Foreign policy farce

>> Charlie Wilson’s War is a strange,
real-life Washington comedy

HELIUM HELL: Jason Lee and friends

by MATTHEW HAYS

Tom Hanks owns the role of Charlie Wilson. Wilson was a liberal Democrat senator who loved women and booze, and Hanks has puffed himself out for the role admirably. His clear love for throwing himself into the part is one of the reasons Charlie Wilson’s War is such a fun and exhilarating movie to watch.

The latest from vet director Mike Nichols opens in the ’80s, when Wilson was a coked-up, hard-living senator, hanging out with strippers in hot tubs. But when an ambitious, power-hungry socialite (played by Julia Roberts) lobbies Wilson about the plight of the Afghan rebels facing Soviet occupation, he makes a fateful trip to the war-torn country, where he is genuinely moved by the plight of growing numbers of refugees.

Wilson learns that the American government’s plan for the region is extremely cynical. Give the Afghan refugees just enough fire power to be an ongoing thorn in the Soviets’ side; keep the rebel war going against their occupation at a low simmer and it will translate into the Russkies having their very own Vietnam.

Wilson realizes that if they’re to win this war, they need more money, better weapons and more training. Through various sleazy backroom deals, he ups the funding and gets the job done. According to this particular mythology—backed up by meticulous detail in respected journalist George Crile’s book of the same name—Wilson helped to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan through his covert manoeuvring.

One of the things that’s impressive about Charlie Wilson’s War is the way screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has effectively crunched all of the facts and shenanigans packed into Crile’s book into a digestible feature film. This is American Foreign Policy for Dummies, and let’s hope plenty of people see it, because it scores with some good points about U.S. policies overseas.

The irony hanging over this film, of course, is that the very people the Americans armed and funded as a way of getting back at the Soviets would ultimately become al-Qaeda and the Taliban, sworn enemies of the U.S. Like many films and books of this nature, it prompts the question: sure, some Americans will be watching, but will any of it actually register?

Charlie Wilson’s War opens
this Friday, Dec. 21

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