Something to watch tonight: Charlie Wilson's War

What’s that say­ing? “History. It’s just one bloody thing after another.”

A great film about good inten­tions and unin­ten­ded con­sequences has just landed on Netflix. Charlie Wilson’s War is a great com­bin­a­tion of writer and dir­ect­or (Sorkin and Nichols) and effort­less star power (Hanks and Roberts). It’s bril­liant¹.

I reviewed the cinema release in the Capital Times in January 2008:

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day in 1979. They remained in the coun­try, bru­tally sup­press­ing the loc­al res­ist­ance, until they were forced to leave in 1989: almost ten years of occu­pa­tion that des­troyed one coun­try and ruined anoth­er. One side of the story was told in the recent film The Kite Runner: in it we saw a vibrant and cos­mo­pol­it­an cul­ture bombed back to the stone age by the Soviets and their equally one-eyed Taliban replacements.

For peacen­iks like myself, the Soviet aggres­sion was an incon­veni­ent fact, dif­fi­cult to acknow­ledge dur­ing our efforts to pre­vent nuc­le­ar anni­hil­a­tion at the hands of war-mongerers like Ronald Reagan. While we were march­ing for peace and dis­arm­a­ment, play­boy Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) was secretly fund­ing the Mujahideen insur­gents to the tune of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars, provid­ing them with the weapons that would bring down the Russians.

With the help of a reneg­ade CIA-man (won­der­ful Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Texan social­ite (Julia Roberts), an Israeli spy (Ken Stott) and President Zia, dic­tat­or of Pakistan (Om Puri), Wilson per­suaded, cajoled, threatened and coerced Congress to pay for all this – without them even know­ing what it was for. Aaron Sorkin’s script is razor-sharp, often very funny, and does a great job of not spelling out all the les­sons we should be learn­ing. Charlie Wilson’s War may have brought about the end of the Cold War but it also opened up Afghanistan to the bru­tal fun­da­ment­al­ism of the Taliban, increased the influ­ence of the Saudis in the region and indir­ectly led to the Iraqi poo-fight we are in now. As Wilson says, it’s all about the endgame.

Also in that January 2008 Capital Times column (if you feel so inclined): Jason Reitman’s com­edy Juno (which I ima­gine plays pretty dif­fer­ently since Elliot Page’s trans­ition), found foot­age mon­ster movie Cloverfield, lame par­ody Meet the Spartans and “well-intentioned” lit­er­ary adapt­a­tion The Jane Austen Book Club.

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Where to watch Charlie Wilson’s War

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland:Streaming on Netflix

India: Streaming on Netflix or Hotstar

USA: Digital rental

UK: Streaming on Netflix

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Further listening

I have been giv­en the secret meth­od of embed­ding RNZ audio here after a long peri­od where I assumed it was just broken². On Sunday 16 August, I gave & Sons a pretty scath­ing review which you can listen to here:

In a rare occur­rence, Michelle Langstone last Sunday gave me a bit of a serve by way of reply. It’s totally cool for us both to see the same things in a film and react in com­pletely oppos­ite ways (espe­cially when she expresses her opin­ion so cred­ibly and enthu­si­ast­ic­ally). It reminded me of the old pod­cast­ing days, when we would get in a room and spar about things. Maybe I should bring back a pod­cast here …³

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1. I even own a copy. ↩︎
2. Now I have to go back through dozens of posts here and update the code. Sigh. ↩︎
3. Maybe I will. ↩︎