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Charlie Wilson's War**
*ing: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Directed by Mike Nichols
Tagline: A stiff drink.A little mascara. A lot of nerve.Who said
they couldn't bring down the Soviet Empire
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In
a secret CIA ceremony in the 1990s, a Democratic Party Congressman
from Texas is being honoured for his role in delivering a "lethal
body blow to Communism." The agency is celebrating the "defeat
and break-up of the Soviet Union" - one of the "great events
of the 20th Century."
So begins the new Mike Nichols movie, Charlie Wilson's War. Starring
Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the film bills
itself as the real story of how in the 1980s, a hedonistic politician,
Charlie Wilson (Hanks), conspires with an extreme right-wing Houston
socialite, Joanne Herring (Roberts), and an untamed CIA agent, Gust
Avrakotos (Hoffman), to conduct the largest US covert operation in
history: the securing of money and weapons for the fight of the Afghan
"freedom fighters" against the Soviet army.
Nicholas's film, saturated with ferocious anti-communism, is a defense
of neo-colonialism and the right of American "democracy"
to intervene wherever it likes around the globe. And in some ways
it is an eye opener. All the congressional dealings and the power
US congressmen and senators have is mind boggling. Third world senators
are barely able to push around a few million dollars, while their
US equivalents are dealing in the billions.
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But
of course we know that Charlie Wilson and America never thought of
the consequences (or more likely, didn't care) of directing billions
of dollars worth of arms and training thousands of mujahideen. Charlie's
War not only drove the Russians out of Aghanistan, but destroyed both
Afghanistan and almost Pakistan in the process. If you are of Afghani
or Pakistani origin Charlie Wilson's War will make you angry.
No reasonable person expects a film, any film, to capture the intricacy
of real events with absolute accuracy; adaptations are translations,
and as the old Italian saying goes, "The translator is a traitor."
It's one thing to compress, combine and fictionalize a story to fit
the sprawling, ugly mess of it onto the big screen; it's another to
take only the best, shiniest parts of a real, ugly story and turn
it into a feel-good comedy. Translation may be treacherous, but Charlie
Wilson's War feels like a conscious act of treason against reason
itself. As film critic David Thompson has said, "We learn our
history from movies, and history suffers." Charlie Wilson's War
isn't just bad history, it is even more harmful; a conscious attempt
to induce memory loss. |
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Congressman
Charlie Wilson had as much fun with his position as you could, which
was a lot and the film focuses on that. So we see Charlie hot-tubbing
in a Vegas hotel suite, the room's full of booze, broads and blow.
But Charlie, played by Tom Hanks, can't look away from the news, as
one of his new acquaintances notes her apathy to world events, Charlie
boils it down: "Dan Rather's wearing a turban; you don't want
to know why?"
Dan Rather is in a turban because he's in Afghanistan, among the Afghan
mujahideen, the Islamic rebels trying to drive the Soviet Union out
of their country by any means necessary. This sight sparks something
in Charlie, so he sets out to increase CIA's funding for the Afghan
rebels, from 5 million dollars a year to 10.
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Charlie's desire to help puts him in contact with other likeminded
Americans, like Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Houston socialite
whose Christian beliefs mean she'll support anyone against the Godless
communists, and Gust Avrakotos (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a CIA man
who's not a company man. Joanne and Gust can't imagine anything worse
than the Soviets capturing Afghanistan, and they work with Charlie,
funneling money and arms through Pakistan, working with a motley crew
of arms dealers, spies, Saudi billionaires, Pakistan's military dictator
and other interested parties. Eventually, the covert funding to help
the mujahideen, with no Congressional oversight outside of closed
committees, was as high as a billion dollars a year in the name of
expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan.
And Charlie Wilson's War makes all that ugliness look like great fun,
hard-drinking, gladhand gestures. It may be so for the, but it is
sneaky spy stuff for anyone in this part of the world. What isn't
on screen in Charlie Wilson's War is any mention of the fact that
the Afghan mujahideen became the Taliban, or how the Afghan mujahideen
were helped in their cause by the Afghan Arabs who later became Al-Qaeda.
