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Kabul is for lovers

A blowback comedy that wipes away fingerprints
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 13th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Capitol times. Tom Hank's Charlie Wilson wages war against the Ruskies.
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Charlie Wilson's War

Directed by Mike Nichols
With Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ned Beatty and Amy Adams

Is there anything more beloved by warmongers than ennobling their bouts of brutality with stirring, epic-sounding titles? “Operation Enduring Freedom” sounds so much more important than, say, “Operation Unceasing Misery” or “Operation Torch and Pitchfork.” Who would daub those enterprises with young blood?
“Operation Cyclone” (to give mock heroics a tint of the elemental, if not the inevitable) was the barely secret arming of the Mujahideen by the United States, while that rag-tag batch of fanatical hillbillies were perfecting jihad against the evil Soviet empire in Afghanistan (and who wouldn’t happily pay to put the spawn of Brezhnev back in charge of that particular dust bowl?).
Operation Cyclone eventually hit its fans, and we are now enjoying what’s known as “blowback,” where past actions return to kharmically exact a greater price. 9/11 was, to continue flogging the metaphor, a whirlwind reaped.
Mike Nichols’ film Charlie Wilson’s War is, basically, a blowback comedy based on Operation Cyclone — though Nichols only hints obliquely at future events, allowing his audience to make their own associative leaps. Karl Marx famously stressed that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Charlie Wilson’s War reverses the maxim’s order.
Charlie Wilson was a Democratic representative from Texas who lived the high life in Washington while doling out large sums of money to various arms interests and the CIA. Supposedly liberal (certainly libertine), Wilson was noted as much for his devotion to Nicaragua’s kleptocratic Somoza clan as to fine malt whiskey. But this master of glad-handing and judicious smarminess would end up being at the center of world events.
While enjoying a hot tub with a Playboy bunny and two Vegas B-girls, Representative Wilson (Tom Hanks) catches sight of CBS’s Dan Rather on the evening news, got-up in Mujahideen garb, reporting from an Afghan battlefront. The idea of primitive monotheists besting the Soviet juggernaut intrigues Wilson. So, upon his return to Washington, he sets about ways of funneling arms and cash to the Islamic stone-throwers.
Down in Langley, the CIA — continually striving to present to the world an approximation of intelligence — is also discussing the Afghan rebels, with Agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) demanding that the region receive more attention. Getting nowhere, Avrakotos seeks out Wilson’s assistance. The third interested party wishing to see the USSR mired in its own Vietnam is Texas socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), who will bed Representative Wilson if it means more U.S. backing for Afghanistan.
In short, history, according to Charlie Wilson’s War, will be made by one rogue spook and two amateurs. Even with their cursory knowledge of Afghan history and culture, the three successfully solicit  help from gravy-stained senators, Israeli and Saudi arms merchants and Pakistani middlemen, all of whom have their own motives for propping up jihadists.
As a film more interested in commercial success than intellectual significance, Charlie Wilson’s War is thoroughly entertaining, with a sharp script by Aaron Sorkin, West Wing’s resident genius on all things Washingtonian. His and Nichols’ film crackles with wry, witty dialogue, and the cast does an excellent job of volleying lines back and forth.
Hanks, as the wastrel desk warrior, plays excellently against type. Too often a noble Mr. Smith, the actor flirts with being more of a Senator Joseph Paine gone to Washington, though one with far more humor.
Roberts is perfectly brittle as the right-wing fund-raiser, while Hoffman, as too often, steals the film as the sartorially challenged intelligence wonk. Hoffman makes a meal of each scene, finishing it to the last crumb, deftly upstaging the two bigger stars.
For all this, though, there’s the nagging feeling that this is a clever piece of nationalist propaganda. Charlie Wilson’s War attempts to foist anew that old canard of the United States being really a decent, big-hearted oaf in the world that never actively plans ill. Its continuous breaking of other people’s china is a congenital flaw to politely shrug off, never premeditated violence.
Indeed, the film effortlessly erases any of the nascent neo-con stirrings of the time, and is silent on the hasty, high-office schemes cooked up from the Carter administration down to that of George I. When Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto warned Washington in the late ’80s that it was creating a “Frankenstein” in her backyard, she complained to the White House, not the office of the representative of the second congressional district of Texas.
There is a frozen smile on Charlie Wilson’s face at the film’s end, when he’s presented with a medal for his robust defense of the jihadist freedom fighters. While those around him seem secure in the delusion that the world’s now a safer place, Hanks’ congressman seems to signal to us that what’s won isn’t necessarily done.
Thanks, Charlie. We know.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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