GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 12/19/07)

You've got to give this picture points for novelty if nothing else. How many feel-good movies about U.S. Middle-East policies can you name? Now, of course, history dictates that whatever feel-goodness Charlie Wilson's War puts out cannot be sustained. Still, for 95 or so of its 97 minutes, the movie is a testament to good-old-fashioned American good will, stealthiness, and military-and-espionage-and-unconventional-diplomacy know-how.

A Hollywood A-team craft from stem to stern, War stars Hanks as the title Wilson, a real-life Texas Congressman as well as a real-life Good Time Charlie, who we first see in 1980 naked in a hot tub with three women and one other man. This weekend-in-Vegas sojourn seems like a regular thing for him, but, at this hot tub session, he's distracted from his Playboy-posing date by a 60 Minutes report about the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Moved by the plight of the Afghans, he hies back to Washington, where he's on a Defense Appropriations subcommittee, and, after establishing his separation-of-church-and-state bonfires with a constituent and almost seducing his daughter (Emily Blunt in a pretty thankless role), he sees to it that the Afghans get some more money for their effort. Soon enough, after the promptings of another, very wealthy constituent with whom he has a relaxedly intimate relationship (Roberts) and the proddings of a disillusioned, brash CIA agent (Hoffman), Wilson is globetrotting, cajoling interested parties from all sides of the Middle East into supporting a huge covert operation in the region, making bedfellows of Pakistan and Israel in the process. The Afghan triumph over the Soviets is often cited as one of the factors in the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union. And the Mujahideen, of course, was where one Osama bin Laden sprang from.

War acknowledges this ironic bit of blowback at the end, after a poignant scene depicting the U.S. dropping the ball it carried to military victory. But for the most part the movie plays like a political screwball comedy, complete with slapstick; the scene in which Wilson juggles a briefing with Hoffman's C.I.A. guy and the crafting of a press release in order to put a cap on a burgeoning scandal (stemming from the hot-tub business, and evoking, none-too-flatteringly, Rudolph Giuliani) has a flair that actually evokes Preston Sturges.

Hanks hasn't had a role as uncomplicatedly likeable as this one in quite some time — the hard-drinking, worldly-wise, but supremely relaxed Wilson is in some ways an older throwback to the more footloose-and-fancy-free roles he made his name with early on. (Although his hairstyle here suggests the picture could have just as easily been titled Trey Wilson's War.) Julia Roberts has never played a dowager before, but heaven knows she makes a good, and funny, one. Hoffman has the showiest turn; dyspeptic, unfailingly rude, but always right, his character is a reliable type that an actor of Hoffman's skill can do in his sleep. Aaron Sorkin's script is alternately witty and too on-the-money, as always, while Mike Nichol's direction is so deft and brisk you'd think he was adapting Noel Coward or something. He's not. But he is making something that critics like to call "a grown-up entertainment." I myself used to find the invocation of that false category nauseously banal; War is good enough, and rare enough, to make me almost appreciate it.

— Glenn Kenny