Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
Mike Nichols’ 20th feature film finds him back inside the Beltway where, a decade earlier, he’d examined the compromises of the Presidential campaign trail in Primary Colors. Like that earlier film, Charlie Wilson’s War is about outsiders impinging upon hegemony—and the ways in which hegemony inevitably impinges right back. “The following is based on a true story,” we’re told near the beginning of the film; a disclaimer as the closing credits end adds: “While this picture is based upon a true story, some of the characters have been composited or invented, and a number of incidents fictionalized.” Nichols knows that what is central to making his fictional films work, even when based on factual events, is “‘at what point you liberate the story by finding central conflicts and central metaphors.’”1 Like Silkwood, the film is not primarily intended to provide a documentary, historicizing function. Its appearance in Hollywood, however, at the tail end of a long, grim season in Fall 2007 of U.S. foreign-ops films—including In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis) and The Kingdom (Peter Berg), both released September 28; Redacted (Brian De Palma, released October 10); Rendition (Gavin Hood, released October 19); and Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, released November 9)—all but ensured Nichols’ film (released December 21), the best and most complicated of the pack, would meet with critical and box-office exhaustion. It’s a film that deserves to be reconsidered, especially as the U.S. quagmire in Afghanistan spreads wider into its second decade.
The plot of Charlie Wilson’s War is predictably complicated, considering the international conspiracy against Communism that it depicts, though Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire screenplay manages to capture both the flavor of the personalities and some inkling of the complexity of their entanglements in a crisp 105 minutes and is “more of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahideen has any right to be.”2 As in the analysis of earlier political or biographical films by Nichols, this examination of Charlie Wilson’s War will focus not on the veracity of the biographical or historical elements of the story but on how the film explores Nichols’ characteristic preoccupations with the human condition bound within constrictive social structures. In the three main characters of the film—Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a playboy Texas Congressman who calls in all his political I.O.U.’s to fund a covert alliance with the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union; Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts, in her second consecutive starring role for Nichols), the Houston billionaire socialite whose reactionary right-wing politics fuel her anti–Communist passion; and Gust Avrakatos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a rogue CIA operative with anti–Communist passion and no interest in agency politics—Nichols and Sorkin, working from Crile’s propulsive 2003 exposé, offer three distinct versions of the reified individual, each locked within objectified, objectifying positions of influence.
As presented by George Crile in the book Sorkin adapted, the public record reflects the unlikely conspiracy of three people whose cultural stratifications should have provided no entrée to one another: the natural objectifying order of class structure typically would have operated to insulate Herring in her enormous wealth, Wilson in his modest middle-class Texas origins as son of a timber-company accountant, and Avrakatos as the second-generation son of a “Greek soda-pop maker.” What unites them is ideology: opposing foreign incursions of Communism during the Cold War that threaten American interests. As the narrative of Charlie Wilson’s War begins, the Soviets have long since marched into Afghanistan, and Congress has earmarked $5 million in token military aid to fund Afghani resistance. The anti–Communist rhetoric that flows freely from all the important players in the covert initiative that directly leads to the first defeat of the vaunted Red Army serves as bond between strange bedfellows; the phrase “kill some Russians” is the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake.
Beyond a willingness to depersonalize and thus objectify the enemy to bend it to one’s will, what these three principals share is strategic placement within the structures of American authority—Herring via the ultimate clout of capital, Wilson and Avrakatos via tenuously assigned stations within governmental hierarchy. Yet Charlie Wilson’s War quickly establishes all three as unconventional avatars of hegemony, who must slyly use the system against itself in order to accomplish their goals. Of the three, Avrakatos emerges as most aware of reified reality, acutely sensitive to the dangerous ramifications of what they are enacting in Afghanistan’s war with the Soviets if they are not prepared to enact equally far-reaching, transformative post-war development once the country is freed from Soviet tyranny.
Joanne Herring as portrayed by Julia Roberts is a high-rent variation on Roberts’ Oscar-winning portrayal of the title character in Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), with her broad mouth, brass, and mountainous décolletage. Her money and socialite connections give her access to power that is just as swiftly undercut by gendered traditionalism. Rather than disguise herself as a man in conservative clothing and behavior, however (which, in any case, in her reactionary Texas circles, would not fly), she accentuates her physical and monetary assets, unapologetically sexualized and commodified. If Charlie charms and Gust bulldozes to get their respective ways, Joanne Herring seduces. She has recognized that what she wants will necessitate strange bedfellows, and that, in the realities of patriarchal sexual politics, the bed may sometimes be a literal one.
