Check Out…Richard Widmark in “Kiss of Death”

Though it shames me as a crime/noir fan to say it, it took me until just this week to see Kiss of Death.  Admittedly, there is a plot: Victor Mature turns stoolie to protect his family and inadvertently puts them in danger when the man he testified against is acquitted.  But you’ll be too busy revelling in the awesomeness that is Richard Widmark to care.

Widmark makes his feature film debut as Tommy Udo, an all-time great psycho who Mature sees lurking in every shadow.  The performance is unforgettable, and not just for the classic moment in which Udo pushes a wheelchair-bound old woman down the stairs.

Udo crackles with insanity. The skin of his face hangs loose, a thin veneer covering the stark white skull beneath. An invisible string pulls the corners of his  mouth wider and wider until once-pursed lips have blossomed into a terrible rictus. His eyes glisten, brimming with the emotion of a consciousness on the verge of collapse. Seemingly innocuous statements are punctuated with bursts of nasal laughter that trail off into silence, ellipses that leave the worst part unsaid. And through it all, Widmark adds little touches to put things over the top: he’ll lick his hand as if it were a paw, throw a body part to the side in an inexplicable spasm, let one eyeball roll back in its socket.

As if it wasn’t apparent from the preceding paragraph, I highly recommend that you check this one out. Widmark’s performance undoubtedly influenced the generations of actors that followed. Watch closely and you’ll pick out Nicolas Cage’s twitchy swagger, Willem Dafoe’s piercing gaze, and, when it comes right down to it, probably some tic or expression displayed by any decent thespian who’s made a solid living by coming unglued onscreen.

Robert Mitchum wouldn’t bring his frog-eyed, deadpan fanatic to the big screen for quite a while yet—Night of the Hunter was 1955, Cape Fear 1962—and Anthony Perkins (as Norman Bates) waited thirteen more years before donning his momma’s skivvies. In 1947, Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo was indisputably the coolest, craziest villain around. 

(Posted by Julian on 1/31) 

 

Super Bowl Prediction Hidden in “I Am Legend”

Just a bit of weirdness before Super Sunday for you. The opening scene of I Am Legend features footage from a newscast, with a CNN-style crawl running along the bottom of the screen; the broadcast is supposed be late 2008 or early 2009, so the news bits are fictional. (I remember being annoyed with it when I saw the film, as I was reading the crawl rather than paying attention.)

Anyway, one of the faux newsbits reads “The New England Patriots beat the Giants for the second time this season, 23-7.” While this doesn’t mention the Super Bowl directly, the only time the Patriots and Giants could possibly play one another twice in a season includes the Super Bowl – they’re in different conferences, so would never have more than one regular-season matchup (and even that would only come once every four years.)

Furthermore, the score given – 23-7 New England – is pretty close to the Vegas spread, although most are calling for a higher-scoring affair.

Anyway, something to watch for come Sunday. If the final score does come out as mentioned in the film, than (depending on when the postproduction on that scene was done) someone in the I Am Legend camp correctly predicted the matchup and final of the big game before the playoff picture even firmed up.

I’m going against the grain, by the way, and calling for a huge New York upset, 29-28.

(Posted by Sean on 1/29/08)

DVD Review: “No End in Sight”

 No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, USA, 2007. Review by Julian on 1/26/08.

Every year, around the time they wheel out the Oscar nominations, I realize I need to get my ass moving and start checking out the films that slipped through the cracks. With most of 2007 spent in Pittsburgh—not the single greatest city in the country when it comes to film availability—the list would be even longer than usual if  the year hadn’t presented such a dearth of quality cinema. Nevertheless, I’ll be raiding Netflix to check out all the nominees I haven’t seen so far. This way, when they announce the winners, I won’t just guess that the wrong nominee won: I’ll know that the wrong nominee won. 

(This is assuming, of course, that the best prospective entrant in a given category was nominated at all.  Which it probably wasn’t.)

Scanning the list of nominees for a good start, I decided to check out No End in Sight, a documentary tracing the colossal series of errors committed by the United States government in its occupation of Iraq. It was a good choice. The film offers a measured and informative narrative, presenting a wide variety of qualified perspectives on an issue the media often covers but rarely considers with anything resembling critical thought. Talking heads include assistants to Colin Powell and the UN’s Special Representative in Iraq, major administrative players in the initial recovery effort, and members of the military who saw the story from the ground.

