"Charlie Wilson’s War" review

Grade: B-

It is rare when I think a movie needs to be longer, especially during a season where it seems like most flicks average two and a half hours in length. However, “Charlie Wilson’s War” left me wanting more, and not in a good way. While it’s a good little 90-minute yarn, the movie screamed for a more fleshed-out perspective.

The tale of man how a politician of no importance helped drum up support for Afghanistan for a war that dealt the U.S.S.R. a humiliating defeat during some of the tensest times of the Cold War is inherently fascinating. Aaron Sorkin’s script is as sharp as one could expect; there’s a reason he made West Wing work in its early years and this material is very much within his comfort zone. Tom Hanks does an excellent job as the womanizing lout who also holds a great deal of moral conviction. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the highlight of the film playing gruff and schlumpy CIA agent who’s a lot smarter than he looks; I wouldn’t expect anything less from Hoffman at this point. Julia Roberts isn’t really anything in this movie, but she’s not really given much to do, so I guess I can’t hold that against her.

For about an hour “Charlie Wilson’s War” is thoroughly entertaining. The presentation of the hoops, obstacles, and hostility that Wilson has to navigate in order to help the Afghanis fight the Russians is pretty fascinating. But once the set-up and the initial obstacles are overcome the movie goes into autopilot. The last 15 minutes seem a jumble of stock file footage of helicopters being shot down and troops marching across Afghanistan’s barren landscape. The movie also isn’t really successful when it tries to express the point that framing the conflict is religious terms is a dangerous and slippery slope, and could have been handled better.

But the real fault of the movie lies in the fact that it barely acknowledges, or at least rushes through, the point. As most should know, after the rebels drove out the Russian army, the country was extremely unstable. And the United States, figuring all the hard work was done, moved on to the next crisis instead of helping the country rebuild itself. This idea is given five, maybe ten minutes of screen time. The movie uses those five minutes to let Wilson off the hook for the chaos and years of civil war that followed the end of Russian occupation in 1989. It’s true that things got really bad in the region as Wilson’s political career was coming to an end, but the deterioration of the situation deserved to be addressed beyond a post-script quote by Wilson just before the credits roll.

The moral of “Charlie Wilson’s War” isn’t different than any movie to come out of Hollywood about wars the U.S. has fought post-Vietnam: If we’re going to get involved with in these country’s conflicts, we’ve got to do it for the right reasons and we’ve got to be prepared to help with the heavy-lifting when the fighting is over. I guess I can understand the reasoning behind focusing the film on doing what it took to drive the Russians out of the country, considering the story of the 15-year-old and the Zen Master (it makes sense if you’ve seen the movie), but the film should have more thoroughly-explored the lack of will for doing the heavy lifting.