Gust Avrakatos is “coarse,” as Cravely (John Slattery), a patrician CIA supervisor, calls him. The word is freighted with intended cultural baggage referencing Avrakatos’ ethnicity; his blue-collar, “street” sensibility; and, of course, his impolitic preference for unvarnished truth over unctuous conformity. He is easy to dismiss, despite his bristling intelligence, because intelligence that bristles is no more welcome in the polarizing simplification of political ideology than it is anywhere else. Gust is a constant, reified threat to entrenched, complacent hegemony—a direct invitation to be summarily, categorically dismissed. There is, of course, no social position more desirable to a covert operative than to be dismissed, and Gust uses his persona non grata status in the Company to make things happen in Central Asia. Whether entirely organic, entirely manufactured, or (what is most likely) a combination of the two, Gust’s iconoclastic antipathy to the inbred, silver-spoon fecklessness of what he encounters in the U.S. Intelligence community makes him well qualified to elude foreign radar but also his own meddling bureaucracy. Tragically, as he notes at the end of the film, that bureaucracy to which he and Charlie Wilson turn over their operation will scuttle what they have managed to effect, precisely because it is unable or does not wish to see the irony of what Gust cannot help but see: our country’s dangerously short attention span and our aversion to a Soviet ideology that intervenes on foreign soil purely from self-interest will lead to our pursuing a course identical to the one we have opposed in the Soviets.
Charlie Wilson, the man whose “special recognition by the “Clandestine Service” operates as the ironized frame for the narrative (the recognition seems simultaneously more deserved and more ambiguous when we return to it at film’s end), is as savvy an opportunist as Joanne Herring or Gust Avrakatos. He appears to the Beltway as “Good-Time Charlie,” an unreconstructed man’s man, boozing, womanizing, for sale not just to the highest bidder but to all bidders, and content simply to collect political I.O.U.’s from congressional colleagues who have long suspected he has no agenda to promote and therefore no reason ever to cash in those accumulating vouchers. He has a scandalous penchant for objectifying women (“You can teach ‘em to type, but you can’t teach ‘em to grow tits”), matched only by his scandalous indifference to scandal (his affectionate name for one of the youngest members of his glamorously curvy staff of “Charlie’s Angels” is the deliberately provocative “Jailbait”). He allows himself to be exploited by Joanne; indeed, his entire operation is soaked in exploitation, in which the historical antagonisms of Christian, Muslim, and Jew are co-opted by yet another, purely ideological antagonism, towards Communism. As an Egyptian and an Israeli hurl teeth-bared accusations at one another across a cocktail table pressed into covert duty as negotiating table, Charlie utters the mind-bogglingly pragmatic remark, “None of this is important.” The best that can be said for such an opinion is that it is fueled by the haste of a salesman knowing a deal is imminent and can easily crumble. The film demonstrates what Nichols has brought to life in a wide variety of dramatic contexts: objectifying points of view, whether appropriated for domination, dismissal, or demonization, always promote myopia, even blindness, to the realities of one’s own situation. By the time Gust warns Charlie, standing on Charlie’s Washington balcony apart from the victory celebration over the Soviet retreat, that the vacuum of leadership after the Soviets are gone is as terrifying as the Soviets’ presence, it is too late for Charlie to parlay any more political favors. He has used his I.O.U.’s on the easier sell: hating the Soviets. There’s nothing left to induce colleagues to care about a “-stan” that has receded into the indifference of American geographical insularity. Charlie has become the “Congressman from Kabul,” crying in the wilderness a jeremiad of “what we always do” and (by ignoring the redemptive possibilities inherent in such reified awareness) will inevitably do again.
