I guess it is impossible for any movie, with the exception of Lord of the Rings, to capture the essence of the original book (come to think of it, Hollywood took liberties with Tokien). That is true for the recently released film of George Crile’s masterpiece, Charlie Wilson’s War. You lose the nuance and complexity that Crile captures, but the basic storyline is sound.
There are two central characters–Congressman Charlie Wilson and CIA case officer, Gust Avrakotos. Wilson was a womanizer, alcoholic, and patriot. Avrakotos was a working class guy not viewed by his supervisors as management material. He was too rough around the edges. This is a story of a Washington that no longer exists.
As the Reagan Administration spent its political capital during the mid-eighties to fight the Democratic controlled Congress’s efforts to cutoff covert funds for the Contras fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, an obscure Democratic Congressman, Charlie Wilson, working almost alone helped organize and fund a massive covert operation to beat the Soviets in Afghanistan. The movie tells that basic story in a very entertaining fashion, but it does not approach the wild truth that George Crile brings to life in his book.
Unfortunately, Hollywood is no damn good with history. They take enormous liberties with the real story. Gust Avrakotos, for example, appears as the central CIA guy running the op throughout. In the real world Gust subsequently was replaced by Jack Devine and Frank Anderson. You also hear nothing about Milt Bearden, who actually was in charge in Pakistan and oversaw the training and equipping of the various mujahideen recipients of CIA funds.
The movie also tries to gloss over the fact that the United States was funding some of the mujahideen–Haqqani and Hekmatayar in particular–that we are now fighting in Afghanistan. Shah Ahmad Massoud is presented in the movie as the main beneficiary of U.S. largesse. Not so. He received one, but there was continuing tension between Massoud, a Tajik, and the Pushtun Afghans who were backed by Pushtun cousins in Pakistan.
This much is true–the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was seen as an atrocity and outrage. And the Soviets were guilty of killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians. It was a noble effort on our part. But the movie also is ripe with irony. How many Afghan refugees have we helped create? While we are not engaged in the same indiscriminate attacks on Afghan civilians, there are unfortunately too many credible reports in which our forces have bombed villages and killed civilians. It is tough to leave the movie feeling too comfortable about our own moral superiority.
Too bad the movie could not show the contrast between the covert effort backing the Contras and that of the Afghans. Crile accurately captures the night and day difference. I was fortunate during the fall of 1985 to work on the Afghan Task Force and then, in the Spring of 1986, on the Central American Task Force. Crile correctly notes that the Central American Task force was a black comedy of errors and the Afghan Task Force was an unsung, under appreciated effort. It was the worst and best of the CIA.
If you are 35 or younger you have no memory of this period. George Crile’s book is required reading. Get the book first and then see the movie. Both are worth your time.
In no way did the movie version of ‘Lord of the Rings’ capture the ‘essence’ of the book.
Just the opposite. The movies only captured the superficial part of the book. And twisted that.
Just a slight correction.
nalbar
As someone who loves history and loves movies, I can tell you, firsthand, mixing the two is extremely difficult, for a screenwriter. I’m working on a historical story now, and there are problems because the players change over time. That’s life, but that’s not a good movie. The audience doesn’t want to meet new people every 15 minutes. They want to get to know a few people and be able to follow them around.
And what “history” of any major event, or personality, can be accurately told, in compelling form, in 2 hours? Okay – JFK was fantastic, and actually amazingly accurate, given the difficulty of telling that story. But they had the benefit of telling a tiny slice of time through one central focus – the New Orleans DA’s office.
What bothers me is not Hollywood, but audiences. People shouldn’t go to a film and expect to get a history lesson. That’s the audience’s fault. If Hollywood is telling only the truth, it’s called a documentary, not a film. That’s why we have two words.
That said, as you know, I enjoyed it too, despite its oversimplification of the situation in Afghanistan, and it sidestepped mentioning that’s where Osama Bin Laden got his training.
I heard Aaron Sorking speak at a screening, and he explained that when you put something like that in a film, that becomes all people talk about, implying that that’s how movies get killed, unfairly. So the filmmakers seem to have deliberately bent over backwards to be either as inoffensive to all, or equally offensive to all, so as not to appear to take sides. Again, that’s good marketing, but not good history. But they’re not IN the history business, and believe me, we’d hate the films they made if they were completely accurate. They’d be messy, confusing, boring, and still inadequate, because how much truth can you tell in two hours?
Anyway – I’ve just been wrestling with this myself of late. In Hollywood, the first goal is always to tell a good story. People need to remember that word – story – when they see anything based on or inspired by a true event.