Charlie Wilson’s War could have been a very powerful movie but ended up being merely amusing. All this talent, all this crackling dialogue and brilliant scene direction stopped short, as if the money abruptly ran out, just like it did for the covert ops in Afghanistan 20 years ago. Yet again, Aaron Sorkin takes a whack at a complex issue and runs away like a manipulative little girl as soon as it’s time for counterarguments.

After A Few Good Men — “I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth!” — I’ve never been able to take Sorkin seriously. I’d never gotten into The West Wing, because it seemed to me awkward, contrived, and one-sided in its blatantly stacked political arguments. Apparently, it wasn’t just me, because a few years ago I came across a Peggy Noonan column that cleared it up:

“About every fourth show someone says something conservative. That’s usually me. Two weeks ago, for instance, Press Secretary C.J. was talking to Presidential Conscience Tobey about affirmative action. When Tobey pressed C.J. for her views, she said she was the wrong Democrat to ask. She explained that her father had once been denied a job when someone else got it in an affirmative action decision. Tobey nodded and asked, ‘How’s he doing?’ C.J. said, lightly, ‘Fine.’

“In my version, C.J.’s father had suffered. He was an idealist who believed everyone has an equal shot at success in America, a public school teacher who wanted to help kids and was gifted in his work with them; now he saw a less qualified and implicitly less loving person elevated at his expense, and only because he was the wrong color. It left him shattered. The flag on which he’d stood had been pulled from under him, and he never fully regained his balance.

“When Aaron wrote it, C.J.’s father was not a victim of government but a fellow doing fine. In part because that’s how Aaron thinks about affirmative action, and it’s his show.”

This continues in Charlie Wilson’s War. I’m intentionally leaving the director Mike Nichols and the star/producer Tom Hanks out of it, because, as the DVD interviews with them and costars Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman show, it’s all about Sorkin and they can’t thank him enough for giving them this glorious opportunity, etc.

This is a story of a fun-loving, nice-guy congressman who gets incensed about the way the Soviet Union treats Afghanistan (abominably, to be sure), researches the issue, drives the appropriations from $5 million to a billion, helps the covert ops arm the mujahideen, and is hailed as defeating the USSR through the U.S. taxpayer money. I apologize for the spoilers, but this is all old news.

There are some valid objections raised by Clarence “Doc” Long, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, who predicts that getting into bed with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan to help defeat the Soviet Union will backfire, but these objections magically disappear when he visits Afghanistan personally and sees the suffering firsthand. Awwww… Toys blow up in children’s hands. Forget the connection between the CIA and Osama Bin Laden, whom they helped arm and train his troops because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

There is also a curiously high amount of heavy-handed pleas, woven into the narrative, to leave God and Christian ideals out of political decisions regarding a war fought by a secular country against Muslim rebels. The religious values of the latter are evidently too minor a detail to enter into Sorkin’s discourse about separation of church and state. The upshot, such as may be gleaned from the abrupt ending, is that Afghanistan’s gone to the dogs after that war because the United States cheaped out and didn’t put any more money into repairing its infrastructure — you know, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we’re talking real money. It is the fault of the stingy United States that Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban. Yay, however, to the billion dollars of the U.S. money for leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which it… um, well… didn’t. A combination of factors, of which the Afghan war was just one bad move, did.

The reason for a movie about a 20-year-old war, is, obviously, to be a cautionary tale about the Iraq situation. But it doesn’t address the wisdom or lack thereof of removing a secular government and leaving the door wide open to religious fanatics. It doesn’t address the wisdom of weighing the consequences of involvement in the affairs of cultures we don’t know or understand. The only thing it truly addresses is “Less God, more money.” It is stunning how many instances of completely unnecessary arguments about whether America is a Christian country are dragged into the story for no good storytelling reason.

Meanwhile, a movie that’s only 95 minutes long could have used some more discussion of the consequences of Charlie Wilson’s involvement — after all, 20 years is enough to get some perspective. There was a glimpse of hope that Sorkin gets it, in a dialogue with the refrain “We’ll see” — but he didn’t. Perspective is not what Aaron Sorkin has ever been after. Perspective might demonstrate that his idealism is misguided. Who cares that no Western country ever succeeded in conquering or even cleaning up Afghanistan, although many have tried. His loud American hero butts into somebody else’s war with the best, most decent intentions, and the only reason his intentions follow the customary route to hell is that the U.S. government didn’t give him any more money. I do believe that, in Sorkin’s little world, the lack of unlimited and unconditional financial support from the United States is the only reason bad things happen, to anyone, ever.

Charlie Wilson’s War could have been an important and interesting piece, but it never rose above the level of an immature and ignorant, albeit entertaining, tantrum. Too bad. One could expect from a talented man pushing fifty a little adult courage in admitting that there are forces and complexities in the world that require solutions money can’t buy.

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