical tone of much of this film, Nichols & Co. play it straight when depicting the despicable tactics used by the Soviets: disguising IEDs as toys, which left countless children maimed and dismembered—and also forcing entire families out of Afghanistan across the border to refugee camps in Pakistan. Soviet MiG fighters are pictured engaging in banal chatter about girlfriend problems as they rain bullets on fleeing Afghan civilians. No, the Soviets are definitely the bad guys . . . but . . .

? Before you think Hollywood has gone soft, there’s a spanking coming, about U.S. intervention in other people’s fights: We import our ideals—and then we leave. “We always leave. And the ball keeps bouncing,” Charlie tells another appropriations committee from whom he’s trying to wring a scant $1 million for new schools in the now Russian-free Afghanistan. All those kids who fled Afghanistan with their families to Pakistan are going to come flooding back into the country and witness the devastation that the atheistic Soviets have wrought—without any idea that it was an American covert operation that saved their country. Who is going to fill that education/indoctrination vacuum? One guess—and it ain’t Scholastic.

? And there is the obligatory lecture about American evangelicals and their nonsecular war talk. Americans don’t wage holy wars, we are reminded. To be fair, the point, while obvious, is well taken and not nearly as strident as it would have been in other hands.

? Critics have noted that Americans suffer political lessons only when sugar-coated, explaining the failure of such films as Rendition, Lions for Lambs , and In the Valley of Elah . It also helps if the films aren’t tendentious, pretentious, self-righteous, and dull.

? Yes, the U.S. government comes across as clumsy and comic and crude—but not without genuine compassion when face-to-face with genuine suffering. It is also superlatively effective in achieving its desired goals when focused, determined, and united.

? All told, Nichols & Co. have provided about as “balanced” (if not very original or profound) interpretation of American political prowess wedded to an ideological confusion as we can expect from a very unbalanced Hollywood: Everyone wants to get reelected, almost no one is clean, and very few learn from history.

? But we wouldn’t live anywhere else.

? Amen. Er, sorry. Righty-o.