Charlie Wilson's War

This movie was better than I expected, but overall still just okay. A very interesting story about the legendary but not well known role of the US in the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late '80s, it timely cautionary tale for our current times. Sadly, I don't think anyone learned anything from the earlier experience in Afghanistan, and we will go on paying the price for "fucking up the end game", as Charlie Wilson himself said. Best performance in this film goes to Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the CIA agent. For the other leads, there were some strange elements that never seemed to gel for me in their characters. For Charlie Wilson, the party animal persona that is supposed to be exemplified in the opening hot tub scene never really works for me; I never got the sense that he was reckless in his social life, and felt that the Las Vegas scene was included only to make the pending indictment later in the story make sense. For Joanne Herring, her relationship with Charlie Wilson was confusing - did somebody love somebody? was there real sadness when she married someone else? - and her role in the story similarly undefined; I found her condemnation of Charlie's office staff as "sluts" in the bar celebration scene to be very strange, as it did not fit in with either her role or their position. Despite appearances, Charlie's staff of buxom women were all smart, assertive go-getters, and whether he had them around for his own enjoyment or not, it appears from the story that he gave opportunities for women to be players on Capitol Hill at a time when it would have been challenging for women (especially beautiful ones) to get in the door legitimately. The best feature of this film is the screenplay and dialogue, and at the closing credits I was not at all surprised to see Aaron Sorkin as the responsible party. The smart, witty and fast dialogue is reminiscent of his previous work on West Wing and on The American President, and he shines again on this film.