The new Mike Nichols film, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” is ninety-seven minutes long. Into that time, it packs political machination, helicopter gunships, single-malt whiskey, Las Vegas, Islamabad, naked butts, and eight years of war. The film, adapted from George Crile’s book, doesn’t always work, but it sure offers value for money. One reason for this economy is that Nichols has paired up for the first time with Aaron Sorkin, late of “The West Wing,” whose scripts operate on the principle that there is no affair of state, however tangled or burdensome, that cannot be breezed through at a brisk dramatic pace. That breeze is enviable (you feel it in an idealist like Capra, as well as in a cynic like Preston Sturges), but it comes with a risk: watch too much TV, relish the ease and aplomb of a movie like “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and you may start to wish—even to believe—that all government can be run this way, with so little friction and such style.
Charles Wilson was, until 1996, a Democratic congressman for the Second Congressional District in Texas. Nichols’s film gets going in 1980, when this upstanding representative of the people found himself in hot water. Up to his neck in it, to be exact, with a Playboy cover girl and a couple of friendly strippers sharing the soak. This, we understand, was a standard night out for Wilson (Tom Hanks), whose tireless, nonpartisan research into the bottle and the boudoir stood him in good stead for the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee on which he sat. Early in the film, we see him swivel around in his hot tub to catch a Dan Rather report on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It’s a neat image—too neat, perhaps, verging on the flip—for the two tones of Wilson’s personality, presented by Nichols and Sorkin as a sly response to our current political leadership. Instead of blameless puritans who drop the ball when required to act, we find, in Wilson, the reckless gadabout who gets things done. That’s the idea, at any rate. What Nichols has made is not a romantic comedy set in the political world; it’s a vision—hopelessly unrealistic, but lit with hopeful fun—of politics itself as a game of comic romance.
Wilson is approached by Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a pro-Pakistani Texan hostess (how many of those do you know?), with millions to burn. “I’m a liberal,” he tells her. “Not where it counts,” she replies. An unusual combination of bombshell and firebrand, she seduces Charlie—never an arduous task—into visiting the refugee camps on the Pakistan border, to which the embattled Afghans have fled. He has already ramped up the American contribution to the Afghan cause from five million dollars to a princely ten. By the end of the movie, it has risen to a billion. From here on, Wilson is a sinner with a cause and a sidekick: a bullish C.I.A. agent by the name of Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), with a dipping gut, a pair of smoked spectacles, and a mustache that you could trim only with a weed whacker. The two of them get along famously: “You’re an awfully easy man to like, Congressman,” Avrakotos says over the phone.
Nichols has a problem here, in that, ever since Hoffman slid over the hood of a car in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” he has developed a habit of bursting into well-behaved movies and taking them hostage. That’s not to call him a grandstander; he isn’t like Anthony Quinn, say, munching the scenery and bellowing other actors off the soundstage. Hoffman’s first scene, in the new film, is a shouting match with his boss at the agency, except that he doesn’t shout. The words just stream lethally out of him, in his clipped baritone, and within seconds we have our man—not that we will ever know him, for the guy is a spook, but we feel the indubitable brunt of his presence. He’s just there, fully formed and utterly convincing, like a clerk or a cavalryman in a Russian novel, and, as he plants himself foursquare in Wilson’s office, hands in pockets, you find yourself laughing at the solid rush of truth. Even a pro like Hanks, rooted in congeniality, is forced to raise his game.
That office scene is, by some distance, the most enjoyable thing in the picture. For one thing, it’s a dovetail: Wilson is snared in a sex-and-drugs scandal, and he’s trying to limit the damage with the help of his female assistants (whom he addresses en masse as “jailbait”), while simultaneously questioning Avrakotos about covert military aid. Doors open and shut, blondes rotate with redheads, and somehow, in the midst of the farce, plans are set in train that will eventually lead to the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan. If the notion of war being sparked by a character clash is purest Nichols, then war as war—as cruelty and privation—is another country, and, as he showed in “Catch-22,” back in 1970, it leaves him cold and panicked. The glimpses of actual combat in “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with gun-turret shots of Afghan villages being strafed, are a joke: not black comedy but random stabs at an action movie, whipped along with upbeat music, from an intimist director who is far happier finding dirty laughs in a closed room. The title of Nichols’s last film, “Closer,” could stand for his whole career, and to watch a couple of charmers like Hanks and Julia Roberts play postcoital patty-cake with their schedules and schemes is a civilizing joy, even if the actual coitus is kind of hard to imagine. Make love, then war: it’s a provoking combination, and few could have foretold what would finally emerge from Charlie Wilson’s war, with its triumphant Afghan tribes and, among them, a battle-schooled bin Laden. “Let’s see,” Avrakotos says repeatedly. There is something in Hanks’s quizzical face, in the movie’s final frame, that hints at unintended troubles still to come.
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/12/24/071224crci_cinema_lane/
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