Charlie Wilson's War
Now that's a good movie! Last night was Monday so the theatre was hardly packed; perhaps 30 people but they were all at least late twenty something and well behaved.
The Oscar goes, without doubt, to Phillip Seymour Hoffman for his utterly absorbing performance as Gust Avrakotos the principal CIA agent in the plot. Tom Hank excels in a convincing performance as the flamboyant Congressman Charlie Wilson and Julia Roberts is believably camp as the outrageous Texan millionaire Joanne Herring.
This is superb cinema for grown-ups. It makes excellent use of archive news footage and a small amount of terrifyingly believable CGI. We see Soviet helicopter gunship attacks on Afghan villages and towns from the pilots' perspective, a la PS3.
Mike Nichols directs a fabulously believable montage of American political life, covert operations and cold war politics set utterly convincingly in the eighties.
The story, based on George Crile's book, is all the more intriguing because the real Charlie Wilson and Joanne Herring are still alive. These two and Gust Avrakotos (who died in 2005) are, as portrayed, utterly likable people of enormous passion, humour and intellect.
We are asked to believe two potentially provocative theses on the conduct of the cold war, which make this movie borderline propaganda in the context of the 'war-on-terror'. Firstly that America is the Muslim world's friend because they financed the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan; and secondly that Israel helped.
The film ends with white text on a blackened screen confessing that although America made the right decision in Afghanistan in the cold war context, they clearly 'fucked' it up afterwards. The final scenes emphasize Charlie Wilson's alleged frustration at this.
This is not a bad interpretation of recent history and I do buy it but like the film makers imply, we are now paying for the mistakes made afterwards. A huge door has been left open for the sequel - 'Osama the early years'.
