Making Love and War Together

It may at first seem surprising that “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the new film written by Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”) and directed by Mike Nichols, is being slotted into the media’s narrative about the box-office failure of a number of recent movies about the Iraq war. After all, this film is set decades ago and concerns itself with a completely different war: the one occasioned by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.No matter. According to Richard L. Berke in the New York Times, “a mere whiff of more depressing headlines out of the Middle East may be enough to drive some people home to watch a DVD of the Yule log.” That, in his view, is what happened to such movies as Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs” and Gavin Hood’s “Rendition.”But if “Charlie Wilson’s War” is successful, Mr. Berke has an explanation for that, too. It will show that “you can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent — and palatable to a mass audience — if its political pills are sugarcoated.”In other words, what doomed “Lions for Lambs” and “Rendition” was too much truth and not enough sugarcoating. Such a belief is itself a sugarcoating of the unpalatable truth that, in spite of Hollywood’s best efforts, American audiences still like to see movies in which American forces are the good guys, and they defeat America’s enemies, who are the bad guys.By that measure, “Charlie Wilson’s War” should do well.Charles Wilson (Tom Hanks), who was, until 1996, an actual Democratic congressman from Texas, was a member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the early 1980s. Roused to righteous fury by the Soviet slaughter of Afghan civilians, made possible by the Soviets’ command of the air, he arranged through clandestine means — and in partnership with the Saudis, Pakistanis, and even Israelis — to supply the mujahideen, then fighting the Soviets, with shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapons. (A documentary about the Congressman will air Saturday night on the History Channel.)From Hollywood’s point of view, the sugarcoating comes in the form of an emphasis on Charlie’s politically unconventional playboy lifestyle. Commenting to an observer about the unusually large number of well-endowed young women on his office staff, he observes: “You can teach ’em to type, but you can’t teach ’em to grow tits.”This is apparently something the real-life Charlie really did say. His indulgence in sex and drugs, and his profane skepticism about the moral and religious, if not the patriotic pieties of those who elected him, produces a lot of the acerbic wit to which Mr. Sorkin’s script gives such entertaining play.Told of his appointment to the House Ethics Committee, Charlie comments wryly, “Everybody knows I’m on the other side of that issue.”Yet, according to the movie, this ethically challenged man — along with a lovable, wisecracking CIA sidekick (Philip Seymour Hoffman) with similar social tastes, and a wacky Texas socialite (Julia Roberts) who is also (between rich husbands) a part-time lover — all but single-handedly defeats the Russians in Afghanistan while sticking a thumb in the eye of the boring social conservatives who were supposedly running the country at the time.Most remarkably, there actually seems to be some truth in this scenario. But if the real-life Charlie Wilson, who served as an adviser to the filmmakers, did most of the things attributed to him in the movie, he “wasn’t the only good guy,” as someone who was working in the Pentagon in the 1980s dryly commented to me.No, indeed. Ronald Reagan, for one, was on the same side as Charlie when it came to opposing the Soviets in Afghanistan, though you wouldn’t know it from Mr. Nichols’s picture, in which the late president’s name is barely mentioned.Obviously, it makes a better story — again, from Hollywood’s point of view — if Charlie is all alone, a voice crying in the wilderness, and bucking the system all the way until finally, by his efforts alone, the mighty Soviet Union cries “uncle” and retreats, soon to collapse altogether as a result of the defeat inflicted on it by one congressman from Texas.“Charlie did it,” as no less an authority than the late president of Pakistan, Zia ul-Haq, put it. Or, in Charlie’s words, which end the film, “These things happened. They were glorious, and we changed the world … and then we f—ed up the endgame.”The movie offers no further elaboration on this statement, but it seems to refer to the widely held belief that it would have been a relatively simple matter, after the Soviet retreat, for America to have been so nice to the mujahideen that many of them wouldn’t have subsequently allied themselves with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.I doubt this myself, but that didn’t prevent me — and it shouldn’t prevent you — from enjoying the movie any more than does its Hollywoodization of political and military processes that in real life are very much more complicated and boring. At least the Americans are the good guys here. And they win. Sort of.jbowman@nysun.com

Making Love and War Together

Making Love and War Together

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