Beginning with Bush’s infamous declaration of victory in May of 2003, the film goes on to show how the process of rebuilding and governing Iraq was hopelessly and tragically mismanaged. With the exception of hopeless boob Walter Slocombe, whose bad  hair cut and witless stammering admittedly lend his pleas of ignorance a bit of credence, everybody here knows that the US messed up big. While the film is packed end to end with a pretty staggering litany of blunders, I’ll give a personal shout out to L Paul Bremer, who as Director of Reconstruction decided it would be a good idea to disband the entire Iraqi Army. Instead of having a ready-made force familiar with the local terrain  at his disposal, he created a group of angry desperate enemies a solid half million strong.

Certain critics will contend that the film represents the traditional biases of the liberal media, but just about everything presented here is unequivocal fact. Actually, that may be one of the ways the myth of the liberal media arose in the first place: the facts themselves seem to have an awfully liberal bias. When you’re dealing with the kind of shortsighted greed and arrogance on display here, there’s only so many ways the cards can fall.

No End in Sight covers a relatively narrow time frame, tending to focus on the early period of occupation at the expense of the politics involved before and after. Whether that’s a weakness depends on what you’re looking for; a plethora of existing documentaries cover the country’s motivation for entry (see Fahrenheit 9/11 as a provacative start), while current developments seem to be mere echoes of the mistakes, complaints, and disengenuous statements of progress we’ve seen in the past.

Amid the hand-wringing, political sniping, and anomie of today’s society, a film like this one won’t exactly energize the oversaturated apathetic masses. And while it may not change the world, it will at least serve as a vital historical document for the generations to come. I don’t have too much faith in us learning from the past, but at least I can look forward to No End in Sight Two: Down and Out in Iran.

 Rating: 3.5 screens out of 5

 

Review: “Cloverfield”

Cloverfield, directed by Matt Reeves, USA, 2008. Review by Sean on 1/25/08.

In the space of about 24 hours, I went from an only-vague awareness of what Cloverfield was to hearing pretty much everyone I encountered talk about it and only it. This is JJ Abrams’ power, and he wields it gleefully. That being said, believe the hype: you want to see this movie. You might hate it, but you want to see it anyway.

The successor and refiner of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield follows a collection of interchangeable hipsters and their handheld camera through a Manhattan under siege by a large nasty monster of unclear origin. I never thought I’d say it, but this is an absolutely perfect use of the handheld, ultra-realistic technique. Blair Witch used its camera gimmick to cover up the fact that there wasn’t anything whatsoever to look at besides woods and sky. With Cloverfield, however, the cinema verite injects lifeblood into the disaster movie – for the first time in a long time, we have a great big disaster movie that looks like you’re really seeing it, rather than sitting in a theater. Somewhere, Michael Bay is crying.

That being said, Cloverfield could’ve used a rewrite or two. The film continually asks the viewer to take huge leaps of faith, starting early on with one character’s obstinate insistence on hanging on to the camera, even as he’s narrowly avoiding a dozen horrible deaths. We then have to believe that not just one character, but the whole damn posse is going to cross all of Manhattan – while the monster rampages – to rescue the girl that our hero has a serious crush on, but is not actually linked to in any meaningful or long-standing way. Along the way they take a heaping handful of potentially disastrous risks that no post 9-11 New Yorker would take to save their own mother, let alone that one girl from the Coney Island trip. That’s the trouble with making a starkly realistic film (with a giant sea monster, but who’s counting): if the camera work is real but the people aren’t, you’ve got a problem.

Story problems can be forgiven, though, because this isn’t a story-driven film; this is visceral horror. Scenes of New York panicked and buildings falling are the right blend of CNN on 9-11 and Godzilla; devastation that would look cartoonish if we hadn’t seen it real life less than a decade ago. (Whether or not it’s too soon for such work is another topic; but hey, there’s no way you can do any disaster movie ever again without invoking 9-11, so why not go whole hog.) Several sequences are genuinely terrifying, and others are perfect uses of shock and disorientation. The slow visual reveal of the monster (a method once thought utterly killed by Jeepers Creepers) is just right. Obviously, giant debts are owed to both Godzilla and Alien, but this is the kind of thing those franchises would be doing if they weren’t utterly out of steam.

Further praise is deserved by the film’s viral marketing campaign, which, as I mentioned, spread through my social sphere like wildfire, both before and after the film’s release. The extensive online world of this film, both within the storyline and in the hands of fans, almost guarantees a future to this franchise. Furthermore, ambiguities in the film have allowed fans to piece together the story through repeat viewings and subtle clues; this film must have the most repeat viewers of anything since The Passion of the Christ. I know at least one person who went three times in the space of last weekend.

