All the wily strategies Charlie had used for

All the wily strategies Charlie had used for filling the pork barrel, he now exercises in his sacred cause. Among his co-conspirators are one of his mistresses, a Houston doyenne named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a scuzzy, belligerent, occasionally brilliant CIA agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Charlie also plays the Israelis and Egyptians against each other, to get them to work together. He tries working his seductive powers on Pakistan's President Zia (Om Puri). In Congress he trades votes and cashes in favors. Essentially, he treats the Afghan war as one big earmark. He makes American generosity seem the coolest game in town — the Peace Corps reimagined as summer camp. Indeed, the whole movie revels in politics as a game, one worth playing well and enjoying. As Hoffman says, "If you're gonna do this, you might as well have fun with it." No question that the filmmakers and stars are on the top of their game. Hoffman reminds us that, along with his weird and salutary ability to burrow into any character, he is a great line-reader — a crucial asset to a script with the welter of exposition that Sorkin's has (along with many big laughs and even more subversive ones). Roberts gets to parade her luster in evening gowns and bikinis; she amps up the cunning warmth, and we note only in passing that in early middle-age she's starting to frost over into Glenn Close. Hanks, liberated from playing anguished do-gooders, unlocks a lot of raffish energy and gets that famous whine out of his voice. He makes Charlie a larger-than-life, conniving, lascivious ... all right, do-gooder, but one you wouldn't mind sharing a drink or a hot tub with. Nichols moves this along with the easy assurance of someone who's being doing it, and doing it well, for ages — The Graduate was released 40 years ago today — yet hasn't lost his stroke or his speed. Those deft directorial touches, and the intelligence the movie both exudes and assumes from its audience, put Charlie Wilson's War up there with Hollywood's grand old comedies: the Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder movies about slick schemers and their slicker women. The Nichols-Sorkin film is so much fun, you will not only forget all of Hollywood's serioso war movies, you may forget the international calamities that Wilson's largesse indirectly led to. One last similarity Nichols' film has to the screwball classics: if you don't stay for all the closing credits, you're in and out of Charlie Wilson's War in an hour and a half.


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I just don't have much to say right now, but pfft. Not much on my mind right now. What can I say? Shrug. I can't be bothered with anything recently. I haven't gotten anything done.

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