Charlie Wilson's War

Look, I understand why people thought Aaron Sorkin was the right guy to adapt George Crile's history bestseller Charlie Wilson's War. The last time he packaged a political story for the screen was in The American President, and that turned out fairly well. I understand why Mike Nichols looked like the right guy to direct it: He put Neil Simon's memoir Biloxi Blues on the screen, and adapted Catch-22 when it would have been very, very easy to botch.

So how did this become a mediocre-to-poor movie? How did one of the most adaptable stories of recent nonfiction--the story of a drinking, leching congressman who bent the rules and funded the Mujahadeen to victory over the Russians in Afghanistan--become so small and trite?

The problems start with the casting. Charlie Wilson was six-foot-four, closer to seven feet from the bottom of his cowboy boots to the top of his hat. He was a backslapping country drunk with flashes of depression and an insatiable hunger for poon. And he's played here by... Tom Hanks. Watching the saintly Forrest Gump ogle backsides and seduce 20-year olds is more silly than it is credible. And Julia Roberts makes his casting look inspired. She makes a great entrance, thrusting and sashaying through her mansion trailed by two show dogs... and then she opens her mouth. Her accent never convinces and her dialogue, which depends utterly on her accent, comes out like flat champagne.

That's two knocks against this movie already, but there are larger and smaller problems. Larger: The plot is rather inexplicably compressed. Oddball events from the lives of Wilson and rogue CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (a well-cast Phillip Seymour Hoffman) are junked. If you were trying to convey a listless-but-energetic congressman's knack of self-destruction, would you cut out a scene in which he drunkenly rams another car, drives back to his apartment, and uses the rules protecting congressmen to avoid arrest so he can fly to Pakistan? It really happened to Wilson, but Sorkin cuts it. The movie runs only 100 minutes, shorter than the average blockbuster, way shorter than the filler-chocked Transformers, and it isn't boring political intrigue that got lost - it's madcap adventures that would have looked great onscreen.

Ah, but how great would Nichols have let it look? The smaller problem: The movie looks cheap. Of the $70 million reported budget, I'd say half was spent on stars and a quarter shows up onscreen. Wilson's office looks like a dingy insurance salesman's nook, not a congressman's office. (I've been in lots of them.) Afghan refugee camps look substantially sillier than the ones that appeared in Richard Attenborough movies 25 years ago. The stock footage was borrowed, I'd guess, from an underfunded high school's AV room.

This is a surprising misfire. Maybe I'd like it more if I didn't know the story -- but since I know the story I can't explain the mistakes and bad choices of the filmmakers.

My rating: 5/10