That has to be the miss of the century as far as cinema is concerned.
The finale is a closing quote from Charlie, " we f***ed up the
endgame" seems to imply that Mr. Wilson's actions led to 9/11,
but the link remains vague. There are fewer and fewer students of
history nowadays; more people will see this film than will ever read
George Crile's book. And while Charlie Wilson's War notes that Wilson
and his crew goofed up the 'endgame', what it doesn't quite acknowledge
is that for thousands of Afghans who suffered under the Taliban and
the armed forces of America and her allies in Afghanistan, it wasn't,
and isn't, a game. It's a reality that gets harsher by the minute.
Instead of acknowledging that, Nichols offers us champagne-sparkle
charm and whimsy. If a film really wants to tackle the covert actions
of the Cold War and their long-term consequences, it needs to provide
short sharp shots of truth as raw as straight up whiskey, one after
the other. We get the busy boozy buzz of Charlie's crusade; what Nichols
has done is eliminated the historical hangover of unintended consequences.
Charlie Wilson's War is timid where it should be reckless, clever
where it should be cutting, funny where it should be fierce.
"Zia ul Haq did not kill Bhutto." Those words are spoken
by Julia Roberts introducing the new President of Pakistan. That Charlie
Wilson's War was released after Benazir Bhutto's assassination bears
testimony as to how relevant those events remain to Pakistan's reality.
Charlie Wilson's War should have been a film about how every event
has consequences, and how one good thing does not necessarily mean
everything is hunky dory in the long run. But it is a decadent portrayal
of an American Congressman and his cronies who decided to play God.
To top it off, the film is historically inaccurate. During the '80s
everyone knew the US was fighting a proxy war in Afghanistan. During
the Cold War era, the US was not going to allow Soviet influence to
spread uncontested. Charlie Wilson's War would have us believe that
Wilson was solely responsible for our covert operations over there.
This simply isn't true. He may well have organized the political effort,
but if he didn't, someone else would have. Not to mention, that the
film makes it seem like all the rebels needed was stinger missles
and overnight they were saved; in fact there's a lag time of about
eight years, and they received a lot more help than just the ability
to shoot down choppers.
However, the OTT Charlie Wilson claims credit for everything in this
film. And he does this while drinking to excess and partying with
strippers. He even gets out of an ethics jam when a witness claims
he snorted cocaine in the Caymans, outside of the Justice Dept jurisdiction
(in a case brought by then federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani). When
he goes to Pakistan to meet with the new President (Zia), and later
to a Peshawar refugee camp, he is spurred to action.
There is little opportunity here to give the devil his due. Some of
the scenes are amusing, for example one in which he deals with a rich
Christian diehard who tries to get Wilson to support the placing of
religious icons in public venues. However, considering the glittering
calibre of talent on screen and behind the camera, Charlie Wilson's
War is a disappointment. We haven't really spoken about the performances
in the film, because they're largely irrelevant. Hanks is miscast
as a Texan; Roberts is, as always, herself; Hoffman gets to rage,
but his character's deeper doubts are shoved off-screen for wacky
globetrotting adventures on the part of Hanks and Roberts.
This movie wants to be a funny, yet cautionary political satire but
just winds up as a waste of Hollywood resource. Nichols peppers the
film with sex, beautiful women, booze and smoking, in a desperate
effort to make it seem subversive and carefree, but it's all too carefully
calculated. The film plays with scene after scene of talk, talk, talk,
while Nichols makes sure the actors are sitting in really interesting
rooms. Indeed, the entire story is passed back and forth through the
mouths of characters, rather than anything visual, and the key scene,
in which the Americans visit the Afghani refugee camp nearly blows
the whole deal; it looks like a Hollywood backlog with well-fed extras
dressed in robes. And it just doesn't strike a chord for us who know
what Afghan refugees actually looked like.