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In terms of the ironic ambiguity of their narratives, Charlie Wilson’s War displays a complexity that rivals any of Nichols’ most accomplished films. Primary Colors, the most direct precedent in the Nichols’ canon to Charlie Wilson’s War, presents John Travolta as a charismatically likable but eminently corruptible Clintonian figure and leaves us in its concluding images uncertain whether we’re watching an apotheosis or a fantasy. Travolta and Hanks deliver performances that command our sympathy even as the cinematic context makes a case against the central character. Charlie Wilson’s War takes it narrative to even deeper exploration of ambiguity, because the former Congressman cooperated with the film production and was a presence on set. Should Charlie Wilson’s War turn out to be Nichols’ valedictory in Hollywood, it will be an apt last word. Nichols’ entire career in filmmaking has been an exploration of the redemptive possibility of awareness within the processes of reification, with some protagonists refusing the overture to awakening and others embracing their transformation. Charlie Wilson’s War, as a true story of ideological patriotism and good will pursued with blinkered monomania, offers a complexity of response to American intervention in the Arabic world much richer than the typically somber left-wing platitudes of the films that preceded it during the spate of politicized cinema released during the Fall of 2007. Hanks’ undervalued performance, like Travolta’s, commands our sometimes-unwilling affection. These are deeply flawed men who know they are flawed, working within systems as deeply flawed as they are. In having the former Congressman on set and ending the film with Wilson’s own critical pronouncement upon himself and his legacy, Nichols unifies life and art in promoting his auteurist themes: it’s one thing when a fictional character sees the ways in which he has failed and speaks truth to power. There’s an added dimension when that character’s analog in the real world does the same thing. Charlie Wilson is a real-life Mike Nichols protagonist.
The film presents a morass of entrenched social objectification. Beyond the framing event (Wilson’s commemoration by the Clandestine Services), the film’s decade-long flashback opens with Wilson up to his armpits in the stuff of awkward political imagery: naked in a Vegas hot tub with a sleazy independent television producer, a Playboy cover girl, and two strippers. Women are bartered—happily barter themselves—with ease throughout the film, beginning with this first scene, which is about deal making, with Crystal Lee’s nudity the initial item on display. Wilson’s congressional career has afforded him a license to chase women, many of whom he has caught by employing them on Capitol Hill. Charlie’s “Angels,” the tight-skirt-and-décolletage crowd that staffs Wilson’s offices, are capable aides complicit in the objectifying terms of their employment. When Jane Liddle (Emily Blunt) accompanies her father to Charlie’s office, she dresses conservatively, a desexualized performance that Charlie and the Angels leer at; inevitably, Jane winds up in skimpy lingerie in Charlie’s apartment.
As Charlie’s administrative assistant, Bonnie Bach (Amy Adams) brings a fresh-faced fervor that is clearly professional and may or may not also be personal. Bonnie’s wardrobe is also snug-fitting, but at least conservative in palette, since she is seen more consistently in congressional corridors beyond the office suite. She travels with Charlie to Joanne’s house in Houston, and to President Zia’s palace in Pakistan. She sees what he sees in the Afghani refugee camps in Peshawar, and she is just as visibly moved. While she and Charlie banter, only once is their flirtatious give-and-take clouded by genuine criticism of her boss: when the scandal involving Paul Brown (Brian Markinson), the TV producer from the Vegas hot tub, first breaks. Pausing in profile at the door to his office before retiring to help put out another fire lit by his perpetually hot pants, Bonnie poses in alluring disapproval: “You never should have been in the same room, Congressman,” she says. She’s right—yet this is a woman who exits Wilson’s inner office to resume her work in a harem that includes a staffer affectionately nicknamed Jailbait. They are all very much aware of their packaging, and, given Bonnie’s reasonable conclusions about what is happening upstairs in Joanne’s mansion while she waits patiently downstairs among the faithful thoroughbreds, her criticism could actually be rephrased as a critique of Charlie’s need to maintain higher standards in his womanizing. Hot-tub strippers are in bad taste; women like Joanne or the Angels reveal a discriminating palette. Midway through the triumphal montage, which leads from Charlie lobbying his congressional colleagues for increased aid to the success of the covert operation, we are treated to a long, close-up, tracking shot of Bonnie’s tight gray skirt as it swishes through the corridors of Congress. She bears a note from Gust, and she’s well aware of its contents: its assurance of a first destroyed Russian craft has put some extra sashay in her stride. She wends her way past several dozen offices and individuals, a pert blonde missile seeking the heat of her man. When he takes the note from her, she gazes up at him in expectation, and her waiting is rewarded: he lunges at her as if in an assault and dips her into a soul-kiss.
