Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson's War (2007, Mike Nichols)
Mike Nichols' films often feel to me as if they're aimed at garnering the approval of the people they're about -- even when they're satirical or critical it's never really ruthless, and it's done in such a way that these hypothetical moviegoers can jab their fellow viewers as they note how delightful a representation it is they're watching; movies made for moviegoers who delight in feeling, as Tom Hanks does as he reads the news as it comes off the wire, that they're a step ahead of the rest of the world, when in reality they're slaves to their own addiction to knowingness.

At its best, "Charlie Wilson's War" has a loose, collaborative feel -- and certainly Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman bring a great deal to the table -- and yet I can't help but feel that Nichols is equally interested in affiliating himself with positions of power as he is with telling an entertaining story (which, with his fidelity to big-name writers, is surely the intent of his moviemaking). Whether it's the casting of empty movie stars like Julia Roberts or the questionably triumphant tone he takes in filming war scenes, there's a quality to Nichols' films that is decidedly middle-brow, and if that's too crude a criticism, then it simply feels like Nichols isn't content on satisfying his storytelling urges -- he wants attention as he does it.

It's often the case that I don't feel Nichols' films have any deep reason for existing -- they don't provide an emotional value of any recognizable sort, and even his most superficially human films -- "Wit," "Angels in America" -- rely on intellectual heavy-lifting, mostly from theater ("Wit" is ostensibly about a cancer patient; in reality it's a filmed play about a professor's love for language). I'd be hard-pressed to think of an expressive moment in any of Nichols' films aside from the Carly Simon song at the end of "Heartburn."

Nichols can, at times, throw in a sensitive line-reading or two -- there's a great one about how America starts games it doesn't want to finish, and then leaves while the ball is still bouncing -- and there are moments, like when Hanks visits Pakistan for the first time, that you can see Nichols is trying to show that politics have the power to change things. And yet surrounding it we've got a director who loves drama so much that he doesn't bother to tell us anything about life.