Charlie Wilson War movie review

Most of the recent films we’ve seen about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq remind us what a drag those conflicts are, which may be why so few of us have bothered to go see them. Of course all wars are terrible, but good movies have a way of mitigating that dreary fact even as they acknowledge it. Take the cold war: a “long twilight struggle” (as John F. Kennedy put it) that brought the world to the brink of annihilation and provided a persistent source of tension, anxiety and dread for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Horrible, to be sure. But also kind of a blast.

That, at any rate, is pretty much the gist of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which may be more of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be. As the film observes, that fight, in which the United States semi-secretly armed Muslim anti-imperialist freedom fighters for much of the 1980s, was a prequel to later trouble with anti-Western Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But let’s not get ahead of the story. Before the blowback, after all, a mighty blow for freedom was struck by a congressman with an alleged fondness for snorting blow. And let’s not be too quick to dismiss the wisdom of his sidekick, a C.I.A. operative with a bad temper and a worse haircut: “If you’re gonna do this, you might as well have fun with it.”

Fun is this movie’s unlikely and persuasive motto. If it’s the best politically themed movie to come around in a while, that may be because the director, Mike Nichols, and the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, grasp that politics, for all its seriousness, is an essentially comic undertak- ing. Their film is never glib or flippant, but instead shows a lightness of touch and a swiftness of attack — 96 minutes to drink some cocktails, make some deals and send the Russians packing — that stand in welcome contrast to the plodding, somber earnestness of some recent movies I will tactfully refrain from naming.

Not that discretion is necessarily the better part of valor. And it’s hard to imagine a hero as indiscreet as Charlie Wilson, a Democrat who represented Texas’s Second Congressional District in the House of Representatives. Mr. Wilson, who retired from the House in 1996, is played with sly, rascally charisma by Tom Hanks. It is always a pleasure to see Mr. Hanks play against clean-cut type, and here he has the devilish smile of a middle-aged playboy who has woken up in a long-lost guilt-free sequel to “Bachelor Party.”

An unapologetic womanizer — the type whose lechery seems like a higher form of gallantry — Wilson staffs his office with long-stemmed babes and casually seduces a pious constituent’s daughter (Emily Blunt). He’s a sharp political operator all the same, and also a man of conscience, as his patient, all-seeing assistant (Amy Adams) is pleased to discover.

When we first encounter Wilson, he’s very much in his element: soaking in a Las Vegas hot tub with a Playboy model and a sleazy television producer, among others, his hand wrapped around a glass of Scotch and his mind focused on the consequences of Soviet aggression. God bless America! As understood by Mr. Nichols and Mr. Sorkin, who have filleted George Crile’s fascinating 500-page bestseller into a trim and lively history lesson, Wilson is both an anomaly and a paragon.

A liberal as well as a libertine, he finds common cause (among other satisfactions) with Joanne Herring, a right-wing Houston socialite who loves Jesus and martinis and hates Communism. She is a splendid American contradiction, standing up for liberty and godliness while getting into bed (literally) with a bachelor congressman and (metaphorically) with President Zia (Om Puri), the military ruler of Pakistan.

Julia Roberts, as golden as an Oscar statue, incarnates Ms. Herring as if paying tribute at once to Barbara Stanwyck and to the legions of anonymous Julia Roberts impersonators toiling in drag clubs across the land. I mean this entirely as praise: Not many movie stars have the wit or the moxie to embrace the camp elements of their own personas, and the character is clearly something of a performer in her own right.

The third player in this high-living, hard-partying jihad is Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a C.I.A. operative whose first appearance in Charlie Wilson’s office sends the movie tipping, momentarily and deliciously, into pure door-slamming farce. Gust, whose Greek blood and rust-belt background make him something of a misfit among the blue bloods of the Agency, is as frustrated as Charlie is by the refusal of the United States to arm the Afghan resistance, and so the two of them cook up an elaborate scheme involving Israel, Pakistan, a belly dancer and a compliant House Subcommittee chairman (Ned Beatty).

It’s quite a yarn, and the filmmakers relate it with clarity and verve. The film’s high spirits are inseparable from its sober purpose, which is to present a gentle corrective to the idea that American heroism resides only in square-jawed, melancholy stoicism. That has been the preferred post-9/11 stance, and there is some evident nostalgia in “Charlie Wilson’s War” for the simpler world of the 1980s, when the bad guys flew MIGs and American political life was perhaps a touch less sanctimonious.

But there is nonetheless a bracing, cheering present-day moral to be found in Charlie Wilson’s story, a reminder that high principles are not incompatible with the pleasure principle. The good guys are the ones who know how to have a good time, and who counter the somber certainties of totalitarianism with the conviction that fun is woven into the fabric of freedom.