Charlie Wilson's War.

"Whole chunks of rapid-fire exposition tumble from the mouths of Washington politicos, Central Asian despots, and Texan bluebloods in Charlie Wilson's War, unmistakably the artificial rat-tat-tat of Aaron Sorkin, who adapted the true tall tale of an alcoholic, womanizing East Texas congressman operating behind the scenes to arm Afghanistan's mujahideen guerrillas against the brutal Soviet occupation of the 1980s," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "With its chickenshit elisions, and despite the last-minute feint at reversing its celebratory Cold Warrior tone, Charlie Wilson's War is Gumped-up history."

"It has hustle and colorful talk and snappy acting and peek-a-boo insights into How Things Work in the free-for-all corridors of power," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Philip Seymour Hoffman carries the movie. As the CIA operative who hates Communists and his myopic superiors in equal measure, he has a wily, don't-give-a-shit drive that makes you wish he'd been in Baghdad in 2003."

Updated through 12/23.

Sorkin's "scripts operate on the principle that there is no affair of state, however tangled or burdensome, that cannot be breezed through at a brisk dramatic pace," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "That breeze is enviable (you feel it in an idealist like Capra, as well as in a cynic like Preston Sturges), but it comes with a risk: watch too much TV, relish the ease and aplomb of a movie like Charlie Wilson's War, and you may start to wish—even to believe—that all government can be run this way, with so little friction and such style." And as for PSH: "[Director Mike] Nichols has a problem here, in that, ever since Hoffman slid over the hood of a car in The Talented Mr Ripley, he has developed a habit of bursting into well-behaved movies and taking them hostage."

"Comedy or not, the spin from its creators is this: Don't lump us with those box office disasters with ponderous Iraq-related messages." Richard L Berke talks with the film's makers for the New York Times.

Glenn Kenny profiles Nichols for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/18: So Mike Nichols "has now made a movie about how his wife's ex more or less put an end to the Cold War without anyone really noticing," notes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "The big-screen Charlie Wilson's War, clocking in at 93 fly-by minutes, is dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden. And Nichols is suited to the tale - this being the Mike Nichols of Catch-22, The Graduate and Primary Colors (which is to say, the satirist), not the Mike Nichols of Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge and Regarding Henry (which is to say, the moralist)."

"Had the US invested in a devastated Afghanistan's post-war reconstruction and democratization one whit as enthusiastically as it funded the war itself, the world we live in today might well be a different, better, safer place," notes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "That substantial point, which reportedly delivered quite a wallop in Sorkin's original script, is pretty much a whispered afterthought in the Charlie Wilson's War you'll see starting this Friday. A few tactful lines toward the very end, so low-impact most viewers will probably just take the whole film as an incongruous gung-ho throwback to the Cold War anti-Russkie satires of yore. Taken as is, this War is trivial and irresponsible. Even what it likely intended to be, it's less contemptible than pitiable - an emasculated movie."

Update, 12/19: "Mike Nichols turns in a brisk and undoubtedly entertaining episode, er, movie; it’s over before it has a chance to really sink in," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

Updates, 12/20: "Largely performance-driven, Charlie Wilson's War will delight anyone old enough to remember [Tom] Hanks's debut on television's Bosom Buddies or his scene-stealing turn as the gruff coach in A League of Their Own," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "Levity becomes this fine actor, and his cheery élan as Charlie relieves him of a certain stuffiness when he takes on soldierly heroes or mentally challenged innocents.... Laden with broad shtick..., Charlie Wilson's War is a rollicking populist caper that panders shamelessly to America's love of the maverick."

"Like most great Hollywood comedies, of course, this isn't primarily a film of ideas but of character," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "And Charlie Wilson's War matches its wonderfully eccentric trio of main characters with the expertly engaging performances of Hanks, Roberts and Hoffman; it's the kind of movie that needs stars as much as they need it."

"As it turns out, the previous Nichols movie this one most resembles is the 1988 romantic comedy Working Girl," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Charlie Wilson's War is a funny, sprightly tribute to the American can-do spirit, with a bleak ending that suggests that our plucky protagonist may have just dug his own (or, in this case, his country's) grave. This film does have glaring faults. Its storytelling verges on the slapdash, and its vision of politics as a game of personal brinksmanship can ring sentimental and shallow. But like its priapic hero, the movie charges forward with a lusty vitality that helps the viewer forgive it a multitude of sins."

"There's a potential for wicked satire here - particularly since a line can easily be drawn from the US support for those Afghan rebels to Al Qaeda and 9/11 - but Nichols would rather show us Hanks slapping his secretaries' fannies while Robert sports a truly awful wig and an even worse Texas accent," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Aaron Sorkin's script is alternately witty and too on-the-money, as always, while Mike Nichol's direction is so deft and brisk you'd think he was adapting Noel Coward or something," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "He's not. But he is making something that critics like to call 'a grown-up entertainment.' I myself used to find the invocation of that false category nauseously banal; War is good enough, and rare enough, to make me almost appreciate it."

Updates, 12/23: "This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated Advise and Consent back in 1962," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely. You don't want to look too carefully at the process, which is haphazard, greased by alcohol and a barter system of favors and flattery, big moneybags in the home state, and a lot of gumption and git-'er-done ingenuity."

"[I]f this movie succeeds in convincing Americans that the US support went to Ahmad Shah Massoud alone, it will have effectively let the CIA and Wilson off the hook for their contribution to the circumstances leading up to 9/11," argues Melissa Roddy at Alternet. "During the 1980s, Wilson engineered the appropriation of approximately $3.5 billion to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. According to Milt Bearden, CIA chief of station to Pakistan, Massoud received less than 1 percent of it. So, if Massoud was not receiving the $3.5 billion that Congress was sending, who was? There were seven factions based in Pakistan who were the recipients of American largesse, but about 40 percent of it went to a blood-thirsty, fundamentalist, loudly anti-American bastard named Gulbaddin Hekmatyar."

Still, the New York Times' AO Scott finds that Charlie "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."

But for the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, this "is an anachronism, the wrong movie at the wrong time. Not only does it tell its tale in a style that feels dated and artificial, the story itself focuses on events that history has overtaken. The moving finger has written and moved on, and not even the combined star power of Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols can do anything about it."

"Nichols doesn't turn this story into an essay on political morality; he's more interested in telling the story of a couple of rogue guys (and one rather upscale rogue woman) who put their shoulders to the wheel in the service of their principles," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Agreeing with those principles isn't the point; Nichols is more interested in exploring their urge to take action as something quintessentially American."

For Time's Richard Corliss, Charlie "is that seemingly impossible object these days: a picture about war and politics that has manages to be both rational and inspirational. It is also the year's funniest smart movie."

"It's the first legitimate marriage between Nichols the comedian and Nichols the commentator," argues Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Witty, wacky, and wildly inappropriate for our Puritan PC times, this story of a lecherous Congressman and his anti-Commie compunction sails along on breezes of effortless engagement, filled with performances so potent they act like double shots of soothing Southern Comfort."

"It isn't quite Three's Company Goes To Kabul, but Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin's leering adaptation of George Crile's too-strange-for-fiction bestseller boasts a lightness of touch that proves both a strength and a weakness," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Charlie Wilson's War is pretty entertaining - and thus, in a way, that much more obscene," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve.

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2007 1:46 AM