Charlie Wilson’s War, the new film from director Mike Nichols and West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, begins in one of those cavernous military airplane hangars, the kind so gargantuan you feel like you can’t actually look all the way to the other side. Across the floor, the camera slowly glides toward Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a Democrat from Texas, who is speaking from a portable stage. He’s just a speck in the center of the frame, but behind him hangs an enormous American flag, one whose presence dominates the room. It’s a striking image, and an apt one as well, the great big symbol and its tiny representative: Even as a congressman, he’s just a little man almost completely dwarfed both by his country and the ideas it stands for.

It’s also a fitting picture of the film itself, a relatively small, and too often small-minded, movie that attempts to wrap its arms around a sizable chunk of America’s foreign-policy history. By the end of the film, Wilson has proven himself a rather savvy defender of what he sees as America’s ideals. Sorkin and Nichols, however, are less successful. Though intermittently amusing, War is unconvincing and largely superficial, marred by Sorkin’s various tics and hampered by the competing interests of public accessibility and political passion.

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Partly this is due to Sorkin and Nichols trying to pack too much into too short a running time. Sorkin has a reputation for writing very fast dialog, but it’s just not quick enough to do more than gloss over the issue at hand. The story, which is loosely based on true events, centers primarily on Wilson’s efforts throughout the 1980s to fund the arming of Afghanis under siege from the Soviet Union. As Sorkin would have it, Wilson, a mildly corrupt, carefree congressional bachelor (much of the exposition occurs while he’s immersed in Vegas hot tub with a pair of Playboy bunnies), saw a short report on the evening news, made a few inquiries, hopped off on a jaunt to Pakistan, and then decided to do everything he could to push for more funding and better weaponry for the Afghan fighters. The assumption, essentially, was that the Cold War couldn’t be fought in the open, but the U.S. could kill Commies by proxy — and under Wilson’s direction, it did.

Sounds familiar, does it? That’s not surprising, really, because we’ve all seen this scenario before: The cocky, carefree protagonist stumbles on an international political cause and decides to make his empty life mean something. (Was this, perhaps, ghostwritten by Michael Gerson?) And, because even Tom Hanks needs sidekicks, he’s flanked on his journey toward meaning by a quirky male friend and a strong-willed woman. In this case, that means Gust, a temperamental CIA agent played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a feisty conservative — or, as the film would have it, “ultra right wing” — socialite from Houston.


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