Settling Scores.('Persepolis,' 'Sweeney Todd,' and 'Charlie Wilson's War')(Movie review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 24-DEC-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The new Mike Nichols film, "Charlie Wilson's War," is ninety-seven minutes long. Into that time, it packs political machination, helicopter gunships, single-malt whiskey, Las Vegas, Islamabad, naked butts, and eight years of war. The film, adapted from George Crile's book, doesn't always work, but it sure offers value for money. One reason for this economy is that Nichols has paired up for the first time with Aaron Sorkin, late of "The West Wing," whose scripts operate on the principle that there is no affair of state, however tangled or burdensome, that cannot be breezed through at a brisk dramatic pace. That breeze is enviable (you feel it in an idealist like Capra, as well as in a cynic like Preston Sturges), but it comes with a risk: watch too much TV, relish the ease and aplomb of a movie like "Charlie Wilson's War," and you may start to wish--even to believe--that all government can be run this way, with so little friction and such style.

Charles Wilson was, until 1996, a Democratic congressman for the Second Congressional District in Texas. Nichols's film gets going in 1980, when this upstanding representative of the people found himself in hot water. Up to his neck in it, to be exact, with a Playboy cover girl and a couple of friendly strippers sharing the soak. This, we understand, was a standard night out for Wilson (Tom Hanks), whose tireless, nonpartisan research into the bottle and the boudoir stood him in good stead for the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee on which he sat. Early in the film, we see him swivel around in his hot tub to catch a Dan Rather report on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It's a neat image--too neat, perhaps, verging on the flip--for the two tones of Wilson's personality, presented by Nichols and Sorkin as...

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