TOM HANKS, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN IN CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR

Win the war, lose the country

Charlie Wilson's War is a slice of American foreign policy--American interventionism, actually--seen (because this time it really was) as the work of a single Congressman. It's been called "a history lesson" and "a cautionary tale." The warnings are only tucked in hastily at the end, and no "history lesson" so greatly limits its context. Nonetheless, enjoyable as the show is, it's above all instructive. It's the way Stephen Gaghan's Syriana would have been if it had a tidier structure and made more sense. Despite the emphasis on glossy personalities, there's a lot of fast, smart political analysis of how things get done when you want to win a little war on the sly against a big enemy for a little country.

Nichol's film is based on a book by the late CBS correspondent George Crile--and that's Crile's title, not a jazzed-up movie version. The screen adapter is Aaron Sorkin of TV's "The West Wing,” a master at swiftly blocking in the machinations of top-level politicos.

This is a story of people making a big splash momentarily on the world scene, and for it Nichols has enlisted three big American film stars: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Some commentators wish they played even bigger; that Julia had had a bit more fun and that Tom was as histrionic as an old -time southern politician. But they do okay: Julia can't be Erin Brokovitch every time; Wilson wasn't the old-time kind. What Hanks conveys is a look of mellowness and overindulgence.

Hoffman plays a wildly independent and outspoken CIA man who becomes Wilson's ally. He's convincing too, and yes, he does tend to steal most of the scenes he's in, while we're constantly saying to ourselves how he almost doesn't look like Philip Seymour Hoffman: he's hiding behind tinted lenses and black dyed hair as Gust Avrakotos, a man of Greek descent, who hasn't been doing much and thinks most of his bureau chiefs are idiots.

Hanks' character is a Texas Congressman who's on two important committees, but so deeply in love with women and booze that it raises a potential scandal, and he justifiably addresses his cleavage-heavy office staff members collectively as "jailbait." In 1979, the Soviets are invading Afghanistan, and Congress is offering the Afghans only a pittance to defend themselves. If the Cold War means anything, Wilson reasons, we ought to stop the Russians in their tracks.

This movie earns constant points for depicting how things get done in Congress, the deals, the extra doubled allocations hidden in a bill. This war of Charlie's is a secret war, the biggest ever. He increases the funding from $5 million to $1 billion, and works through Israel, Pakistan, the Saudis, the Egyptians, strange bedfellows who all stood to gain from keeping the Russians back. Through CIA operatives arranged by Avrakotos, Russian weapons are delivered to the Afghan resistance fighters, the mujahidin (which Charlie learns means "holy warriors"--but this was twenty years before 9/11), to bring down Soviet planes and helicopters without revealing an American presence. Wilson is spurred on by a Houston socialite who, despite being a Christian fundamentalist, is working to strengthen the Pakistanis. They of course, are more eager to turn back the Russians than anybody and have the closest stake in Afghanistan. Charlie persuades some of his Congressional colleagues to join his side by taking them to the Afghan refugee camp where he realized the atrocities being committed to the Afghans by the Russian invaders.

Wilson wins his war: the Soviets are turned back. Maybe this contributes to the fall of the Soviet Union. Charlie gets a special award from the clandestine services for his initiative. But as a closing caption quotes the Congressman as saying, though things had turned out fabulously well, in the aftermath "we f----d up." Indeed: the mujahidin turned out to include Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Mike Nichols has dealt with politics and war interestingly before--Catch-22, Postcards from the Edge, Primary Colors, but he's more at home in the drawing room than on the battlefield. Here, politics seems above all to be the raw material for the acting gambits, the fun sparring between Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a room. Wilson calls Afghanistan "just a pile of rocks" at one point. The sex between Hanks and Roberts, which is part of our, and Wilson's, introduction to the Afghan-Pakistan dilemma, isn't any more real than the politics. The scenes of aerial battling and desert skirmishing can't be taken very seriously and could have been done overnight at Cinecitta.

But the insider stuff is very suggestive. Mike Vickers, played by Steppenwolf Theater actor Christopher Denham, was a young but talented man who Avrakatos put in charge of the covert operation, and he's still a special ops chief for the CIA. When he's first enlisted in "Wilson's war," Vickers is playing simultaneous chess games. It's a good metaphor: the Afghan war is a war game, and only one of many. Though the refugees and the kids with missing limbs and disfigurements are real to Wilson, the lesson of this movie is how Americans habitually fail to see the larger picture when they engage in manipulations of world politics. You can have a dramatic effect sometimes by injecting large quantities of money and arms into a situation, but it's the follow-up that counts. And you can't control a whole region by tweaking a few events.

Charlie Wilson's War is a movie that's grown-up, relevant, and smart. It's not a great movie but it makes you think, and that's all too rare.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.