I’m tired of Hollywood’s political earnestness.
Let me clarify. Charlie Wilson’s War is not a travesty. That hyper-criticism would be totally unfair — it’s a pitch-perfect piece of enjoyable mainstream political comedy, calibrated for the lowest common mental denominator of the movie-going public. America = good. Kill those Russians!
Whatever. Has far as box-office-driven cinematic ethics go, it’s fair enough. Par for the course. The ‘mainstream’ construction of the film (strings, close-ups) isn’t as unsettling as the mentality behind it. Charlie Wilson’s War, the supposedly true tale of a congressman who enlists a socialite and a CIA unit to help arm Afghanis against Russian forces, comes off as part parable, part feel-good comedy. The rich and powerful collude and succeed in aiding the trod-upon and impoverished — whoopee! But why focus on how they do it? Why focus on bills and politician names and trade deals the aforementioned mainstream audience will never in a million years follow? Why take this true plot of stranger-than-fiction absurdity and not emphasize the inherent satire of its infeasible plausibility? Why set sights so low, especially when such hallowed surnames are taking gleeful part?
I couldn’t help but imagine this movie re-framed with that signature black-and-white wide-angle of Dr. Strangelove, a camera style that communicates a larger context for a depicted interaction and, in effect, the preposterous-ness of the situation. Kubrick’s 1964 imagining of world politics is a fiendishly spot-on send-up of world leaders, and Charlie Wilson could have transplanted its cynical ethos into modern-day Washington with hardly a change to Aaron Sorkin’s lively script. Charlie parties hard in hot tubs. He likes his whisky and, it seems, occasionally, his cocaine. He salaries a staff of entirely young, nubile females, whom he collectively hails with “Jailbait!” like it’s a job title. And the film merely plays him off like a lovable scoundrel.
My criticism isn’t merely Puritan, so don’t you go hating on me for raising a doubts against a man who likes his booze, drugs and promiscuity. That’s not my complaint — hell, I’m a marginal partaker in the Charlie Wilson lifestyle my own damn self. But the film doesn’t comment on his in-office dealings; instead, it too takes a tracking shot of his assistant’s comely ass (Amy Adams, with sadly nothing to do but fawn) as she strides down the hallway. It embraces the cleavage with Charlie’s own aplomb while all the while lacking entirely any sense of aesthetic joy. In other words, titillation without commentary and therefore sanction. The gaping lack of opinionated visual camera play that might give a broader view of the characters’ carefree hedonistic behavior leaves the movie’s storytelling a flat, practically judgment-less narrative.
Sure, by the end of the film, Charlie Wilson (the perpetually affable Tom Hanks) realizes the impossibility of extending his foreign efforts to the education or infrastructure of the nation whose war efforts his country has just assisted. The Iraq parallel is clear — don’t forget the citizen needs of the states whose military you target. But Nichols’s film is at heart a story of American triumph, and the irony of powerful men routinely cracking on attractive fems or even of Texas socialites assisting with fairly careless ease in world politics is underplayed so much it’s practically taken for granted. Charlie Wilson revels in its privledged world of unheard-of power and excess, rather than setting up the truer fact of its utter ridiculousness beside normal society.
Julia Roberts, in the role of that Texas socialite, is additionally silly; her performance all but ensures the entire production stales into cardboard. As an actress, she’s certainly demonstrated plenty of flair in the past, but her Joanne Herring amounts to a single facial expression and one woefully flat Southern accent, and she comes off more as Julia Roberts going stony glam blonde than an actual flesh-and-blood character. Add to that the character’s instinctual bitchiness (ordering around professional political assistants like so many cocktail waitresses, for one), and you’ve got a plot supplement of romance and influence that only might have been. I’d have gone with Diane Lane instead. Maybe even Susan Sarandon.
Thankfully, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acerbically rational CIA agent contributes a dose of reality’s outlandishness (Charlie asks why more hasn’t been done about the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees, and Hoffman acknowledges that “me and three other guys” are working hard on it), although even he’s left largely to the wayside when the narrative arc’s push comes to climatic shove. The Afghani plight, after all, isn’t really the point of the tale. This is a film about the twin American keystones of individual ability and governmental power. Nichols does indicate the awkward post-coital of such uncomfortable bedfellows, but he’s more interested in putting them between the sheets than examining the sleazy battle of their courtship power play.
— Sloane