When Bonnie accompanies Charlie to Houston, she’s palpably uncomfortable in the home of a right-wing reactionary like Joanne. Yet at least some of her discomfort is about her being supplanted as the target of Charlie’s charm and ardent glances. Before Joanne makes her predictably grand entrance, trailing whippets, Bonnie must negotiate the iconography of Joanne, in the form of a variation on John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883–1884) with Joanne’s likeness attached to the notorious bare-shouldered society-woman portrait. Accentuating the performativity of her role as a powerful woman in patriarchy, Joanne is a compendium of Roberts’ star tropes: “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.”3 Charlie regards the painting admiringly; Bonnie eyes it nervously. Outside, an auction is underway in the garden, and a beautiful dancing girl (Carly Reeves, niece of Hanks) in Oriental harem costume is the next “lot”; inside, Charlie attempts to ease Bonnie’s misgivings as they wait for their hostess. Referencing the cultural misogyny of Central Asia, Charlie lamely attempts a pitch for an enlightened Joanne: “One of the things she’s trying to do over there is liberate the women.” Bonnie smirks, “And what better way than through a slave-girl auction.” The idea lingers in her mind after she’s in Joanne’s presence. Joanne sweeps across the room to within inches of Charlie; Nichols and Stephen Goldblatt (Nichols’ director of photography on each of his last three films, beginning with Angels in America) pointedly frame the encounter so Bonnie is caught in the center of the composition, squeezed out by the two overwhelming presences facing one another in profile.4 When Charlie introduces the two women, Joanne never shifts her none-to-nose gaze from Charlie while saying a rote, “Nice to meet you.” When finally she deigns to regard “Bobbie,” it’s to order a specially blended martini; Bonnie sounds petulant in asserting that she isn’t the Congressman’s “slave” but rather his “administrative assistant.” The barb fails to bite: Joanne knows exactly how to handle a bright, pretty young rival for the room’s attention. She reasserts her rank, and Charlie gives a barely perceptible nod that indentures Bonnie to Joanne’s will—because that’s precisely where Charlie will always find himself. When Joanne leads Charlie upstairs for more intimate negotiations, Bonnie is left holding the martini. She ultimately settles among the hounds in a pile-up of fidelity at the bottom of the stairs, all of them awaiting their masters.
For all the glimpses inside the conference rooms and inner offices on Capitol Hill and at CIA Headquarters, there is no person depicted as wielding power more forcefully and with less surrendered to compromise of what she wants than Joanne Herring, because she commands the social and political standing that comes with access to more money than all but five women in the state of Texas. The attraction of Joanne Herring and Charlie Wilson is strictly commodified by the influence each commands; they otherwise would have as little to say to each other as Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin in The Graduate. They are not the strangest of “bedfellows” in this political intrigue they’ve initiated (which ultimately requires the pairing of ancient national enemies), but they are unquestionably the strangest to literalize the expression. When first we see them together, in this scene with Bonnie, there is audacious impulse implied in Joanne’s inviting powerful, moneyed people to her house and then slipping away long enough for bed, bath, and barter with Charlie. As in the carefully constructed mirror shots in Closer, Nichols and Goldblatt offer visual cues to the deceptive method beneath Joanne’s mask of carnality. As we learn by the end of the film, she has fantasized about the Fall of Communism during her trysts with Charlie. Two times in the film we see Charlie in his apartment, on the telephone with Joanne. The first is when he has just finished showing lithe Jane Liddle the potency of the Washington skyline, all gleaming White House and, rising high above it, the Monument (contextually, a comic wink and nudge at phallocracy). Joanne’s timing in telephoning is emblematic of Charlie’s capitulation to Joanne’s siren call: he’d put off any other alluring woman for the bird literally in hand, but Joanne’s allure transcends mere sexuality. The party he agrees to attend by the end of her phone call is the inception of the narrative’s intrigue, and their sexual tryst is more than just the first meeting that will produce the operation: it is the film’s first deal. It’s the only time Charlie gets more than he gives with Joanne; all that she has previously given has been invested in anticipation of what Charlie can eventually give her. As Charlie gives and gives in Congress, collecting chits for which he has no particular strategic purpose earmarked, Joanne has lavished the support of her rich contacts in sustaining Charlie’s long, undistinguished congressional run. Charlie likes to believe he’s still in office because his constituents have simple needs and his deep-pockets supporters, most of whom are Jewish, like his pro–Israel activity (which, as his deals with Egypt and other Israeli antagonists indicates, is yet another superficial performance). In fact, as Joanne reminds him, he’s where he is, relaxing in her bathtub, in his sixth term on Capitol Hill, because she has supported rather than opposed him.
