We talked into the night of the startling truths behind the veil of righteousness that was either required to keep our world at peace-or was the very reason for it being so horrific. Oddly enough, the book, and now movie mirror exactly the same conundrum... but as usual.. only a few will be privy to engage in such discussion. Privy-perhaps the wrong word for it infers elite or special when what I mean is few will have an opportunity to realize that there are deeper questions that need asking after watching this film.
Film Critic James Rocchi said it best-
I didn't leave Charlie Wilson's War, the new film from director Mike Nichols, dissatisfied or unamused. I walked out of Charlie Wilson's War angry. No reasonable person expects a film -- any film -- to capture the complexity and scope of real events with absolute precision; adaptations are translations, and as the old Italian saying goes, "The translator is a traitor." It's one thing to compress, combine and fictionalize a story to fit the sprawling, ugly mess of it onto the big screen; it's another to take only the best, shiniest parts of a real, ugly story and turn it into a feel-good comedy. Translation may be traitorous, but Charlie Wilson's War feels like a conscious act of treason against reason itself. As film critic David Thompson has said, "We learn our history from movies, and history suffers ...." Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more evil, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia.
The movie is ridiculously nearsighted and does a great disservice to our historic perspective. Summed up with the movie's final sentences spoken by Hanks which perfectly illustrate how the truth, like so many headlines, can be manipulated to tell only the part that paints the best reflection of what we want reality to be, rather than what it truly is. Sort of a Dorian Grey Portrait-this story snapshots a moment in time showing the best image possible, while the real truth lies buried, like the portrait hidden in the attic, in the untold history that followed those final words.
“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And the people who deserved the credit are the ones who made the sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame.”
Does anyone realize the endgame was us disowning Afghanistan after arming it to the teeth and training its citizens to be efficient terrorists? That the subsequent struggle for power amid the aftermath, created the Taliban, bin Laden and alQaeda? At least there was a moment, originally in the film, but left on the cutting room floor by the producers, where Gust contacts Wilson years later to tell him to turn on his tv to see the 9/11 attacks.
gee-kinda wrecks the warm-fuzzy afterglow of the film doesn't it?
Charlie Wilson's War stops being funny
...when you realize we're living in the sequel.
1 comment:
Just saw the movie last night. (I live in Hong Kong. Different distribution schedules.) Reasonable people can disagree, but it's difficult for me to see how you could come out of the theater thinking 1) there's supposed to be a warm after-glow, and 2) you couldn't tell that "the endgame" was the deserting of a crumpled Afghanistan. It's pretty explicit all around:
*The CIA guy saying, Crazies [religious fundamentalists] are pouring in to fill the gap we're leaving;
*the congressman saying to his appropriations committee, We've got to help with the infrastructure, build schools, whatnot, and his fellow reps saying, Nobody cares about this place anymore;
*Christian conservatives arming the Afghans to defeat the godless commies, saying, The wicked deserve punishment, and the Muslim Afhans chanting it back ("The wicked deserve punishment!") with explicit comments from the actors that the trouble with saying God is on your side is that someday "God" will be claimed to be on someone else's side.
Again, there's no single, right way to take a movie's "message," but I disagree strongly with the things you took away.
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