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Summary: distortion
Comment: good acting and a funy story are used to rewrite history. sad and dangerous. the US was the first in Afghanistan, before the Russians. The Russians were asked by the Afghan government to help them stop the civl war. the Afghan government who was asking the Russians for help were another three years in power after the Russians left Afghanistan. After this, a real messy civil war started (no time for building schools), and then the Taliban took over. That's the true story, but we might just forget this with these kind of movies. There were many atrocities committed by the US in the 80's and 90's, and this was one of the biggest.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hollywood gets it wrong
Comment: The movie is at times enjoyable and well acted. Okay.
Just some background here--According to former Secretary of State Robert Gates in his book _From the Shadows_ the CIA began giving aid to Islamic fighters in Afghanistan several months before the Soviet invasion. Former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter Zbignew Brzezinski is on public record stating that Carter signed an order on July 3, 1979 to give aid to the mujahadeen. Brzezinski informed Carter in a memo on the same day that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention". When asked if he had regrets about helping to start a war Brzezinski replied, "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War".
The importance of Charlie Wilson is wildy blown out proportion in this movie and his involvement inaccurately portrayed, as is that of his "side kick". The real-life Wilson had always been a hawkish rightwinger and commie hating cold war warrior. In the film we are lead to think Wilson was simply a good time lovin', womanizing, good ole boy Texan Congressman that never really got serious until he saw in person poor Afghan refugees. At this moment in the film Wilson changes before our eyes and now he has a righteous cause. The real Wilson was a friend of Nicaraguan tyrant Anastasio Samoza. Wilson's partner in the movie (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is based on CIA operative Gust Avrakotos. In the 1960s army colonels led a coup in Greece and Avrakotos was the CIA main contact with the notorious fascist regime. Avrakotos was forced to leave Greece by the late 70s, having achieved a very nasty reputation.
The aftermath and consequences of this cold war game aren't given their due by this Hollywood movie either. The very weapons the U.S. supplied the mujahadeen were used to wage a lenghty, bloody civil war in Afghanistan. It was well understood who our government was dealing with despite Ronald Reagan's claim that the Afghan fighters were the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers. About half the CIA money went to a monster named Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, a fellow who in his youth used to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women. Hekmatyar was known to be as "anti-American" as they come. The CIA and US government would get in bed with anybody just so long as they could serve as a temporary useful pawn in the cold war chess game with the USSR and so the terrorist goon received Stinger missles, training, and lots of money. The Taliban and an group that came to be known as al-Qaeda formed out of the ashes of the Afghan civil war. At the end of the film Charlie Wilson is shown trying to secure money for schools but it's not clear how much a few new schools would help when Reagan's founding fathers liked throwing acid in the face of women and killing teachers that dared try to educate girls.
Viewers of the movie are to believe the US means well, but sometimes makes mistakes. Clearly there was little real concern for the fate of Afghanistan and we do get a sense of this when watching the good Charlie Wilson's failed efforts to build some schools. What the movie completely gets wrong is that Washington ever cared about the Afghan people in the first place and not only that but did it's best to draw the Soviet Union into a war with them. I'll not go on about how cliched and formulaic this Hollywood flick is with it's warped fixation on the individual and personal and disregard for mere facts. I hope most Americans don't take movies like this too seriously.
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Summary: How an east Texas congressman made Afghanistan safe for the Taliban
Comment: BEWARE SPOILERS!! (and pompous displays of semi-relevant erudition)
Director Mike Nichols is a past master of women's point of view films that go beyond the narrow confines of the "chick flick." Silkwood (1983); Heartburn (1986); Working Girl (1988); and the very fine Postcards from the Edge (1990) come to mind. His first feature was an adaptation of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor back in 1966. He followed the next year with the generation-defining The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman. His films feature fine satire played along the cutting edge of the popular culture.
Here he deviates slightly to celebrate Texas congressman Charlie Wilson who managed to persuade Congress to support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In particular Wilson was able to get American shoulder-launched Stinger missiles for the locals to shoot down Soviet aircraft. In the film we see some nice graphics of just how effective those missiles were. It is no exaggeration to say that Charlie Wilson's intervention turned the tide against the Soviets and eventually persuaded them to withdraw. A few years later, as we all know, the Soviet Union came to its sputtering end.