In a comic composition from Charlie Wilson’s War that appears to be equal parts love match and prizefight, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) and Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) go toe-to-toe to get what they want from each other. Caught in their crossfire is Bonnie Bach (Amy Adams), Charlie’s pretty, pert administrative assistant, who seems to understand better than her boss that, for all his power as a six-term congressman, he’s probably out of his league with a billionaire kingmaker like Joanne. By the time Charlie himself realizes it, he’s brought down the Soviet Empire in central Asia but is powerless to counter the sweep of the Taliban into the ideological void.
Their “relationship” is thus purely transactional, though this does not stop Charlie from being fooled by its illusion of intimacy. The second time that Nichols and Sorkin show Charlie and Joanne talking on the phone, the covert operation is all but over in the spring of 1988, and Charlie is the odd man out of Joanne’s sleeping arrangements. This time, significantly, it’s Charlie who has dialed; there are no pretty young things distracting him; he’s moist-eyed, and he’s been drinking. We assume that something terrible may have happened with their operation, though it’s hard to imagine anything stopping the juggernaut they have unleashed, and besides, in this “true story,” we already know the outcome. “Where’s it at, Charlie?” she says, and in a small voice, implying the reciprocity he has come to enjoy but fears has ended, he asks, “Am I ever gonna see you nekkid again?” Only her question gets an answer: he reports that Congress has just increased appropriations to $500 million; matched by their Middle-Eastern conspirators, this makes a billion dollars invested in countering Communism in Central Asia. This is Joanne’s idea of pillow talk, where size definitely matters: “There’s never been anything like it,” he adds. While they exchange warm assurances of missing each other, Nichols and his editors, John Bloom and Antonia Van Drimmelen (the team who worked with him on each of his last four films beginning with Wit) end Joanne’s side of the scene with a new medium-shot that reveals her husband for the first time, slumbering beside her, wedding ring dully glinting on his finger in foreground soft-focus as Joanne dismisses Charlie: “I gotta go.” Charlie has only been a bedfellow while he had something she needed. There is a clear distinction between what each misses in the other. She misses the eroticism of covert power, wielded absolutely in the white-hot foreplay of making the deal together in secret and on the grandest of scales. Having achieved a political goal he scarcely could have dreamed a decade before, he misses something much more human-scale, and his near-weepy loneliness is a personal disillusionment that parallels the political disillusionment he’ll soon experience on the Hill. Everyone has taken him for what they could get, and while he can be accused of the very same thing, he’s coming to terms with the emptiness of contact that aspires to nothing beyond transaction. Charlie is left holding the phone. We see another boozy, moist-eyed shot of Charlie just before the film returns to the commemoration ceremony, another late night in Washington: Charlie is slushy with all the deal-making and how little it feels like he’s accomplished in light of his failure to reconstruct something positive in Afghanistan, now that he finally understands and desires a moral and ethical imperative. Without ever picking up or even so much as looking at the phone, Hanks calls to mind the same air of disillusioned resignation Charlie felt after that second phone call with Joanne: now he’s been dumped by Joanne and Congress.
