ON CIRCUIT: Charlie Wilson’s War, Fool’s Gold and Laura Linney in The Savages.
Charlie Wilson’s War
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 wisecrack 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.
This is a fictionalised sentimental-comic tribute to the real-life congressman Charlie Wilson, an exuberant figure who, in the 1980s, 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. ‘You’re a very, very easy man to like, congressman,” someone tells him — and us.
The hard-nosed meanie is handled 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 Islamist haters of American freedom? Well, this movie spends its time averting its eyes from that terrible fact. We all know what the first casualty of war is; Charlie Wilson’s is no exception. — Peter Bradshaw