Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
TO paraphrase Ronald Reagan's immortal words: there they go again.
Another deeply muddled, fence-sitting, obtuse Hollywood picture about American politics, excruciatingly unsure whether to crack wise satirically, or go into a glassy-eyed patriotic celebration.
It's a comedy, but with a persistent ring of phoniness and unfunniness. And Julia Roberts gives the worst performance of her career: humourless and semi-intentionally grotesque in the role of Joanne Herring, a rightwing political hostess.
Clearly, we're all supposed to find the feisty Texan gal irresistible, but her triangular face has all the charm of a unfed pitbull, an impression strengthened when, with deadly seriousness, she awards herself a getting-out-of-the-pool-in-a-bikini scene just in case we weren't sure that she was still attractive.
This is a fictionalised sentimental-comic tribute to the real-life Congressman Charlie Wilson, an exuberant figure who in the 1980s, with considerable chutzpah, masterminded and funded the covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
He is played by Tom Hanks, and that casting is an instruction to love him: a ladies' man and a drinker, but with a heart of gold. "You're a very, very easy man to like, Congressman," someone tells him - and us.
The hard-nosed meanie side of the operation is handled by the tough CIA man Gust Avrakotos, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is made up, and I am choosing my words carefully, to look less attractive than he really is.
The good guys win; the Soviets get their asses kicked, but for those of us watching the film in 2008, there is something important being missed out. Every schoolchild surely knows about the terrible irony, the blowback? The fact that the mujahideen, armed by the United States, morphed into the haters of American freedom?
Well, this movie spends its time averting its eyes from that terrible fact, and fastidiously declines to spell it out, other than with some supercilious warnings from Gust, and a fatuous and redundant postscript before the credits about having messed up the endgame.
Granted, the movie's historical span finishes with the 1980s, but it's quite uninterested in the Afghans' mental world. The point is to celebrate Charlie's cheerful, gutsy resourcefulness; he's a nice version of Col Oliver North.
Director Mike Nichols keeps things moving and Aaron Sorkin's trademark rattling dialogue is often in evidence, particularly in one snappy scene in which Gust first calls on Charlie in his office, bearing a bottle of whisky.
But fans of his TV shows know what a deeply uncynical writer Sorkin is: he just can't help relapsing into soupy rhetoric.
There is, moreover, something oddly uncertain about the sexual politics. No political correctness in those days, of course, but all the leching over Wilson's gorgeous female staff is tacky, and it is sad to see the talented Amy Adams reduced to playing a glorified cheerleader assistant.
It all adds up to something very unsatisfying, and less than honest. We all know what the first casualty of war is; Charlie Wilson's is no exception.
-_Peter Bradshaw