There are certainly people who will not be taken by Cloverfield; as I said, you have to be willing to go for the ride, and susceptible to the scares of disaster films. Regardless, however, this is a significant and engaging, if flawed, movie. See it.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Some bonus content for you (spoiler free): the monster depicted in Cloverfield, improbable though it may be, is tangentially based on a theoretically-extant creature. In 1997, animal noise from incredibly deep in the ocean near South American was recorded at a great volume, over great distances; this noise was never explained. By analyzing the nature of the sound, however, scientists theorized that – if this were an actual animal noise – the creature that made it would have to be preposterously deep in the ocean, and significantly larger than the blue whale (making it the largest creature in the history of the planet. Here’s the Wikipedia page on the incident: Bloop. Yes, it’s actually called Bloop, and is actually a real thing.

Review: “Atonement”

Atonement, directed by Joe Wright, UK, 2007. Posted by Sean on 1/24/08.

(Don’t really have the ammunition for a full-length review on this one – call it a capsule.)

When the Academy Award Nominees were announced this past week, Atonement’s adult leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, were passed over for acting nods. Their young costar, 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan, was not snubbed, however, receiving a Best Supporting Actress nomination. While the performances of Knightley and McAvoy were more than capable, the Academy is on to something (for once) here: Atonement is Ronan’s story, and should’ve been her movie. And for about the first forty-five minutes, it was.

Ronan plays the youngest of three incarnations of Briony Tallis, a child of privilege in pre-war England. She has great admiration for her impetuous older sister, Cecilia (Knightley,) and has an innocent (but emotional) crush on Robbie Turner (McAvoy,) the servants’ son turned pre-med student. Turner, of course, is in love with Cecilia, a fact that Briony is exposed to in a series of increasingly indecorous incidents. The spurned adolescent quickly turns vengeful; to say more would be to spoil the only truly dramatic stretch Atonement offers.

This much of the story is tense, emotionally resonant, and densely layered. Instead of maintaining that level of intrigue, however, the film lurches rudely forward seven years or so, skipping the unraveling of everything the first act promised. With this jump comes the temporary exit of Briony from the story and the permanent exit of Ronan from the film; when Briony returns, she is weak-willed and apologetic, not the chilling villain we last saw. We are asked to attach anew to the perils of Turner and Cecilia, but that story has no weight; it was all being shouldered by Briony. Her return is too little, too late; while the conclusion confirms the story as truly hers, it feels as if it was taken from her too early.

If all of Atonement were as strong as its first act, it might well be the best film of the year. As it stands, it leaves the viewer considering what the movie could’ve been.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Review: “Juno”

Juno, directed by Jason Reitman, USA, 2007. Review by Julian on 1/11/08.  

At first, Juno scared me a bit. Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches was singing real loud, Michael Cera of Arrested Development and Superbad was jogging around in real short shorts, and director Jason Reitman, of Thank You For Smoking and Ivan Reitman(‘s seed), was making sure he hit each indie stereotype stride for stride.

On second glance, the fear increased. I felt a nervous tingle in my stomach as I saw that the film was written by someone named Diablo Cody (flash: yes it’s a she, yes that sounds like a stripper name, yes she was a stripper, no, her parents didn’t actually name her Diablo). If Diablo Cody was the name of a character in a horror flick whose brains were about to be eaten by an amputee zombie, it’d be totally cool. In a slightly somber, slightly offbeat dramedy about a high school girl coming of age while going through an unplanned pregnancy, eh, not so much.

Not long after the credits, I was squirming in my seat. Ellen Page –who I remember from Hard Candy even though I’ve never seen Hard Candy because it manages to come up in every conversation I’ve had in the last two years—was speaking in a very strange and very unnatural manner. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, then I realized: she was talking like a movie character imitating a hyper-enculturated teenager imitating movie characters. I’m not sure what’s coming after (post)postmodernism, but I’m willing to bet it involves a lot of droll remarks and Thundercats references.

By the dawn of the third act, I realized I was watching a great film. Reitman and Cody had plunged deep into a sea of indie cliches, swallowed a few too many coy jokes and awkward pauses, and emerged coughing up the true secret of conveying real life in film: don’t make it real.

Let me explain.