Joanne, the Texas beauty queen, knows how to package herself because she’s never known anything else. She out-provokes even the Angels in her cleavage display, her sexualization of her persona more aggressive than the Angels because they are wearing the uniform that Charlie has cheerfully abetted, while Joanne answers only to herself. The difference between Joanne and the Angels, as she makes clear at the pub in parting from them the night before she flies with Charlie, Gust, and Doc Long (Ned Beatty) to Pakistan, is that they are “sluts.” Her power permits the distinction, though there is of course more physical evidence of slatternly behavior by Joanne in the film than by all of the Angels combined. They are obediently eroticized; Joanne is formidably erotic. When called on her obviously exploitative presentation of herself, as she is by that noted non-prude Gust Avrakatos (who warns her before they fly to Central Asia to dress more modestly), she scolds him indignantly about her experience and good sense (and indeed, when she tours the Peshawar refugee camps, she has swathed herself head and shoulders in a stylish navy headscarf; as usual, Joanne is alluring even when purposely dressed for neutrality). To have Roberts play Joanne is to access her back-catalog of physiologically assertive women, from Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) to Erin Brockovich to Tess Ocean in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Ocean’s Twelve (2004). Joanne enters her scenes and commands men’s gaze as a celebrated Texas billionaire beauty queen—or as the megastar Roberts—has earned the right to do. (Hanks’ casting is also pointed, accessing Hanks’ Jimmy-Stewart warmth to give Charlie an unpretentiously well-meaning decency, even at his most lost and misbegotten, at coke parties with strippers and arms deals with dangerously mercenary men.) At the refugee camp with Charlie, Gust, and Doc and his wife (Nancy Linehan Charles), Joanne gets in character with the shawl pulled tight to her skull, pretending for the moment to be the sweetly submissive woman Central Asian culture demands, rather than the brassy ideologue she in reality is, secretly driving America’s largest covert action. Doc has predictably been moved by what he has seen in the camps, and he needs Joanne’s urging to get up and speak to the assembled crowd of turbaned onlookers. They’ve been “sittin’ here,” she says, “and bleedin’, and waitin’, and prayin’ for you—it’s only gonna be a man like you that can save them.” Charlie watches in awe; he knows if she can get Doc to speak to the crowd, he’s on the hook. As a politician who has made public promises, he won’t be able to have second thoughts and back out on the long plane ride home. Gust looks on from behind mirror shades that conceal bemused disgust. He usually can’t help saying what he thinks, but he knows if he undercuts her cynical ploy, he could jeopardize funding for the operation. Joanne cinches the hold she has on Doc with an appeal to his meekly grandmaternal wife: “We know, don’t we, about our men—what they can do when they summon themselves.” In fact, Doc has done nothing but allow himself to be pushed and prodded to this point. Joanne uses the packaging of patriarchy to convince men they’re doing their own will, not hers.
Doc readily submits to the traditional role-playing Joanne has initiated, because he is an old-fashioned, “church-goin’” sort. He betrays intense ideological alienation from the strange bedfellows Charlie is assembling in Jerusalem and Islamabad and Cairo: “You want to put $80 million in the hands of those people?” Charlie recoils at the familiar, derisive referent: “Doc, now, if you took a trip to the border with me, you’d stop calling them ‘those people.’” (Of course, Charlie alone cannot convince Doc to see for himself; only Joanne can make this happen, by packaging her financial clout in coquetry. There would be feminist authority to such potency if she weren’t trading in sexual favors and demeaning stereotypes to accomplish her goals.) One of the great ironic set pieces of the film comes when Doc accedes to Joanne’s coaxing and stands up with the microphone. He compares himself and his personal privations to those of the refugees, an appalling analogy until he explains, via translator, that his son was wounded in Vietnam fighting “against Soviet oppressors.” Charlie exclaims in surprise to Joanne, who, typically, is several steps ahead of the men: it’s another part of her due diligence that she has waited for the right time to use this personal pain of the Long family in manipulating Doc, the same way she knows how to push Charlie’s buttons. (Her coldness and antipathy to Gust are the flip side of this: Gust sees through everything she does but is already in line with their objective and needs no sex-based wrangling by Joanne; she curtly brushes off his solicitation the night before their trip.) Doc stands before the mujahideen and promises guns and training; when the hush of the relayed translation explodes in a fist-pumping roar of approval, Doc feels the rush of a revivalist call-and-response and thrusts his fist into the air in solidarity. Commenting to Joanne on Doc’s vow to always be on the side of good, on God’s side, Charlie says, “I think what’s got Doc worried is that, sooner or later, God’s gonna be on both sides.” This acknowledges Joanne’s and Doc’s rabid, Christian-Fundamentalist hatred of atheist Communism locking arms with rabid, Islamic-Fundamentalist hatred of Communist invasion. Doc concludes his impromptu pep rally with lines he could comfortably deliver from the bully-pulpit of his home church: “This is good against evil. And I want you to know that America is always going to be on the side of the good, and God will always punish the wicked.” As the crowd goes wild at the translation of these incendiary words, Gust and Charlie exchange an ambivalent look, as much as to say, What sleeping giant have we not only awakened but armed? Soon, having defeated “those people” of godless Communism in the Soviet Empire, “those people” of Afghanistan will turn on us, just another affluent, heedless nation of “those people” of the West, infidels whose materialist decadence and overstepping interventionism they abhor.
