Over the past year or so, too many prominent film-makers have failed in their (admirably intentioned) attempts to make big, serious films about US foreign policy misadventures.
Perhaps they were coming at the issue from the wrong angle. Maybe, rather than aiming to deliver this season's Platoon or Coming Home, those directors should have had a crack at fashioning variations on MASH or Catch-22. After all, the current catastrophes offer plenty of material for the sort of cynical satirist who enjoys skewering for the sake of skewering.
Set in the 1980s, though riddled with references to current discontents, Charlie Wilson's War almost manages to be such a film. Mike Nichols, the reliably liberal director of Catch-22, has taken the true story of a dissolute congressman's efforts to fund the Afghan resistance against the Soviets and turned it into an agreeably slippery farce.
Tom Hanks, playing against type, makes a loveable monster of Wilson. First seen frolicking in a hot tub with busty soap actors, he is persuaded to become the mujahideen's paymaster by a profoundly sinister, disconcertingly right- wing society hostess (waxy Julia Roberts). As the years progress, Charlie finds himself drawn into furtive negotiations with fundamentalists of various stripes and, now sincerely dedicated to the Afghan cause, ends his career as a pillar of the clandestine community.
The film is at its best when at its most cynical. One particularly fine sequence finds Phillip Seymour Hoffman, brilliant as a foul-mouthed CIA operative, being forced to repeatedly step out of Wilson's office while the senator fields accusations of drug taking. "You ain't no James Bond," Wilson remarks. "You ain't no Thomas Jefferson. So, we'll call it even," the slovenly agent replies.
Even better is a scene in which Ned Beatty, playing congressman George S Long, joins gun- wielding mujahideen in cries of "Allahu Akbar!" The awareness that the same phrase would, a little over a decade later, be used by men flying planes at New York skyscrapers, helps confirm the danger of shovelling gunpowder down fundamentalist gullets.
Sadly, Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing, a series that too often succumbed to the politics of the Great Man, can't quite resist the temptation to make a hero of Charlie Wilson. The film's pleasing moments of acidity are steadily diluted as, gathering wisdom and self- awareness, Congressman Wilson turns into somebody a little like Tom Hanks.
Once again, as with earlier war-on-terror dramas, the excess of piety spoils the pudding.