Some pieces of art, be they on the page or the big screen, work to generate a sense of REALISM by walking the straight and narrow. Characters mourn the deaths of their relatives, make hushed conversation in churches and coffee shops,  face everyday tragedy and walk home with their eyes on the sky and their hands in their pockets. REALISTIC writers stick with subjectively universal details and try their best to evade any pecularity that would disturb a reader’s sense of identification.

Juno, like other works that successfully capture the essence of real life, is full of unrealistic details. Characters change motivation and temperament at the drop of a dime, make jokes of the most tragic revelations, and generally behave like the bizarre, unrealistic weirdos we encounter every day of our lives. Life is not realistic, so why should film be? If fiction wants to be realistic, dammit, it needs to be stranger than itself.

And Juno is strange, but it’s also warm, and painful, and often cringeworthy. The acting shines across the board, from the preternatural Page to T.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, who defy their hard-nosed personas by playing the best parents anyone could realistically hope for. The cast (under Reitman’s direction) carefully avoids overplaying the emotion, restraining themselves just enough to make things that much more effective when it all bubbles to the surface. 

As the closing credits rolled, I was glad my fear had been a bit premature. Yeah, the soundtrack was too loud, the style a bit pretentious, the dialogue a little on the goofy side. But with American film teetering on the edge of the grave, it’s comforting to realize that some of the best cinema of the year focused on bringing humanity to life.

Rating: 4 screens (out of 5)

 

 

Review: “I Am Legend”

I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence, USA, 2007. Review by Sean on 1/8/08.

Ah, for the good old days when all Will Smith had to do to save humanity was fly Jeff Goldblum’s computer into an alien mothership. Now there’s a supervirus and global devastation and complex animal testing and oh so much inner pain. And Jeff Goldblum is presumed dead, so I guess we’re really screwed.

We join humanity in 2010, where a humble and photogenic doctor (Emma Thompson, uncredited) claims to have cured cancer by turning the measles virus into a good guy, set to devour cancer cells happily and painlessly. In a plot jump that’s never explained, we fast forward to the evacuation of New York after the vaccine has turned back to the dark side, killed a bunch of people, and become airborne. Smith, as soldier/scientist/all-around paragon of humanity Robert Neville (immune to the disease) is ushering his family off the island, eager to stay at “ground zero” (now where have I heard that before?) and continue looking for a cure. Another big fast forward, and Neville is the last man on earth, scavenging for food and entertainment with his lovable dog Sam by day, defending against mutated evil zombie virus things and still searching for a cure by night. These early scenes (the best shots of which you’ve seen ad nauseum in the previews) are when the film is at its best; Manhattan abandoned (CGI enhanced though it may be) is unnerving and eerie, and the meditative pace of these early scenes allows the viewer to explore Neville’s frame of mind and re-imagine the oft-Twilight-Zoned scenario of being the last human alive.

As things grow more complicated, the monsters become organized (a branch of the plot that should’ve been more fleshed out,) Neville becomes closer to a cure, and sanity begins to go by the wayside. The film occasionally diverts into dull horror, more jump-out-of-the-dark scares than true suspense. Someone really needs to send a memo to Hollywood: not being able to see shit on screen is not scary, it’s just irritating. It’s always scarier when you can see everything.

The point of I Am Legend, if there is one, is how humanity is going to get out of this mess. The plot stumbles repeatedly through the second and third acts, but through a Signs-esque series of connections and a saccharine epilogue, we learn that the search for a cure was apparently what all this business was about. Neville at one point angrily exclaims, “God didn’t do this – we did.” Unfortunately, it is God who swoops in to save the day in the end, so what appears to be a mild-mannered action film is, in fact, a great big scream of “Science bad, religion good!” An awfully conservative film for the normally socially conscious Will Smith.

Smith’s performance is spot on, and Francis Lawrence’s direction is powerful and sincere. The attention to detail and nuance in the early scenes actually borders on delightful – one might have a more enjoyable time following all the sly cultural references in the first act than actually keeping up with the plot. A muddy script and an ugly message, however, are enough to sink this ship.

Rating: 2.5 Screens (Out of 5)

DVD Review: “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1936)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by George King, USA, 1936.  DVD Review by Julian, 1/3/08.

More than seven decades before Burton and Depp made slitting people’s throats and turning their less identifiable parts into meat pies all the rage, C-level producer/director George King took his own stab at this tale of a coiffeur-cum-serial killer. The story, supposedly based on a real figure who did his dirty work at the dawn of the 19th century, was first published in a British penny dreadful around 1846. Since then, the demon barber’s turned up in countless variations across virtually every medium.  