Nichols deftly treats the counter-attack by the mujahideen against the Soviets as a David vs. Goliath underdog tale an audience can’t help but be compelled by: two neophyte Afghanis, a newly delivered missile launcher wielded awkwardly in their arms as a Soviet air squadron murders innocents in an Afghani hill town, perform an endearing Central Asian vaudeville routine before managing to blow up one of the marauding helicopters. Two more freedom fighters join the original two on their hilltop, each more confidently brandishing a missile launcher. Two more Russian helicopters perish, and the four men on the hilltop indulge themselves in a small rally of self-congratulation. “The scenes of Afghans blowing Soviet helicopters out of the sky feel cheap, cartoony, but they have an afterbite. After you’ve finished cheering, you remember the same fearless holy warriors are shooting at our guys now.”5 All the while, the propulsive soundtrack score, by James Newton Howard, features an unlikely melding of Eastern tablas to one of Western Christianity’s great, triumphalist choruses, “And He Shall Purify …” from Handel’s Messiah. The formal irony underscores the dramatic irony that these two forces may only be united when taking objection to still another force. They all desire to “kill some Russians,” but when their tenuous shared objective is achieved, they risk no further distraction from objectifying and thereby demonizing one another.
Charlie has been naïve enough to believe historical antagonisms can be pronounced irrelevant: If there is a “transformation” in Charlie (as Nichols’ films typically at least invite protagonists to contemplate6), it is Charlie’s disillusionment. As the film begins, the commemoration ceremony can only have a face-value meaning: the victory of an ideology, and the celebration of the enormous role one unassuming man had in that triumph. As the film ends, the flashback has revealed to us the ambiguity of what Charlie sees as he looks out over the assembled crowd and looks back over the crowning achievement of his life’s work. From Joanne but also from Gust (both of whom smile up at him from the assembly, for their own reasons), Charlie has nurtured his sense that, as Nichols himself admiringly says of the real Wilson, “The possibility of making a difference still exists.”7 That difference, however, can never be more than incidental; it is not systemic. The world turns to its reified defaults—grasping for power, relishing privilege, fearing the other, loathing what challenges orthodoxy. From Larry Liddle (Peter Gerety) whining in Charlie’s office about the free-speech police of the ACLU to Zvi (Ken Stott), Charlie’s Israeli arms connection, trading ancient antagonisms with a member of the Egyptian defense ministry, Charlie can’t understand why we can’t all just get along. He’s the kind of person who rarely meets a man he doesn’t like; he and Gust have a disastrous first impression of one another but are able to bond because Gust seemingly dislikes everybody, and this fortunately for Charlie includes Islamabad Station Chief Harold Holt (Denis O’Hare), the one person in the narrative whom Charlie clearly can’t stand, either. To Larry, Charlie offers no accommodation, only the assurance that, when Larry moves his nativity scene off of public property onto the grounds of one of the 38 churches that can serve as the more appropriate host of the crèche, “Everybody lives.” His assessment is accurate. But these are also the low stakes he’s typically played as a ne’er-do-well politician along for the ride. He’s not foolish enough to make the same sweeping claim about the Israelis and the Egyptians, but, to shift their historically intractable animosity back to the matter at hand (covert arms-laundering arrangements in the service of killing Russians), he makes an equally extraordinary claim about their mutual fear and loathing: “None of this is important.” What he means, of course, is that none of this is relevant to his deal getting done, or, perhaps, that none of their antagonisms is important to him. But it’s the sort of mistake made in haste that he gets to regret over time.
When Gust pulls him aside on the balcony and finally tells him the rest of the “Zen master” story he’s had in his hip pocket since the first time they met, Charlie pleads that he’s “stupid” and therefore can’t negotiate the story’s parabolic complexities. It’s an important moment in the film, because a more conventional telling of Charlie Wilson’s story might have cut directly from the victory celebration in Charlie’s living room (Charlie getting his last kiss from Joanne, Gust delighting the celebrants by hurling performative obscenities at the Russian evacuation televised on the CBS Evening News) back to the awards ceremony, the frame of the film’s narrative, thus implying in the triumphalism of Western capitalist democracy only what the master of ceremonies has claimed at the film’s outset: that they are here to honor Charlie’s integral part in “the defeat and break-up of the Soviet Empire, culminating in the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, […] one of the great events of world history,” and “Without Charlie, history would be hugely—and sadly—different.” Instead, the film spends an additional five minutes with Charlie in his flashback before sending us all back with him into the film’s present moment, for his “special recognition.” The aftermath of the Soviet defeat is the defeat of Charlie Wilson’s illusions, and the beginning of wisdom. In the last five minutes of his flashback, rather than in a ceremony of the “Clandestine Services,” Charlie has his “special recognition.”
