IT sounds like a surefire hit for the Christmas movie season: bosomy showgirls snorting cocaine in a Las Vegas hot tub. A rowdy, Scotch-guzzling hedonist splashing in there with them. Oh, he’s also a congressman. Then there’s a rogue C.I.A. operative. Big names on the marquee: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman. All this, and the story is true. The problem isn’t the sex-and-drugs part, but that “Charlie Wilson’s War” is also about Afghanistan, military spending bills and kids with their arms blown off. A mere whiff of more depressing headlines out of the Middle East may be enough to drive some people home to watch a DVD of the Yule log.
“Charlie Wilson’s War” is not as didactic as many of the others and is set in a pre-9/11 world. Based on the late George Crile’s best seller, it is about a square-jawed Democratic congressman from Texas who used his seat on a military appropriations subcommittee during the 1980s to secretly steer more than a billion dollars to finance the mujahadeen rebellion in Afghanistan against the invading Soviet army.
(Speaking of skirt chasing, Mr. Nichols’s wife, Diane Sawyer of ABC News, dated Mr. Wilson decades ago. “They had dinner twice and she said: ‘He was crazy. I was scared,’” Mr. Nichols said. “I mean, she’d gone to Wellesley. Henry Kissinger was speedy for her.”)
Yet for all the horror, Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Nichols and Mr. Hanks — each a liberal Democrat — insist that their creation is, of all things, more a comedy than a political movie. “It’s a serious comedy,” Mr. Hanks said. “Funny stuff happens right next to horribly tragic stuff.” But how can anyone not think of Iraq? Mr. Wilson helped create a vacuum that was filled by the Taliban and Islamic extremists who later played a part in the terror of Sept. 11. In the movie, the blame for the Islamic ascendancy is not placed on the support for the Afghani warlords, but on the United States’ failure to maintain its aid to Afghanistan after the Soviet retreat.
And what is the audience supposed to think when this quotation from Mr. Wilson pops on the screen at the very end? “We change the world and then we leave” and mess up — the actual quote is saltier — “the endgame.”
And there are two references about how a government prosecutor at the time — the current Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani — tried to bring down Mr. Wilson on drug charges.It wasn’t a political gesture,” Mr. Sorkin said. “Honest to God, I wasn’t trying to put a thin mustache on Giuliani. I guess the fact that Giuliani was linked in this investigation, I thought if I could just toss it in, it’s an enjoyable reminder that this is a true story.” Insisting that the movie was not pushing a political point, he added: “This isn’t a sales job. I feel I’d be spraying Cheez Whiz on it by laying on top of it my own unsophisticated political views.”
Mr. Hanks, for one, is primed for any onslaught. “The Wall Street Journal and the like will come out, and they’ll criticize it or savage it, because we’re all a bunch of Democrats who are taking potshots at the war in Iraq,” Mr. Hanks said. “And the other side will say: ‘Boy, I wish we had politicians like Charlie Wilson in office now. I’ll trade in hard drinking for getting things done.’”
link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/movies/16berk.html?pagewanted=1