Hanks, Hoffman carry story of rogue congressman
Published 6:04 pm Friday, December 21, 2007
An obscure but influential piece of modern history comes to light in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the light-footed new Tom Hanks vehicle.
Hanks, who also produced the film, plays Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, an unheroic fellow who finds himself in a heroic position. The film shows the ways that Wilson managed to fund covert CIA arms shipments to Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the country was invaded by the Soviet Union.
What makes this work dramatically — and surely must have appealed to Hanks about playing this character — is that Wilson was hardly the do-gooder type. After a brief prologue, we meet Wilson in 1980, sitting in a hot tub with a naked Playboy cover girl and glugging the first of many cocktails.
How this party boy became a committed player in the war that finally broke the back of the Soviet Union makes for a tale of some irony. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”) and director Mike Nichols are both experienced at this kind of thing, so the movie has a confident swagger.
It’s funny that Sorkin and Nichols haven’t worked on a film before, because they’re both so adept at long, intricate passages of dialogue. This film hits an early peak in Wilson’s office, as the congressman manages two emerging crises by shuffling people in and out of the room.
In fact, much of the film is really funny, which — let’s be honest — most films about Congress are not.
Key players in Wilson’s saga include a conservative Texas moneybags (Julia Roberts) who raises funds incessantly for the anti-communist cause, and an abrasive longtime CIA operative (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
In this collection of Oscar-winners, the dyed-blond Roberts is somewhat lost — but to be fair, her character isn’t given as many good scenes or lines as Hoffman, who knocks this one out of the park.
It’s always easy to underrate Hanks, because he doesn’t seem to be working hard, but of course that’s his secret. Even if his image has gotten sufficiently wholesome that we can’t really buy the roguish hot-tubber Wilson, Hanks nicely navigates the changes in his hedonistic character.
The film’s breezy approach leaves room to wonder about how legal all this CIA maneuvering actually was, a subject that doesn’t come up too often. Only at the end of the film, as Wilson tries to persuade the government to build infrastructure in postwar Afghanistan, does the movie allude to the fallout that might come from the CIA training.
“Charlie Wilson’s War” doesn’t grind too many axes; in fact, if anything it’s a little too soft. But it delightfully succeeds in its central idea: that sometimes history is written by Scotch-swilling playboys who do the right thing.
