Aaron Sorkin's War
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Aaron Sorkin’s War Hollywood misconstrues the Cold War—again. BY JOHN PODHORETZ In Charlie Wilson’s War, a Democratic member of the House decides to do what he can to aid the Afghan rebels fi...
...It turns out that what he can do is plenty, because of his position on two congressional subcommittees...
...He is far more in his element dressing down a recalcitrant CIA station chief in Islamabad, wandering agitated through an Afghan refugee camp as he takes in the enormity of the crisis engendered by the Soviet invasion, or humorously getting his way with his congressional colleagues...
...Like Advise and Consent, this movie actually seems to have been made in 1962...
...He calls his staffers “jailbait,” but he doesn’t lay a fi nger on any of them...
...It’s nice, and even at this late date actually quite amazing, to hear unabashed anti-Communist, antiSoviet talk pouring from the mouths of the characters in this most Hollywood of Hollywood productions...
...Considering how much it gets right, Charlie Wilson’s War can be forgiven this excess...
...Julia Roberts says as much in a speech her character delivers in 1981, according to the movie’s timeline...
...Usually, you have to tune into Turner Classic Movies to see this kind of pre-feminist objectifi cation...
...The only woman we see him sleeping with is Julia Roberts, who is (a) 40 years old, (b) a star commensurate with Hanks and therefore an equal, and (c) seduces him rather than the other way around...
...We see him throwing out bottles of whisky from an overfl owing garbage can, but we don’t see him drunk...
...That isn’t really a problem...
...There’s a lot of talk about how Wilson is a scotch-swilling, coke-snorting sexual reprobate, but we don’t actually see him getting any action...
...It is clear from the very beginning of Charlie Wilson’s War that the goal of the movie’s good guys in fi ghting Soviet dominion over Afghanistan is nothing less than the defeat of the Soviets, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the destruction of the Soviet Union itself...
...to photograph his fi lm in the lecherous manner of sniggering adult comedies of the 1960s, with groovy young women shaking their tail feathers and doing belly dances and pouffi ng their hair...
...Hoffman walks away with the picture because, unlike Hanks, he feels free to take unabashed joy in playing a reprobate...
...The point seems to be to let us view life through the desiccated eyes of Charlie Wilson, lecher of legend...
...goal in Afghanistan is to pin the Soviets down the way we were pinned down in Vietnam...
...But that is ridiculous...
...Nobody puts up a fi ght against Charlie Wilson and his gang of anti-Soviet activists, except for a few bloodless WASPs around the CIA who are entirely undone by a ragtag band of ethnic “street agents”—the proletariat of the intelligence business—led by an unshaven, foul-mouthed Philip Seymour Hoffman...
...But while some of Sorkin’s fast talk about “commie bastards” is an accurate rendering of the rueful self-mockery that characterized the best and most serious antiSoviet activists, the movie gets one thing entirely wrong...
...Still, it’s been decades since we’ve seen a tracking shot of a comely secretary’s swaying tush and swinging ponytail as she carries an important note down a hallway in a movie hungering for Oscars...
...He calls Julia Roberts, who has married somebody else, and cries...
...What Aaron Sorkin cannot understand, because he knows about this only because the good guys won, is that anti-Communists didn’t back resistance to the Soviet Union because we thought the resistance was a way to destroy the tyranny...
...And we don’t care, because who wants to think anything but the best of Tom Hanks...
...Charlie Wilson’s War begins with Hanks lounging in a Caesars Palace hot tub surrounded by strippers, but he’s so implicitly heroic an actor by now that the Jacuzzi water seems to bead on his chest as though it is unworthy of touching his noble skin...
...In the movie, Charlie Wilson becomes enraged when a CIA man tells him the U.S...
...As an inside peek at the workings of the Capitol Hill sausage factory, it’s easily the best thing of its kind since Advise and Consent—far more accurate about the ways of Washington than its screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s account of the inner life of the White House on the West Wing television show...
...We see him invite a randy young pot-smoking woman to his Arlington apartment— this being a Sorkin screenplay, she is, of course, the daughter of a prudish evangelical Christian—but she passes out before they climb the stairs to his boudoir...
...But that was precisely the point of supporting the rebels, and what’s more, it was exactly what happened, and what’s even more, Charlie Wilson and his friends surely believed exactly that...
...He watches footage of Soviet misdeeds, and cries...
...The real problem with Charlie Wilson’s War is that there is little confl ict and less plot...
...If the camera had swung around to show us that the actress in question was Kim Novak in her prime, I would not have been surprised...
...This is a movie about a fl awed character whose fl aws are airbrushed right before our eyes...
...Charlie Wilson’s War is based, as they say, on a true story, though it infl ates the importance of its likeably raffi sh title character...
...In fact, the actress is the It Girl of the moment, Amy Adams, who must have shrewdly calculated that it would help her career to show a little kittenish sexiness...
...There wasn’t a serious person alive in 1981 who actually thought the Afghan rebels would defeat the Soviets on the battlefi eld, the way they did, or that the Empire would collapse within a decade, the way it did...
...Anti-Communists backed resistance because the Soviet evil had to be countered anywhere and everywhere it could be...
...Wilson’s untiring efforts against the Soviet Empire weren’t notable because they were practical...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ In Charlie Wilson’s War, a Democratic member of the House decides to do what he can to aid the Afghan rebels fi ghting the Soviets in Afghanistan...
...He helps engineer an increase in funding from $5 million to $500 million, and teams up with CIA analysts and covert operatives to determine what weaponry the rebels need and how to get it to them...
...With no real antagonist but the faroff and faceless Soviet Union, Charlie Wilson’s War is a chronicle of success foretold...
...The rebels win...
...this is a movie, after all, and it stars Tom Hanks, and if Tom Hanks is going to play a relatively unknown congressman from Texas, you can be sure the congressman secretly saved the world...
...They were notable because this man, morally questionable in so many ways, understood the demands of the most profound moral question of his time...
...The movie has to leer, because Hanks won’t...
...In every way, he is successful...
...Director Mike Nichols made the peculiar but surprisingly funky decision John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Fair enough...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 17
