let's do it the Amewrican way

Charlie Wilson’s War – Mike Nichols

February 3rd 1959 – Buddy Holly perished in a plane crash – immortalised in Don MacLean’s American Pie as “the day the music died.” November 22nd 1963; September 3rd 1964; April 4th 1968: the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King died – all assassinated. What I would call the days the Idealism died. August 9th 1972 – President Nixon resigned – the day distrust at the heart of American politics of the democratic system of government was born and Idealism became the refuge of the naïve and the self-deluded. Uncool.

I mention this because the excellent Charlie Wilson’s War celebrates a post-idealism US hero. As a young Presidential candidate in Barack Obama challenges the American people to vote again for youth, idealism, and a liberal bi-partisan approach to US politics, he perhaps invites the American people for the first time certainly since Clinton and perhaps since Nixon resigned, to re-assert their faith in the US democratic system and its capacity as a nation state to align its power military and economic, to international affairs in a way that is driven by morality not solely naked self-interest.

Charlie Wilson is an unlikely hero. Playboy and womaniser, this ex-naval officer turned congressman armed with an honourable dismay at the systematic oppression of the people of Afghanistan by the then still expansive Soviet Union, showed how to use the venal reality of US backroom politics to get results. And some results: the brutal application of super-power superiority in weaponry by the Soviets was overwhelming under-equipped Afghans denied the necessary hardware by a US government more concerned with avoiding direct cold war confrontation with Communist Russia. The Afghani Mujahideen were resisting to death the invasion and occupation of a foreign power. Not the first of many uncomfortable and apposite ironies in this subtle, well observed movie.

For all his womanising, hedonistic personal flaws, Charlie’s anti-communist humanitarian instincts are honourable. As a member of at least two highly confidential Congressional committees voting unsupervised funds for clandestine operations, he is well placed to persuade key members of those groups to support covertly arming the Afghans with weaponry capable of seriously hurting the Soviet invaders. As discovery of US-made equipment could create a confrontation with the Soviets, he cobbles together from sheer force of personality and charisma, a deal for the Israelis to make available their immense stock of confiscated USSR-made weapons – to prevent US/USSR cold war confrontation. Wheeler-dealer Charlie even enlists the aid of the then Pakistani President Muhammad Zia al-huk via a personal contact engineered by Texan millionairess Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) who is pro-Arab and shares Charlie’s gung-ho anti-communism. This is simply the genius of American culture in operation: essentially a pragmatic business deal that unites impossibly antagonistic partners through a set up that gives each something they want. Charlie Wilson is the Milo Minderbender (Catch-22) of the Soviet/Afghan war. The fixer, unencumbered with religious or even deep political allegiance motivated by a kind of well-meaning individualistic humanism. As played by the ever-sympathetic Tom Hanks one sort of feels that had the context been present-day Darfur, Charlie would have still been on board despite the lack of communists to kill.

It is argued with pretty widespread and credible agreement that the defeat of the mighty Soviet Army in Afghanistan was the first irreversible step on the road to the breach in the Berlin Wall and progressive collapse of Soviet communism. Some guy that Charlie. It recalls the Margaret Mead remark:

“Never doubt that a small dedicated group of people can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

Based upon a detailed analysis by the late, experienced, highly respected journalist George Crile, screenplay writer Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, A Few Good Men, Studio 60) has brilliantly distilled a massive work of fact into a consummate work of fiction that is at once witty, stylish, convincing and yes, entertaining. Sorkin’s dialogue, early on merely effective, workmanlike, really takes off as does the film, the moment this already ad hoc, unlikely coalition of parties united by the dangerous old saying that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” is rendered positively and wonderfully surreal by rogue CIA rebel Gust Avrakatos. Played with Oscar-winning support actor aplomb and delicious anti-establishment wickedness by the incomparable Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Gust is simply the catalyst and pragmatic agent provocateur who transforms worthy endeavour into sublime anarchistic accomplishment. First seen wrecking his ‘jobsworth’ tight-ass CIA boss’s office glass wall with a monkey wrench in protest at his re-assignment from Finland after a dedicated period learning the language, Gust lays good claim to be the movie character-of-the-year. If they gave Oscars – a no-contest shoe-in. Every scene Seymour-Hoffman is in, you’re on tenterhooks wondering what he’s going to say – and looking forward to it. Then relishing it afterwards.

