nan | 楠木

The political drama/comedy Charlie Wilson’s War focuses on the playboy congressman of the title who pulls all the stops to increase US funding for the Mujahideen in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“We’ve got to shoot down these helicopters!” Wilson stresses repeatedly throughout the film. The helicopters refer to the Soviet Hind gun-ships, which until the large influx of Stinger missiles (funded by the US of course), were virtually invincible. The film makes the argument that were it not for the efforts of Wilson, who single-handedly raised US funding for the covert ops in the Afghan war from a petty 5 million (to which the Pakistanis smirked, “is this some kind of a joke?”) to a whopping 1 billion, history could have been a very different story.

Whether that is true or not is besides the point. The film, regardless of its authenticity or not, is excellent at portraying the power-brokering of real-world politics. The world is not black and white, but instead gray; and the enemy of my enemy is truly my friend, leading to the US (along with Israel) working with the Pakistanis, the Egyptians and the Saudi Arabians. It seems unfathomable that Israel would even talk to Egypt (and vice versa) after the two had just fought a war themselves; but such is the curious nature of politics, which the film depicts brilliantly.

Tom Hanks, who plays Charlie Wilson, finally has a role that seems to a bad boy. It’s a rare Tom Hanks film where you see the actor naked in a pool with a group of strippers, and Hanks doesn’t seem to be exactly at ease either. Thankfully he’s not challenged too much in this regard, and his performance is on par overall. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a more interesting role, as the loud-mouthed CIA operative who is the brains behind all the actual covert ops. And Julia Roberts plays an eccentric (and extremely wealthy) power-broker, who takes up the “cause”.

The interesting question that the film raises, and doesn’t directly give an answer to, is that whether the Americans through their efforts in Afghan created the demon that would return to haunt them (Bin Laden and Al Qaeda). Charlie Wilson himself angrily proclaims that America “screwed up the end-game”, since after the Soviets pulled out the US didn’t fund the reconstruction, leaving Afghanistan in a vacuum where it eventually became a breeding ground for Al Qaeda terrorists. While things are never this straightforward, it does highlight the old Chinese saying (which was told in the film – “we’ll see”) 塞翁失马，焉知非福.

8/10