Nichols's "celebration" of Congressman Wilson is however mitigated by the revelation that Good Time Charlie was no angel. Tom Hanks plays the alcoholic and cocaine snorting congressman with a genial--almost innocent--duplicity that only hints at the Machiavellian personality required to properly grace the hallowed halls of Congress. Hanks is just too sweet, a nice guy playing at being a practiced power broker. What is missing is the edge of obsession and single-minded egoism. Perhaps we needed John Malkovich with an east Texas twang.
Julia Roberts plays Wilson's long-time girlfriend whose interest in defeating the godless communists stems not from any sympathy for the out-gunned Afghans but from religious sensibilities of the sort usually associated with evangelical members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I found her white wig and high-toned manner a step in the wrong direction for Miss Roberts. I fear that the transition she is making from starlet to star to character actor is an embarrassment that she might want to avoid.
The real star of this film is Phillip Seymour Hoffman who plays the international operative and sometime American spy, Gust Avrakotos, a sneaky, blunt and very smart guy who also wants to defeat the Soviets. Hoffman brings to the part the kind of rough edge and frankly Machiavellian intent missing in Tom Hanks' character.
The film is marred slightly by a depiction of people in power and their environs that conforms to something like television's mass culture with lots of sleeping around and sharp-edged wise-cracking on the spot, and a somewhat simplistic story line. None of this is to be helped since a living must be made and producers must be assured that the mass audience will attend. Mike Nichols is used to this, and it is remarkable how many fine films he has made that simultaneously seduced not only the money men and the audience, but the critics as well.
The message of the film is contained in a Zen master story that goes like this (I am paraphrasing from the quotations page at the Internet Movie Database site):
There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday who gets a horse, and everybody in the village says, "How wonderful. The boy got a horse." And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight except the boy who can't because his legs are all messed up. And everybody in the village says, "How wonderful." And again the Zen master says, "we'll see."
This captures the spirit of our continuing military involvement in the Middle East. Today's results may look good or bad but can only be really defined by the unintended consequences to come. We armed the Afghans. Unfortunately their triumph against the Soviet Union led to the rise of the Taliban, and that to their harboring of Al Qaeda which led to 9/11, which led to... and so on. How Charlie Wilson's War ultimately ends may not be known for generations.
See this for Mike Nichols whose clear direction and sharp eye for satire is undiminished as he approaches his ninth decade of life. (He was 76 when this film came out.)
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Summary: Coherence Left on the Cutting Room Floor?
Comment: I'm giving this film three stars only because the people I watched it with were amused by it. Otherwise I'd go lower. It looked to me like a botched job, the sort of film where the script writer, the director, and the producers couldn't get on the same page and so released a compromised product that satisfied nobody. It's odd to read the other reviews here on ammy; many of them grind political axes, but the radical right-wingers accuse the film of being leftist propaganda, while the liberals accuse it of being rightist deception. I'd be happier if it were clearly anything besides shallow, exploitative, and uncontextualized. It is fairly silly to offer this as a historical film based on a true story, and yet omit so many players in that story. My own views of the film's political obtuseness are more or less the same as those expressed in the review by Timothy Scanlon.
Forgetting the issue of historical content, I have to say something about the film as drama. Tom Hanks is a great actor, but a dud in this role. He's too recognizable, of course, but beyond that, he's not plausible as Charlie Wilson, even the Charlie Wilson of the script. Take a look at the real Charlie Wilson, as shown in the bonus features; you'll see what I mean. The only outstanding acting in this film, as many others have stated, is done by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of the 'rogue' intelligence agent.
If you have any broader base of information about events in Afghanistan in the decades from Carter to Bush, you may find this film painful. It's a bitter fact that the USA has stepped into the jackboots left on the field by the Russians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The maxim is "know your enemy," not "become them."
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Summary: The best character was not Tom Hanks nor Julia Roberts
Comment: Charlie Wilson's war is an enjoyable vehicle for making the point that someone can have a very flawed personal life, but still help humanity. I could tell Tom Hanks had a lot of fun playing the hard drinking, womanizing, Charlie Wilson. However, he didn't seem entirely comfortable in the role, which would have been more convincingly played by Michael Douglas or Jack Nicholson (although granted Nicholson's a bit too old for the role)--someone who is better at playing a womanizing jerk. And the camera man had a lot of fun with those gratuitous butt and cleavage shots. As far as the Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts characters are concerned, most of their best lines were in the trailer. The unsung hero of this movie is Phillip Seymour Hoffman (nominated for best supporting actor) playing a gruff, sarcastic, highly intelligent CIA agent. His character is hilarious, and IMO what really makes this movie.
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