Blogging Charlie Wilson's War: The movie, again, because a couple of things are still bugging me

It's been three weeks since I posted my review of the movie Charlie Wilson's War and you'd think that by now I'd have let it go and moved on.  But there are a couple of things about the movie that irritated the hell out of me that I couldn't work into the review and they're still irritating me and since it was directed by Mike Nichols and tonight's feature at newcritics' Wednesday Night at the Movies is Mike Nichols' The Graduate, I figured I can use the connection to pretend this little rant is still relevant.

During the period when he was funding, organizing, and over-seeing America's covert war in Afghanistan, Charlie Wilson had two top administrative aides, both of whom shared the same first name as their boss.  Charles Simpson was a former college professor who spent what he eventually felt was too much of his time cleaning up messes Wilson made with his drinking and tom-catting around.  He finally resigned when he got tired of his boss's self-sabotaging of his personal and professional lives.  Simpson was replaced by Charlie Schnabel, a cowboy-booted Texas pol of the old school, who after Wilson became too ill to travel as he had became the Congressman's surrogate self on missions to the war zone along the Afghan-Pakistan border.  Schnabel fell in love with the Afghani people and got so caught up in their cause that he began dressing like a member of the mujahideen, going on raids over the border, illegally, with the muj, and actually converting to Islam, at least for one night.

Simpson and Schnabel were "assistants" in the way a lieutenant is an "assistant" to a colonel.  They did a lot of Charlie's leg work and dirty work, in Washington and overseas.  They were Wilson's top advisers and chief operatives.

Nichols and his screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have replaced both these real male eccentrics with a single, fictional female character who is not an aide or an adviser or a political agent.  She's a glorified secretary.  She's at the top of Charlie's office flow chart and the other women in the office, Charlie's Angels, are her assistants, but all of them are essentially the secretarial pool.  The Angels have no other apparent jobs but to fetch and carry at her orders and she fetches and carries at Charlie's.  Her name is Bonnie Bach and the comic book alliterativeness of her name tells you what her role in the story is, like Lois Lane, Betty Brant, and Pepper Potts, she's there to adore their respective heroes on our behalf.

Bach is played by Amy Adams, one of the best young actresses working today.  Adams was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Junebug a couple of years ago.  Her...um...enchanting performance in Disney's Enchanted turned that clever but very slight little parody into something as magical as the better of Disney's animated features of the early and mid-90s and elevated Princess Giselle to the ranks of the Princesses Aurora, Ariel, and Jasmine.  But in Charlie Wilson's War she's given very little to work her magic on as she's basically playing a wall Charlie Wilson can bounce balls off of in mental games of pitch and catch with himself.  She's there to give and receive expositional information Nichols and Sorkin couldn't be bothered figuring out how to deliver dramatically and her scenes with Tom Hanks are mostly a matter of her asking questions that will prompt him to deliver that information or taking notes while Hanks spouts off some background facts and figures at his own prompting.

But it's not bad enough that in turning the character into a woman they demoted her.  They turned her into a stereotype as well.  She is the movie cliche of the ideal female subordinate.  Brisk, efficient, no-nonsense, beautiful but toned down while on the job---I'm almost surprised Nichols didn't put black-framed horn rims on her so that he could have a scene where she takes them off and unpins her hair and shakes it loose to reveal that she's the most gorgeous woman in Charlie's life.  She is so totally devoted to Charlie the man, as opposed to Representative Wilson the Congressman, that she has subsumed her personality into his.  She has no opinions, no political agenda, nothing to say for herself.  Everything she says is about Charlie and his physical and emotional well-being.  She's this movie's version of Iron Man's Pepper Potts, but without the sex appeal, the backless evening gown, and the unrequited love barely concealed.  In short, she's the perfect kid sister.

Bach is there to give Charlie somebody to explain things to and to embody the fact that this good-time Charlie is still a hard-working and effective (behind the scenes) legislator, and if she wasn't played by Amy Adams her purely mechanical function in the story would creak and scream like an engine badly in need of a lube job.  Adams makes a person out of this prop, but she played less of a cartoon in the cartoon sequences in Enchanted.

The other thing that has kept me annoyed at Charlie Wilson's War whenever I think about it is the way Nichols and Sorkin let us know that Charlie Wilson was a "liberal."

The real Charlie Wilson was something of a throwback, a Kennedyesque liberal in the age of Ronald Reagan.  He was a Texas Democrat, basically a populist, very liberal on most domestic issues, extremely conservative on foreign policy, especially when it came to dealing with communists.  The movie takes his Cold War hardliner's view as a given and as an attitude that we all we would have shared at the time; in fact, it makes it synonymous with patriotism, blithely ignoring that Wilson was accepting the neo-con Manicheanism that got us into Iraq where we're rowing the same boat that Soviets rowed in Afghanistan, bankrupting ourselves and breaking our Army in what our enemies regard as a holy war against the infidel invaders and how he was risking getting us into World War III with his patriot games.

As for Wilson's domestic liberalism, that's taken care of in a scene between Charlie and a fat cat constituent from his district, a Right Wing Christian come to Wilson's office to ask for Charlie's help in keeping the Nativity Scene on the lawn of the city hall back home.  The ACLU is suing to have it moved off public property.  Charlie adopts an Aw shucks, you know I'm on your side attitude but he slyly makes it clear to us and to the fat cat that he thinks the guy is a hypocritical yahoo who can take his precious creche and stick it where the moon don't shine...or at least move it a block down the street and onto private property.

