| CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007) : M.Nichols : 5/10 |
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Danny Peary once described Robert Altman's M*A*S*H as "the rare Hollywood anti-war movie to make money when America was itself at war." Nearly four decades on, Charlie Wilson's War has pulled off a similar feat. Despite the title, it isn't really a "war movie", of course, (there are brief scenes of battle, some of them quite intense) let alone an "anti-war" statement, and the focus is very much on jaw-jaw political machinations in Washington DC, a milieu familiar from writer Sorkin's work on The American President and TV's The West Wing. It's here that one Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), an obscure Texas congressman who happens to serve on a particularly powerful defence-appropriations committe, emerges as the pivotal figure in the US's clandestine arming of the Mujahadeen - the Afghani "freedom fighters" who resisted what they perceived (with some justification) as invading forces from the Soviet Union. It is based on actual events, even if the tale comes across here as rather outlandishly unlikely. Indeed, if Charlie Wilson's War is to be believed, Wilson was the main - if inadvertent - architect of the USSR's collapse. And, though this is relatively downplayed, the rise of Al'Qaida. In truth, Wilson doesn't really deserve quite so much credit for the former, nor so much blame for the latter - and the picture's exaggerations, though distracting, are pretty much par for the Hollywood course (this is, despite the ambitious topicality of its themes, essentially a fairly old-fashioned kind of star vehicle.) Sorkin and director Mike Nichols' basic idea - presenting multiplex audiences with a palatable recent-history lesson - is sound, even admirable. In execution, however, the movie itself only fitfully lives up to its lofty ambitions. What is clearly intended to be a sophisticated, snazzy, savvy affair is instead oddly shapeless, sparkleless and forgettable (it's only a fortnight since I saw the picture, and very little of it remains vivid in my mind.) Of course, it's part of the point of the script that the jokey DC shenanigans should be in stark contrast to the horrors on the ground over in Afghanistan - but at times the juxtapositions between the two verge on the tastelessly glib. It doesn't help that Hanks is somewhat miscast as Wilson, a hard-living, hard-drinking, buccaneering ladies' man who, as several critics have already noted, would be much more accurately incarnated by Jack Nicholson (star of Nichols' 1994 lycanthrope flop Wolf) sometime around his late-forties raffish post-prime. Luckily Philip Seymour Hoffman is on hand to perk things up as Gus Avrakatos, the colourful, sardonic, decidedly unglamorous CIA operative who proves crucial to Wilson's manoeuvrings. This is an enjoyably vivid turn that gives proceedings much-needed pep, though Hoffman's Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor seems somewhat generous - having snubbed the actor for so scandalously long, AMPAS now seems consumed by a collective fit of overcompensatory contrition and largesse. That said, the Academy proved, sensibly, much less taken with Charlie Wilson's War than their counterparts in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who unaccountably showered nominations on the movie. Well, maybe not so unaccountably... Rather wanly channelling Faye Dunaway, a wobbly-accented Julia Roberts plays Joanne Herring, a staunchly right-wing Texan millionairess (it's never clear, by the way, whether Wilson is a Republican or a Democrat - in fact, like Nichols, he's the latter.) Early on, Herring assembles a documentary trumpeting one of her pet reactionary causes. When her sometime paramour Wilson comments on its technical rough edges, Herring replies that she isn't aiming for a "Golden Globe". Surely such a character, at such a historical juncture (even in a film that's distractingly fuzzy on chronological signifiers), would have been much more likely to mention the Oscars instead? An odd bit of dialogue, to say the least. If Sorkin was aiming to curry favour with the HFPA, the ploy clearly paid dividends - boosting Charlie Wilson's War and perhaps even helping it at the box office. Indeed, this has become that rare current movie to tackle (even obliquely) current middle-eastern politics - the film's historical ironies become increasingly savage and glib - and still score at the box-office. Where the furrowed-brow likes of Rendition, In the Valley of Elah and Lions For Lambs have stumbled, Charlie Wilson's War, flaws and all, has (relatively speaking) triumphed. Sugared pills, it seems, still go down smoothest. Neil Young 23.Jan.08 -------------------------------------------------------------------- USA 99m (BBFC timing) director : Mike Nichols (Closer, Primary Colors, The Birdcage, etc) editors : John Bloom & Antonia Van Drimmelen (Notes On a Scandal, Closer, Shaft [2000], etc) seen 8.Jan.08 Newcastle (Empire cinema : press show) |
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