Tommy Hanks vs the Commies

Charlie Wilson's War proclaims itself to be a black comedy. It's the kind of film that one can easily mistake to be a big, important Hollywood film. It is helmed by a big and important name, Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe, Working Girl), has big important A Listers in the cast namely Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, written by the same guy who used to write for West Wing and attempts to give us a look at a hugely important aspect of recent history...How USA got involved in Afghanistan. With this kind of package you don't expect anything less than a savagely brutal and ironic to boot indictment of the burning issue of American involvement in Afghanistan today.

Too bad despite its appearances. Charlie Wilson's War has no teeth. The film opens with Senator Charlie Wilson getting commended by some committee for his part in winning the cold war. In attendance are a happy looking Julia Roberts in a peroxide wig and Philip Seymour Hoffman nodding approvingly in his ruggy moustache. Then the scenes cut to 1979, and how images of Afghan refugees on TV catches the attention of Charlie Wilson nestling with naked girls in a hot tub. From thereon, the films rushes on to one significant plot point to the next. Charlie Wilson, a consummate hedonistic playboy of a senator that he is and is never short of providing witty one liners, gets to be more Tom Hanks than Charlie Wilson. Despite his extracurricular activities, Charlie gets the time to meet with important dignitaries, our very own Zia-ul-Haq (played with apt restraint by Om Puri) included, and visit Afghan refugee camps near Peshawer and is visibly grieved and angry with the amount of help the Afghan resistance is getting. So the main crux of the film has Charlie Wilson lobbying for more supply and help for the Afghans and weaves a harebrained idea of Pakistan and Israel working together against the Evil Soviet Empire. And the means by which he gets this working looks like coming straight out of a boy's adventure tale, belly dancers flown in from Texas to Cairo, verbal arm twisting of officials et al.

The timeline of the film jumps dizzily by years and years til it goes from 1979 to 1988 within the span of less than hour and a half. At the end of it, all feels rather hollow. The complex nature of this extended episode of the cold war gets an airbrush treatment and the ramifications it has in the current times is given a lip service by the Philip Seymour Hoffman character warning there will be consequences if the American government doesn't help the war torn country.

70s and the 80s saw great war films made on Vietnam which were as complex and serious as the conflict itself, Platoon and Apocalypse Now come readily to mind. Another similar conflict in a more cynical age gets a comic book treatment. Maybe it is still too soon to start making films about the war on terror or anything pertinent to it. Lets wait for the wind to blow over and then maybe we will see another era of good and honest war films.