(Movie Review)A student recommended this movie to me. I told her I'd put it on my list of movies to see. (Despite my best efforts, I've been wasting a lot of time watching movies recently--and then wasting more time blogging about them--so I figured I would take a break for a while).
The next week she gave me a copy of the DVD, which meant I pretty much had to watch it.
And you know what? I'm glad I did actually. This was a great movie.
To start with, it's really well written. The dialogue is pointed, snappy, and funny. Watching the characters trade well crafted barbs back and forth with each other was good entertainment.
The exposition as well is really good. I'm not an expert or anything, but if I ever had to put together a course on screenwriting, I'd use this movie as an example of everything to do right.
There are a lot of complex cold war politics in this movie (such as the necessity of supplying the Afghanistan fighters covertly with Soviet made weapons from Egypt and Israel) but it's all explained clearly and succinctly for the audience.
However the screenwriter doesn't beat you over the head with it either. The information is put out there only once, and then the story moves on. The effect it that you are able to follow what is happening, but you feel that someone who wasn't quite as aware as yourself, or who wasn't paying close enough attention, might just miss it.
This is one of those rare Hollywood movies that after you finish watching it you feel smarter rather than dumber.
The screenwriter also does a good job of following the old rule of making each scene perform double. The story of Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan is woven in flawlessly with the story about his ethics investigation by having many of the scenes carry a double plot. It's textbook screenwriting at it's best.
And the acting is excellent. Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman do just a superb job with all the material. Tom Hanks plays the hard drinking congressman to a tea, and Hoffman does the same with the cynical CIA agent.
I know Philip Seymour Hoffman got a lot of praise for "Capote", but "Capote" sucked. If you want to see a real example of why Hoffman is one of the best under-rated actors around, check out this movie instead.
Seriously, after I saw this movie I had an urge to run to the video store and rent everything Tom Hanks or Philip Seymour Hoffman were ever in.
OK, having praised the cinematic value of this movie lavishly, we now get to ...
The Politics
As much as I loved this movie from an entertainment perspective, I had a number of problems with it politically.
This movie is usually mentioned as one of the anti-war movies Hollywood has been making lately, in the same breath as "Lions for Lambs".
But this film didn't come off as particularly anti-war to me. At the tail end of the movie it was somewhat critical of the US failure to get involved in rebuilding Afghanistan after the Soviets left, but it never seemed to portray the covert war the U.S. was fighting as a bad thing. For the most part, it portrayed the US government as good natured bumblers. They have high ideals, but sometimes they just forget to follow through.
But there's a much darker side to the story of US involvement in Afghanistan.
(In the Spring of 2001 I helped put together a teach-in on Afghanistan with the Calvin Social Justice Coalition, so I'm drawing a bit on that experience now).
For starters, if you read any Chomsky at all, you are probably already familiar with the story about Zbigniew Brzezinski. (This is one of those little tid-bits no one else ever talks about, but Chomsky brings it up repeatedly). Breziniski was Carter's National Security Advisor when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in 1979. Years later, in the late 90s, Brzezinski actually took credit for the Afghanistan War. He claims the US government created a trap for the Soviets , by helping to create conditions in Afghanistan that they knew the Soviets would not be able to resist intervening in. Thus giving the Soviet Union their own Vietnam War. Brezeziniski revealed this in an interview with a French magazine in the 1990s, and it was widely reported in Europe at the time, but completely ignored by the US media. (See here, for one of many cases in which Chomsky cites this story. See here for the actual Brezesiniski article.)
Chomsky cautions that Brezeziniski may simply have been shooting off his mouth, but if it is true, it means that the entire Afghanistan War, with all the death and suffering it caused on both sides, was a result of the US state department playing war games with other people's lives.
None of this, of course, is in the Hollywood version of the story. (To be fair, they do mention that part of the CIA, represented in the movie by Harold Holt, simply want to use the Afghanistan War to bleed the Soviet Union, and were not concerned about actual victory for the Afghan people. But the story is much deeper than they let on.)
Also, although the movie criticizes the US failure to stay involved with Afghanistan, it never really questions the wisdom of equipping radical Muslims with state of the art weaponry in the first place. The CIA to this day can not account for all of the stinger missiles they supplied the Islamic fundamentalists with; and these things are capable of shooting down passenger airplanes from the ground. And according to some reports, that's what they've been trying to do with their CIA funded missiles ever since the war ended.
(Although again, to be fair, perhaps the writers of the movie felt recent events could speak for themselves without hitting the audience over the head with it. They deliberately end the movie at the point of the Soviet withdrawal, without writing any sort of afterward. Obviously they're trusting that the audience can connect the dots by themselves.
Still, I think that this was a point worth making, and the movie could have emphasized it a bit more.)
And finally, it's worth remembering the context of the Soviet Union - Afghanistan War. The movie doesn't provide any background for the conflict, but contrary to popular belief the Soviets didn't just wake up one day and decide to invade Afghanistan just for for the sake of evil. The Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan to help protect it's ally, the existing Afghanistan government at the time, from an insurrection by it's own people.
This doesn't excuse the Soviet government but, for what it's worth, it is exactly the same rational the US used to get involved in the Vietnam War. (And on a smaller scale, hundreds of other US interventions, but we won't get into all that here).
Yet when we do it, we're misguided idealists. When they do it, they're war-mongering communists.
The characters in this movie share that double standard. At one point in the movie Congressman Doc Long makes a speech to the Afghans in which he says his son was wounded fighting in Vietnam, so he knows all about fighting the Soviet oppressors. (In both wars, apparently, the Soviets were the aggressors.)
This view is not contradicted anywhere else in the film.
At the tail end of the film, it does do a good job of depicting what is common knowledge now, that the US neglect of Afghanistan allowed the country to disintegrate into a breeding ground for terrorists and resentment against the West.
To what extent history is being repeated now is rather frightening to consider.
When the build up to the US invasion of Afghanistan began 7 years ago, you will recall the US government tried to convince us that, in addition to security concerns, we were doing it for the good of the Afghans. Issues like the conditions of women in Afghanistan (which had previously just been the concern of whiny liberal groups like the Calvin Social Justice Committee) were suddenly being talked about by Bush and Cheney.
I remember debating the invasion with a family member on the phone. I tried to convince her that the US wasn't really concerned about human rights in Afghanistan, and that after we toppled their government we would soon forget about rebuilding their country.
"I really wish you were back in the US so you could hear President Bush's speeches," she told me. "He seems genuinely concerned about the Afghan people, and our government has made a solid commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan this time."
Of course, that lasted about a year and a half, until the invasion of Iraq and the Iraq War became the U.S. top priority.
And recently, reports like this one coming out of Afghanistan indicate the current US effort to rebuild Afghanistan isn't going so hot. Also see here.
OK, now that I've done my liberal ranting and raving, time for some fair play: Here's a review of the same movie from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Just for the sake of balance.
Link of the Day
This youtube video here is about 10 years old, but much of it is still very relevant today. It's a debate between Noam Chomsky and journalist Andrew Marr on a BBC television program. Marr asks a lot of tough questions, but Chomsky gives very insightful answers. Well worth the time it takes to watch.
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