Bombs and butts

Charlie Wilson’s War
15, Nationwide

Mike Nichols’s latest film is a mixed bag and a stuffed bag and, incredibly, none the worse for either. In its rat-a-tat, rapid-fire 95 minutes you get bombings, mines, refugee camps, casualties, hot tubs, Playboy cover girls, arms dealers, cocaine, scandal, Tom Hanks’s naked butt (surprisingly delicious; peachy), CIA agents, world presidents — and all in a movie that is partly serious political satire and partly just a hoot. A film about America’s covert funding of the mujahedin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan a hoot? Listen, I know a hoot when I see one, and this is a hoot.

OK, so who is this Charlie Wilson and what exactly is this war? Good question. Top marks. This is based on a true story and so a true person, the Charlie Wilson who, as a Democrat, represented Texas’s Second Congressional District in the House of Representatives until he retired in 1996. Wilson was popular, charming, smart and an effective politician despite his two favourite pastimes: the bottle and the boudoir. A Scotch-for-breakfast sort of guy, he also had an office staffed by a trio of low-cut young lovelies whom he would summon en masse by shouting: ‘Jailbait!’

Anyway, the film opens in 1980 with Wilson (Tom Hanks) in Las Vegas, sharing a hot tub with two strippers and a Playboy cover girl who is attempting to sell him her TV series idea: ‘It’s Dallas, but set in Washington.’ He is not sold, and instead swivels around to watch the TV, and a report by Dan Rather on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Afghans only means of fighting back — arms dating from the first world war. Although juxtaposing the two sides of Wilson’s character — the good-time womaniser and serious politician — in this way is, I suppose, terrifically flip, the film moves so briskly that there simply is not enough time to feel irritated.