As with many films set within current or recent real conflicts in which real men and women, military and civilian, have died, Director Mike Nichols has to struggle at times with consistency of tone. The Chaplinesque glee of the Mujahideen as they dispatch Soviet helicopters to a fiery hell with shoulder-launched rockets chills the soul a little at the thought that such actions continue today with targets less easy to feel triumphant about. The human empathy with the graphic suffering of the ordinary Afghani people at the hands of the Soviets that motivated Charlie Wilson to action, carries the moral unease of wondering whether things have improved much today for the inevitable casualties of war – ordinary men and women trapped between two obscenely well-equipped protagonists whose conflict kills more innocents than combatants.

Charlie Wilson is the archetypal post-Idealist hero: a randy, self-serving, rebellious, Washington street-wise, larger-than-life, entrepreneurial Mr Fix-It. A contemporary Milo Minderbinder. But there’s the rub: in Heller’s novel, Minderbinder was a satirical character whose amoral, indefatigable business pragmatism was seen as contrasting with a better, non-surreal way of doing things.

The chastening message of Charlie’s War underlines this point and the issue I hinted at above: should the rescue of the Afghan people from Soviet domination and the subsequent downfall of communism, have been left to the arbitrary, personal whim of a well-meaning chancer with the inside track on how to fiddle clandestine expenditure past proper political oversight? Boring and killjoy it may seem, but when you think that exactly the same undemocratic, unsupervised, responsible-to-no-one processes could equally be directed to a cause less admirable, less acceptable than that Charlie Wilson pursued, and the doubts begin to creep in. Perhaps the overthrow of a democratically elected President of Chile say. This is an argument that Sorkin as the writer of The West Wing wrote powerfully consistently and convincingly against throughout the greatest television series ever made.

Which is where I come full circle. Charlie to his profound disappointment finds that while he was able to manipulate $120 billion out of a tame congressional committee to wage war, he could not get diddley-squat out of the same people to finance Afghan reconstruction when the Reds were gone. Charlie found, all too convincingly that US Politicians will stand up and be counted when justifying funding wars; but evaporate in a mixture of indifference and mealy-mouthed insularism when it comes to funding peace and reconstruction after the mayhem and chaos their war-funding has created. This point is made clearly in the film. It is the bitter after-taste of a beautifully crafted, superbly played, perfectly written piece of popular art. But the link is not made between the inability of the US democratic system itself to have brought about such a desirable short term victory and the failure to build on it with an equal and moral commitment to reconstruction to consolidate the military success. The triumph of Charlie Wilson’s War is to show, with wit, humour and style that an individual can still work the system to achieve desirable results. Its failure is in any way to disabuse the American people of a cynical deep-seated belief that this is the only way desirable outcomes can be achieved.

That’s a big ask. But the Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing was up to it. If the present election does not result in rejection of the bellicose, venal, self-serving, dangerously ignorant experience of the last 8 years then God help us for we must rely on nothing more substantial, however delightful and entertaining, than another maverick like Charlie Wilson – not to ensure the democratic system works to achieve moral and desirable ends – but to fiddle something desirable out of a system inherently corrupt and self-serving.

Bigger questions aside, see this movie, it is intelligent, articulate, witty, at times very funny and in its own way always trying to draw attention to important issues. That it does not offer any solutions goes beyond its historic context or artistic brief. Perhaps. Until one remembers that the Afghans who beat one super-power willingly embraced the Taleban and that much of the US funding Charlie fiddled out of the system either then or now, found its way to Al Q’aeida. Which funds and commitment are now directed at defeating another.

(January 2008)

Filed under: 3 star, Drama, General, Hollywood, Mike Nicholls, Philosophical, Political, War