Mike Nichols (2007)
Aaron Sorkin has a remarkable ability to transmit information through credible dialogue and in Charlie Wilson’s War there’s plenty of information to transmit. This is the true story of the Texan Democrat congressman behind an operation to support the Afghan mujahideen in their resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. Sorkin always seems to manage to explain the situation through mouthpieces who speak in character – or in caricature, at least. You can feel the actors’ pleasure in having lines like these to deliver – that in itself is a pleasure for the audience. At the same time, it makes you especially aware and admiring of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wonderfully mature judgment. As Gust Avrakotos, the loose cannon CIA operative who assists Wilson, Hoffman has the confidence to deflate or throw away lines and make them all the funnier. Wilson is played by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts is Joanne Herring, a Houston socialite and political activist and Wilson’s sort of partner. Good as they are, Hanks and Roberts are sometimes almost too eager to deliver a witty line. Hoffman is more skilful: when he exudes relish in how amusing his words are, it’s the relish felt by the character he’s incarnating. The sequence in which Gust Avrakotos keeps being sent out of then called back into Charlie Wilson’s office is, thanks to Hoffman, a deservedly famous one.
I thought much better of Charlie Wilson’s War on this second viewing than when I saw it on its original release. Mike Nichols’ direction is crisp and alert, and the actors respond to that as well as to the quality of the writing. There are particularly enjoyable cameos from Ned Beatty, Emily Blunt, John Slattery and, especially, Christopher Denham who plays a young whizzkid in the Defense Department called Michael Vickers. (The real Michael Vickers is now the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Obama administration.) Yet Mike Nichols is so taken with the egotistical venality of the principals that the reality of the political situation is made to seem rather mechanical. When Wilson discovers the grimness of life in a refugee camp in Peshawar that he visits, the sequence is well played by Hanks and Amy Adams, as Wilson’s administrative assistant Bonnie, but the extras are extras. Nichols is more comfortable presenting, as a piece of comedy, the moment when the mujahideen use American weapons to shoot down their first Russian helicopter. This made me slightly uncomfortable, though: while it’s good in principle for the indigenous resistance fighters not to be treated with reverence, playing them for laughs comes too easily to Mike Nichols. The final moral of the story – by arming the natives to thwart the Soviets, America let in Osama Bin Laden – is a black joke of history. Nichols’s amused detachment from the motives of Wilson, Herring et al means that he delivers this judgment with too much derision and too little regret. Still, Charlie Wilson’s War is a trim and entertaining political comedy, and that’s no mean feat. Tom Hanks seems a bit too cartoonish at first but this approach pays off: when Charlie Wilson turns out to be capable of doing much more than you’d have believed, it has stronger impact. Julia Roberts is very enjoyable – she has the confidence to use her beauty for laughs – and Amy Adams has truthfulness as well as comic flair. Mike Nichols loses no opportunity to fix the camera on young women’s legs and backsides, under cover of Charlie Wilson’s womanising. It’s lucky that Adams and Emily Blunt both have enough sexy style and humour to transform these moments.
15 April 2012