In this, (at least) the third cinematic production of the tale, Todd  lacks the depth of motivation granted him by Burton’s adaptation. No, the Sweeney Todd on display here is pure psycho, a cackling weirdo with a penchant for smacking the help, leering at young women, and activating trap doors with a sheer glee that you have to see to appreciate. The film is carried on the hunched back of the appropriately named Tod Slaughter, a Victorian actor turned chicken farmer turned Victorian actor who, as Todd, never passes up an opportunity to bring the ham. There’s never any danger of Slaughter’s performance inspiring fear, but he sure makes you laugh enough to forget about the general shoddiness of everything going on around him. (Tod Slaughter trivia that no one but Tom Waits fans like Sean will care about: Slaughter’s film debut was in another Victorian gothic called Murder in the Red Barn. Cool, huh?)

 Fans of the Burton production or curious film buffs may want to watch this story unfold just to appreciate the evolution of the narrative.  There’s no evil judge, Beadle is an honest plodder, and the young hero (Anthony in the 2007 production, Tobias here) takes an inexplicable yet racist detour into the wildlands of Africa to fight off some savages. I did not make that up. 

To the great disappointment of those looking for this one to bust out the gore, one thing you will not see here is any blood. In fact, there’s almost no on-screen violence at all.  While many films of this era utilized ominous lighting, stylized editing, or close camera work to create an impression of violent action, director King lacks the budget or talent to compensate for his adherence to the overbearing Production Code.  

There are certainly better horror movies from the era (start with Bride of Frankenstein, released a year before). Heck, there are even better adaptations of the same story. But while you may not regret missing this version of Todd, it just might be your best chance to get a heaping dose of Slaughter.  

Rating: 2 screens (out of 5) 

Review: “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, directed by Jake Kasdan, USA, 2007. Review by Julian on 1/3/08.

I actually had high hopes for Walk Hard, and I can sum up why in two words: Judd Apatow.  Rising to critical attention with the fabulous Freaks and Geeks and the lesser but still hilarious Undeclared, writer/producer/director Apatow has since seen his name stamped on some of the warmest and funniest comedies of the decade.  Cautiously navigating the space between the gross-out and romantic comedy, Apatow has regularly cooked up a potent mixture of juvenile humor and genuine heart.

 With Superbad and Knocked Up, Apatow’s 2007 productions offered, respectively, an offbeat ode to homoerotic friendship and a reminder that with great sex comes great responsibility. Both succeeded by taking the time to establish sympathetic characters before unleashing them on a crude and unpredictable world.

 Where Apatow’s best succeeds, Walk Hard sadly fails. Rushed, ugly, and bizarrely unfunny, this meager attempt at satire stars John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, a lamebrained rock star who’s one part Johnny Cash, one part Ray Charles, and one part whatever miscellaneous asshole is appropriate for the given punchline. The film follows Cox throughout his musical career, tracing his ascension to stardom, battle with the usual cadre of addictions, and attempts to find happiness by conquering the demons of his past.

 The overall package isn’t too bad. In his first major starring role, Reilly plays each joke to the hilt, throwing his body into every swagger, curling his lip at every snide remark, and generally making the most of things whenever possible. Likewise, a supporting cast spilling over with recognizable comedic talent does its honest best to keep things afloat. The songs too are solid, with Reilly doing a far better job of hitting those difficult notes than Joaquin Phoenix ever did in the earnest Walk the Line. 

No, the failure here is quite clearly with the writing, which lacks polish, heart, and, most distressingly for a comedy, humor. Knowing that co-writers Apatow and Jake Kasdan (who also directs) have talent, I have no choice but to label this effort as lazy.

 Apatow and Kasdan construct the film as a satire, wrapping set pieces and narrative events around Cox’s chance encounters with a host of real-life musical legends like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and The Beatles. They even recruit notable names like Jack Black, Justin Long, and Jack White (who, as Presley, steals not just his scene but the whole film) to play the parts. But instead of exploiting these meetings for their full satiric potential, the writers settle for Saturday Night Live-style non-jokes in which the characters simply state who they are over and over again. This is not satire.  It’s not even parody.  It’s just lazy writing.

