Sunday, December 23, 2007

Charlie Wilson's War

An interesting example of a well written script and good story not very well directed. Some of the sequences are incredibly well written - textbook almost. The second and third sequences, when Charlie first goes to Pakistan and when he gets together with Gust are excellent.

The primarily drawback to the film, which I could have predicted, is Tom Hanks miscasting himself as Charlie Wilson. I say miscasting himself because he bought the rights to the book and produced the film, bringing in Mike Nichols to direct.

This drawback is the result of a flawed POV, whether it be Hanks or Nichols, about violence. PSH is the only one who gets it. This movie should have been about killing. Everytime some said "killing Russians," I could tell this was some actor delivering a line. Wrong. The characters in this story should have been gleeful in their efforts to kill Russians. As it was, they were moral about it, and maybe even felt hesitant about admitting that was what they were doing. Again, this interpretation was off. Killing Russians is why the characters in the movie wake up in the morning, it is what drives them to work hard and take elaborate and unnecessary steps. They don't care about the mooj or the moral aspect of it. It was all about killing and finding weaponry that would do the job best.

Nicols treated the Gust character as a counterbalance to Charlie and combined, the two made up the morality of the film. I think this was wrong. Charlie was the id of the film, interested in fun and games, and Gust is the subconscious, the dark longing to do bad to our enemies by any means possible.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Charlie Wilson's War:

I agree with Greg and would additionally argue that the movie suffers from some structural script problems. I never really felt anything watching this film.

Mainly, this movie doesn't seem to have much of an obstacle. The scene in which Charlie tells an aide to double from 5 to 10 million the money going to the covert war is indicative of this. I kept waiting for somebody to say - "no, you can't do that " but nobody ever did. Everytime Hanks tried something it worked.

To Greg's point - i would say that, though I agree that Hanks doesn't really live up to the roll, (I think Julia is just miscast and couldn't no matter what) the major reason why is that the movie's tone is wrong. Greg is right. If this movie is about killing Russians and winning the Cold War we the audience better feel some of the grit, some of the pressure and difficulty of this. Instead, the movie is just kind of glib and happy go lucky. Except, of course, for the scenes of maimed children...which totally don't fit in this movie.

By the same token, the sequence of the Russians getting shot down doesn't make any sense. We see these pilots talking about their love lives and shooting people on the ground - are we suddenly really supposed to hate these guys? Did anybody feel any emotion towards the russians? Towards the plight of the west against the Soviets?

In the end - I didn't like the movie very much. It was boring - though man do i love Emily Blunt! Th movie never made me believe that it was imperative to stop the Russians, never made me feel anything about that fight. At the same time i was never really worried about the Hank's ability to succeed - he just asked for things, they happened and he won.

PS - I hate when movies like this open with the final scene of the movie. I thought it was cheap and that by them doing it, they were basically conceding that they'd failed to make a movie with any real emotion - other than what they could wring from the false seen of Hanks receiving the award.