The film has faded to black with Charlie alone on his balcony, startled to attention by Gust’s having tossed away Charlie’s whiskey and made him look at the reality of what they have accomplished: so much, and not nearly enough. We might reasonably expect that this is the film’s ending: Gust’s Zen master has posed his final “We’ll see” proposition, an invitation to us all to overlay our historical hindsight on what we’ve seen and heard and not to mistake any latest development for last. But part of the opening rhetoric of the film is to frame its events within the self-conscious, reifying glare of “world history,” among the people of the Clandestine Services who flatter themselves that they make that history. Sorkin’s script isn’t finished with either Charlie or history, however. Charlie did his part to topple the Soviet Empire; history must acknowledge this. In his obituary in the Economist: “It was he who organized and largely procured the money for the CIA’s most successful covert operation, the backing in the 1980s of the mujahideen of Afghanistan in their war against the Soviet invaders. [… H]e had put up two fingers to the devil and at least some of his works.”8 But where is the wisdom to be extracted from this? Whence Nichols’ characteristic examination of the possibilities of “transformation?”9 Charlie’s chance at reified insight comes when he returns to his congressional colleagues. In the very same committee room in which he’d once “doubled to $250 million,” he can’t raise a paltry $1 million for school reconstruction. The room is mostly empty. Nichols and Goldblatt assign Hanks a close-up so he can go to work on a brief but summative assessment of the process of reification: “This is what we always do: we always go in with our ideals, and we change the world. And then we leave. We always leave.” The representatives across the room from him, ten years later and after countless media reports and political briefs, still have no more grasp of the Islamic world than sleazy TV producer Paul Brown in the long-ago Vegas hot tub, who confused “mujahideen” for “priest.” Charlie knows the difference between “Pakistan” and “Afghanistan,” correcting his congressional colleague. He has made a difference in the world. And yet that difference must beget additional adaptive changes in a recognition that, in the game of conflicting ideologies, “the ball keeps on bouncin’.” Charlie Wilson was able to “make a difference” in the Cold War precisely because there was a Cold War, and he was able to tap into and manipulate the appetite shared by many, himself included, to “kill some Russians.” He was able to use the instinctual stereotyping of “those people” to destroy “those people.”
One could argue that Nichols’ film has an incoherent perspective on Charlie Wilson’s place in history—that he helped end the Cold War, or that he was a warmonger; that he was a lucky opportunist, or that he was a cunning strategist; that he willfully worked near-miracles in summoning cooperation between ancient enemies, or that he inadvertently ushered in a new “hot” era of conflict between East and West. Nichols himself sounds, in his typically dignified, well-spoken way, like a political fanboy of Wilson’s when summing the Congressman’s remarkable accomplishment, yet ultimately what matters is the formal statement of the film. Nichols is a filmmaker, not a historian. Sorkin’s narrative as presented by Nichols offers, especially in its ending, an ironic ambiguity familiar to many Nichols films. In that final, brief, late-night interior shot back in Charlie’s living room, after being stonewalled by Congress in making his Gust-Avrakatos pitch to “give ‘em hope” in Afghanistan before the “crazies” roll into the void, a disillusioned Charlie mulls all he’s seen and done. He has been relieved of the illusion that, in the world’s complexity, such a sweeping “difference” as the one he’s made will ultimately transform hearts and minds. And so, when we return to the commemorative celebration and the film ends, we understand the mask of humility he presents to the crowd as what true humility looks like, the kind that can only come from a reifying glimpse of the “endgame.” We don’t hear what he says when the ovation ends; it doesn’t matter what Charlie might say to such a crowd under such circumstances, because they wouldn’t hear the truth his “special recognition” has afforded him. What matters is what Nichols and Sorkin end with, the real Charlie Wilson’s pronouncement upon the wonders and the failures of his legacy, which lingers in the mind less as a “We’ll see” than the reified wisdom of “We’ve seen.”