Although Nichols is legendary for his skill with actors, the problem
is that in his latest work the performers are required to derive inspiration
from a script that is untruthful and deliberately constrained. That
is a problem. How are actors to present short visioned reactionary
people as intriguing, even progressive? How is one to empathize with
an individual who includes a hated, brutal ruler as part of his inner
circle? And what about transforming a twisted, bloodthirsty CIA agent
and a fundamentalist aristocrat into political role models? On the
other hand, no effort is spared to portray the film's only Russian
characters, two pilots who engage in banter as they prepare to shoot
down Afghans, as heartless brutes.
It's difficult even for someone with Nichols' talents to bring together
the image of a rebellious, good-hearted lawmaker with that of a conspiratorial
law-breaker whose actions have led to a nightmare for the Afghan,
Pakistani and American people. Nichols ends his movie with a comment
from Wilson on screen: "These things happened. They were glorious
and they changed the world. And the people who deserved the credit
are the ones who made the sacrifice. And then we f***ed up the endgame."
Of what use such allusion when as history, Charlie Wilson's War is
a travesty? Nichols and his screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, have made
an effort to take advantage of the general low level of historical
knowledge to transform an imperialist provocation into a fight for
freedom. The film ludicrously claims the US intervention in Afghanistan
owes its origins to a hot tub in Las Vegas from which Wilson, playing
around with strippers and call girls, sees a television broadcast
of Dan Rather in the Afghanistan. In its effort to glorify Charlie
Wilson as the savior of the Afghan people, who are scarcely present
in the film, the film omits a few inconvenient facts.
The maverick congressman came onto the scene well after the Democratic
administration of Jimmy Carter had decided to give financial and military
support to the Islamists engaged in guerilla warfare against the Soviet-backed
regime in Kabul, which had come to power in a military coup in 1978.
This preceded the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979.The Carter
regime, which hoped a war in Afghanistan would be the USSR's Vietnam,
began funding and arming the most right-wing fundamentalists, the
ancestors of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Neither does the film
mention that Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, was an enthusiastic
promoter of the fundamentalists and that his CIA director, William
Casey, is deserving of the title "founding father" of Al–Qaeda
for his campaign of globally recruiting Islamic militants to come
to Afghanistan to fight the anti-Communist cause. (Carter's national
security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski gloated in a 1998 interview that
some "stirred-up Moslems" were a small price to pay for
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the Cold War.")
Far from being an unsung champion as Nichols would have it, Wilson
was a pawn on the global chessboard, a bagman for those responsible
for nearly two decades of civil war and the destruction of Afghan
society.
The unseriousness and dishonesty of the Nichols-Sorkin project are
breathtaking. The film's publicists dreamt up this crude tagline:
"A stiff drink. A little mascara. A lot of nerve. Who said they
couldn't bring down the Soviet empire?"
Charlie Wilson's War is not simply a justification of the Afghan operation;
it can be interpreted as a blank check for any present and future
military action by the US.
As far as one can make out, Nichols is making an argument along these
lines: Wilson was something of a disreputable figure, some of his
associates were even worse, but, in the end, their collective effort
resulted in a positive development.
Nichols explained in an interview posted at thedeadbolt.com, he was
drawn to the project by the unlikely manner in which people's liabilities,
or elements of them, become assets: "And it is what finally draws
you to most drama, which is that it's the unexpected things about
people, in fact in life, even. The unexpected things that seem to
be drawbacks that are somehow transformed into the better qualities."
This is so absurd. Not every unexpected outcome is possible. A pencil
can't become a carrot. An operation that began as an illegal political
provocation, aimed at advancing US geopolitical interests, couldn't
be transformed into a struggle for any people's freedom. Hollywood
has turned a sharp-toothed, snarling real story into a neutered, nuzzling
house pet. Ultimately the film offers the bright glare of star power
instead of any real illumination and as far as comedies go, Charlie
Wilson's War stops being funny when you realize we're living in the
sequel.
– Saba Sartaj K
*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOME |
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