And that's it for Charlie's liberal bona fides.  A liberal is simply someone who knows how to stick it to the rubes.  Actually, since the rubes aren't the the target audience for this movie, a liberal is someone who knows how to make other liberals, the ones who are among the target audience, laugh up their sleeves at the rubes.

The fat cat's accompanied to Charlie's office by his very straight-laced looking daughter.  She's a grown woman but clearly still Daddy's Little Girl and in the very next scene we see her in Charlie's apartment showing off how grown-up she is in a pair of high heels, black French cut panties, one of Charlie's shirts, and nothing else.  Watching this scene begin to unfold, you might think, if you'd read George Crile's book---

Well, first you'd think, I don't remember this scene in the book!  And of course you don't, because it's not in there.  It's made up.  But then you might think that this was going to be a scene showing us how self-destructive Charlie Wilson could be.  This is all he needs to be doing at the moment, seducing the daughter of a rich and powerful constituent he's already flat-out insulted.  But you'd be wrong.  It turns out to be another joke at the expense of the rubes.  See, his own daughter thinks he's a boob and his conservative, Christian values are a lot of hooey.  Imagine his sputtering outrage if he knew what his baby girl was up to!

Aaron Sorkin made a practice of demonstrating this kind of "liberalism"  on The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  It's too bad Mike Nichols apparently shares it.

There's something else that's too bad.  The daughter is played by yet another fine young actress who is totally wasted in the part, Emily Blunt, who vied with Stanley Tucci as top scene-stealer in The Devil Wears Prada.  Here she is given nothing to do but show off her extremely long and gorgeous legs and very flat belly and pout while Charlie postpones whisking her off to bed in order to tell the audience through her what a great and sentimental old patriot he is.

That's it for now.  Keep the wasting of Adams' and Blunt's talents in mind tonight when we're discussing Anne Bancroft's performance as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate over at newcritics.  From Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and The Graduate through Working Girl and Post Cards From the Edge and on up to Closer, Nichols isn't known for giving his actresses, or his actors, nothing to do.  The thread opens at 10 and will stay open until the cows come home.  Remember, you don't need to have seen the movie recently, or at all, to join in.  If you want to bone up, our fearless newcritics leader, Tom Watson, has posted links to clips from The Graduate at YouTube, which Tom calls "the Cliff Notes of virtual film fests." See you there.

Comments

[Sherri]

I'm reminded of the old description of Robert Heinlein's female characters as "Heinlein men with breasts." Big ones. That you can touch.

While I enjoyed reading the book, a better book for getting a sense of what really went on during the time is Steve Coll's Ghost Wars. Unsurprisingly, it was a little more complex than Charlie Wilson single-handedly winning the Cold War.

[Mike Schilling]

I'm almost surprised Nichols didn't put black-framed horn rims on her so that he could have a scene where she takes them off and unpins her hair and shakes it loose to reveal that she's the most gorgeous woman in Charlie's life.

But Nichols did precisely that with the creche-loving constituent's daughter.

[HenryFTP]

Lance:

As outdated and out-of-touch as I am, I am still not old enough to remember Mike Nichols and Elaine May on television, other than in bad kinescope clips, so I may have missed something blindingly obvious from their early days.

But your diatribe about Charlie Wilson's War reminded me about how much I have always loathed Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, particularly the way she treated her own daughter on screen. Both Nichols and May seem to have attitudes about women that are a throwback to the 1950s -- in Charlie Wilson's War none of the women act like women in the early 1980s Washington professional world that I knew.

In some bizarre way, their caricaturized view of women is the flip side of male anxiety about women in the 1950s as seen in classic film noir.

I'm glad the forum on The Graduate is past my bedtime -- thinking about a supposedly "literate" director like Nichols more at home on "Broadway" than "Hollywood" in these terms is making my head hurt, particularly in light of the late political unpleasantness. I think I'm going to have to stick with Doctor Doolittle.

[HenryFTP]

Sorry -- but when I throw Nichols' Carnal Knowledge into the mix, my headache just got a lot worse. But that look that Nichols gets out of Benjamin/Hoffman at the very end of The Graduate becomes a lot less enigmatic when you put Carnal Knowledge alongside.

[Judith]

hllo,

Sorry, but I liked charlie wilson's war. It made me laugh. I thought the point was to show who was making these kinds of decsions so for me it was pretty effective. And hanks was spot on.

[donna darko]

Lance and I were discussing the same thing at Wednesday Night at the Movies. There's a streak of misogyny, even misanthopy, in his films. His women are static and conventional or they are victims of sexism, i.e. Closer, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate, Postcards from the Edge, Working Girl, Regarding Henry.

[Judith]

Hi Donna,

I didnt see any female victims of men in "Closer" - and Nichols was true to the text of the play - I saw it on Broadway. If anything, the young woman is using her sex, not the other way around.

I didnt see any sexism in the handling of Charlie Wilson's war either - the guy WAS/IS that way, Nichols didnt make it up. And if anything, the rich Texan woman is calling all the shots - not Charlie. That is kinda the point, I thought.

Don't know about the rest -