Charlie Wilson’s War: A Breeze of Change

This may seem impossible, but before this, I had only seen one Julia Roberts movie in my life. Yes, I’ve seen Hook, Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12, but those aren’t really Julia Roberts movies I loved Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but that’s a Sam Rockwell movie. I’ve managed to avoid Pretty Woman, Notting Hill and I Love Trouble. I saw Erin Brockovich, and thought that just about any actress working today could have won an Oscar in that flashy role.

In Charlie Wilson’s War, her biggest accomplishment was disturbing me by combing her eyelashes with a safety pin so close-up that I missed the entirety of her dialog. Suffice to say she was pitching the central plot of the film to Tom Hanks at the time. I’m particularly squeamish about eye stuff to the point where I refuse contact lenses, so I didn’t particularly need to see this unfortunate fact of life for the heavily made-up Texas socialite crowd. Other than that, she’s just kind of… there. With an almost undetectable southern tint in her voice, she floats through her supporting role without much in the way of effort.

Not that the script calls for much of it. A watered-down Aaron Sorkin script still works on his greatest strength - amusing and occasionally quirky exchanges between interesting and likable characters - but it doesn’t demand a lot of the actors involved. Tom Hanks is his usual affable self, covered up with debauchery and a drawl as Representative Charlie Wilson, who uses his unlikely positions of committee power to leverage funding for covert machinations in late-1980s Afghanistan in order to drive out the evil Commies. The Russians were indeed being evil, raining helicopter-death on refugee camps throughout the country, and thanks to Wilson’s efforts to give them weapons, the Afghans were able to force the Russians out of their country. The original script apparently made much more of the connection between these events and the eventual rise of the Taliban, but the film essentially sums it up with Philip Seymour Hoffman saying “now that the Russians are gone, the crazies are moving in.”

Hoffman’s disenchanted CIA spy Gust Avrakotos is easily the best thing about the film, as he picks up this cause because he’s been screwed out of the job he’d been planning to get and just didn’t have anything going on. Hoffman is a natural for acerbic Sorkin dialog, and he plays grizzled hardass with perfect know-it-all bitterness.

It does end appropriately enough with the notion that the only reason those crazies got their foothold is because once the Russians were gone, America stopped caring about Afghanistan and Wilson couldn’t do anything about rebuilding the infrastructure, which is an obvious parallel to current events both in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, by the time this point is made, the movie has spent most of its time being breezy and cute, and thus it just doesn’t have the punch it needs.