Universal Pictures
Left, Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson, right, the real Charlie Wilson.
If "Charlie Wilson's War" (brand new on DVD) is an entertaining mishmash, oddly less than the sum of its remarkable parts, the story it has to tell is one of the most fascinating, improbable and haunting yarns in recent world history. It sounded like a perfect combo: "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols team up to tell the story of former Texas congressman Wilson, a legendary boozer and womanizer who secretly directed billions of taxpayer dollars to the 1980s Afghan mujahedeen insurgency against the Soviet Union -- a war that shaped the world we live in, for good and for ill.
But the relative failure of "Charlie Wilson's War" at the box office wasn't just a matter of the public's lack of interest in topical or political material (although that probably played a role). Sorkin's script has to pack an immense amount of historical background into less than 100 minutes; it leaves out much of the complexity and internal paradox of the Afghan war, and often feels clunky and expository. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are awkwardly cast as Wilson and Joanne Herring, the evangelical Christian Texas socialite (and Wilson's occasional paramour) who first got the randy congressman interested in the Afghans' David-vs.-Goliath struggle against Soviet invaders.