Thoughts on Charlie Wilson’s War

Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftist (and perhaps VFR’s only regular leftist reader), writes:

I’d be interested to see your resident movie critic Spencer Warren’s take on Charlie Wilson’s War. I had great expectations for it myself. Charlie Wilson was a hero of mine 20 years ago. Aaron Sorkin (the scriptwriter of the movie) did my favorite TV show, The West Wing. Mike Nichols (the director) did one of my favorite political movies, Primary Colors. I paid $23 to see it on the big screen last night. Ugh.

Tom Hanks does what he always does—he plays Tom Hanks the lovable goof. You don’t get a feel for Charlie Wilson the larger-than-life force of nature.

Here is the real Charlie Wilson. You can see him being 6 foot 7 with a big deep voice and dominating every room he was ever in. You can see him being staggering drunk by noon and getting more done in the rest of the day than most men do in a week. You can even (with a bit of imagination) see him going on cavalry charges with the mujahideen and cutting the ears off Russian soldiers to take home as trophies. With a bit of makeup, Tom Hanks manages a passing physical resemblance, but that’s as far as it goes.

But Aaron Sorkin and Mike Nichols are the real disappointments. They drained every bit of politics out of the story. The only nod to Wilson’s politics is where he says, once, “I’m a liberal,” but in a default-position, never-really-thought-about-it kind of way. The Philip Seymour Hoffman character says “Your biggest achievement as a six-term Congressman was getting re-elected five times.” And Tom Hanks agrees, saying he never cared about anything since he got to Congress, voted Yes with his buddies every time and as a result was owed a lot of favors. The guy who was the only pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-ERA congressman from Texas and didn’t care who knew it was written out of the story.

At the same time, the rabid Cold Warrior, the only liberal Democrat to support the Contras, was also written out. We’re supposed to believe the whole thing was motivated only because this lightweight who never gave foreign affairs a moment’s thought saw the human tragedy of the refugee camps firsthand and he did that only because one of his bimbos put a bug in his ear.

The best line in the movie wasn’t even planned that way. The Julia Roberts character is introducing Zia ul-Haq at a fundraiser. She promises to give a bland innocuous introduction and instead pounds the table and shouts “Zia ul-Haq did not kill Bhutto!” This was yesterday evening, the same day the Benazir Bhutto assassination story broke, and you could feel the chill hitting the whole theater audience.

- end of initial entry -

Mark K. writes:

Here is a better portrait of Charlie Wilson by someone who was a friend and worked with him.

Vincent Chiarello writes:

Signor Hechtman paid $23 to see a movie! Forget for a moment if the movie is good or bad, but doesn’t that cost for one (the number of tickets purchased is not clear) admission strike you a bit high?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2007 11:19 AM | Send