 (For the blissfully unaware, SNL has been sucking quite enthusiastically for some time now. A staple of the insipid writing featured on the show has been talk show parodies hosted by strange personalities, real or imagined. Instead of creating unique characters, laying down any form of narrative, or even building from set-up to punchline, these sketches involve hosts repeatedly reminding the audience of who they are. On “The Brian Fellows Show”, Tracy Morgan as Brian Fellows constantly says, “I’m Brian Fellows.”  On “The Barry Gibb Talk Show,” more than half of any given sketch is devoted to a theme song with the lyrics. “Talkin’ It Up/On the Barry Gibb Talk Show”.  And so on and so on, ad nauseum.)

Aside from meager satire, Walk Hard features a stilted and narrow range of cruel jokes that, instead of evolving over time or recurring in different varieties, are simply repeated over and over again. A joke about Cox’s brother being cut in half seems like an odd misstep the first time it shows up. By the eighth time, it feels like deliberate punishment.

 Again, Walk Hard  parallels the stagnant SNL in that it’s so bad at times that it almost seems to be daring you not to laugh. “Sure, this sucks,” the film says. “But you’ve already invested so much time. You might as well try to like it!”

If people were starved for quality comedy, this just might work. And in fact, there are moments in Walk Hard when a ray of comedic light beats back the shadows of the preceding minutes. But in a world where Apatow’s own films have led audiences to expect genuine wit and characterization from their comedies, crass and lazy writing of this sort just won’t cut it.

 Rating: 2 screens (out of 5)

Review: “Charlie Wilson’s War”

Charlie Wilson’s War, directed by Mike Nichols, USA, 2007. Review by Sean on 1/3/08.

You can’t say that Hollywood isn’t trying with this whole war thing. 2007 saw loud, impassioned, big-budget political moves like In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, and The Kingdom try very, very hard to make points that couldn’t be ignored; most of these efforts met with middling critical reaction and ho-hum box office returns. Charlie Wilson’s War, then, assembles a cinematic dream team to take a stab at raising social consciousness – Mike Nichols at the helm, Aaron Sorkin at the pen, and a cast that includes Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Call it Ocean’s 9-11.

The overwhelmingly relevant and mostly true story Sorkin and Nichols have put together concerns the Afghani resistance to the Soviet Union in the early 1980’s. Hanks, as Texas Congressman Charles Wilson, is persuaded to take up the Afghan cause by an overly seductive Texas socialite (Roberts.) He soon finds himself interviewing limbless children in refugee camps and having fast-paced, enthusiastic arms discussions with the CIA’s Afghan desk (Hoffman) and a precocious chess master cum weapons expert (Christopher Denham,) en route to turning Afghanistan into the covert front of the Cold War.

About 90 of the film’s 98 minutes are quick, effective, and self-congratulatory; the film opens with an airplane hanger full of CIA bigwigs congratulating Charlie for more or less winning the Cold War single-handedly (a gigantic sign in the background loudly reads, “Charlie Did It!”) The general movement of the film works like a good-not-great episode of Sorkin’s The West Wing; utterly likable and well-developed characters discover a gigantic problem, talk about it while walking quickly and flirting shamelessly, solve it on know-how and gumption, then share a drink in celebration. The rub, though, comes in the last couple of scenes, when Hanks suddenly understands that more harm than good will come of the whole mess if the Afghanis aren’t kept loyal to the US, passionately makes that point to the right people, is roundly ignored, and then we all think about bin Laden on the drive home.

The overall project of Charlie Wilson’s War is incredibly deft; Wilson’s funding of the mujahideen serves as a point-for-point allegory for the current Iraq war and its failed endgame, even while being contextually and historically linked to that very conflict. It’s no easy task to make a metaphor for something with another part of itself; Nichols and Sorkin do this almost effortlessly. To the informed and thoughtful moviegoer, this point is engaging, convincing, and even a bit eye-opening; the question is how many informed and thoughtful moviegoers will turn out. Other than a heavy-handed quote at the end, the film does not make it’s direct linear connection to 9/11 all that blatant; it trusts that its audience knows at least a smattering of US-Middle Eastern history (beyond 1991, anyway,) and wants to connect the dots. If it works, it’s a noble effort; if it fails, it was naive and idealistic.

Taken on its own merits, Charlie Wilson’s War is enjoyable, snappy, and even a little bit fun (fun being hard to come by with subject matter so tense.) Hanks and Hoffman shine, and career Sorkin fans will be entirely satisfied. It’s enjoyable and handsome and deft and noble – the question is whether that’s enough.

Rating: 4 Screens (out of 5)