Sex! Drugs! (And Maybe A Little War)

IT sounds like a surefire hit for the Christmas movie season: bosomy showgirls snorting cocaine in a Las Vegas hot tub. A rowdy, Scotch-guzzling hedonist splashing in there with them. Oh, he’s also a congressman. Then there’s a rogue C.I.A. operative. Big names on the marquee: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman. All this, and the story is true.

The real Mr. Wilson on set.

But Mr. Hanks said he and executives at Universal Pictures fear that “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which opens on Friday, could be a dud.

“There’s people at the studio, of course, who are losing sleep over it,” Mr. Hanks said, neglecting to mention that his own company acquired the project and produced the film with Universal. “There’s a possibility that this movie does absolutely nothing. None whatsoever.”

The problem isn’t the sex-and-drugs part, but that “Charlie Wilson’s War” is also about Afghanistan, military spending bills and kids with their arms blown off. A mere whiff of more depressing headlines out of the Middle East may be enough to drive some people home to watch a DVD of the Yule log.

Tom Cruise and Reese Witherspoon are usually reliable box office draws, but their latest movies, “Lions for Lambs” and “Rendition,” have done as well as nearly every other movie with Iraq-related themes: not well at all.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is not as didactic as many of the others and is set in a pre-9/11 world. Based on the late George Crile’s best seller, it is about a square-jawed Democratic congressman from Texas who used his seat on a military appropriations subcommittee during the 1980s to secretly steer more than a billion dollars to finance the mujahadeen rebellion in Afghanistan against the invading Soviet army.

If “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with a budget of $75 million, is a commercial success, its creators will have found a winning formula. You can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent — and palatable to a mass audience — if its political pills are sugar-coated, in this case thanks to Mr. Wilson’s high jinks, his sometime romance with a right-wing socialite played by Ms. Roberts and his escapades with a coarse C.I.A. officer played by Mr. Hoffman. But Hollywood has long found it tricky to find the balance between being taken seriously on geopolitics without falling short on what movies are supposed to do: entertain.

This calibration was always on the minds of the veteran director, Mike Nichols, and the writer of the screenplay, Aaron Sorkin. Mr. Sorkin opens the movie with an unforgettable scene in the book that features Mr. Wilson and showgirls in an enormous Jacuzzi at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. But he threw cold water on the bacchanalia by adding a new element: Mr. Wilson trains one eye on Dan Rather, reporting from Afghanistan on a nearby television screen. At first, Mr. Nichols said, he resisted conflating those scenes and wanted the opening to dwell on Mr. Wilson’s antics, as the book does. He relented, he said, because he realized that Mr. Wilson’s transformation from a one-dimensional party animal to passionate supporter of Afghanistan was a central tension that needed to be put forward at the outset.

Otherwise, Mr. Nichols said, “you just have a guy chasing girls and drinking a lot, and no action has begun.”

(Speaking of skirt chasing, Mr. Nichols’s wife, Diane Sawyer of ABC News, dated Mr. Wilson decades ago. “They had dinner twice and she said: ‘He was crazy. I was scared,’” Mr. Nichols said. “I mean, she’d gone to Wellesley. Henry Kissinger was speedy for her.”)

Mr. Nichols said Mr. Wilson matured (enough) to become a compelling figure who wheedled and bullied his way into sharply raising the United States’ commitment to taking on the Soviets. “He was an honorable, infinitely charming, completely attractive guy to all sexes,” he said. “He made a lot of movie stars look like pikers.”

The Charlie Wilson on the screen is more honorable and less reckless than the real one. Left on the cutting-room floor was a scene of Mr. Wilson in a drunk-driving accident. And the movie doesn’t depict some of the book’s wackier moments. There is no mention of Mr. Wilson’s dispute with the Pentagon after he sought to bring Annelise (Sweetums) Ilschenko, a former Miss U.S.A.-World, on a Defense Intelligence Agency plane in Pakistan. And though a memorable belly dancing scene remains, it ignores the part where the dancer brandishes a sword at the Egyptian defense minister, taking aim at his groin. Even Mr. Wilson, who at 74 underwent hear-transplant surgery in September, emerging from quarantine for the first time to attend the premiere on Monday night in Los Angeles, said, “They were kind to me.”

“I had the idea when they started out that the movie was going to be rougher, a little more sex, a little more bad language,” added the former lawmaker, a consultant on the set in Hollywood and Morocco, whose expertise about movies goes no deeper than “Casablanca,” the theme for his 60th-birthday party. “I think they softened it to make the movie more salable.” (The movie is rated R.)

Perhaps fearing that the specter of the earnest Tom Hanks of “Apollo 13” and “Forrest Gump” snorting cocaine could be hard to accept — or tarnish his image as the likable leading man — the filmmakers made sure he did not partake on screen.

“We agreed that it needed to be kept in proportion,” said Mr. Nichols, who had final cut on the movie.

Mr. Sorkin elaborated: “There’s a vocabulary in movies that boozing is O.K., especially if the guy is going to kind of reform himself. That using cocaine, we’re never going to look past. That if we saw him snorting it, we’re no longer going to care about the Russians and the Afghans and the horror over there.”

Yet for all the horror, Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Nichols and Mr. Hanks — each a liberal Democrat — insist that their creation is, of all things, more a comedy than a political movie. “It’s a serious comedy,” Mr. Hanks said. “Funny stuff happens right next to horribly tragic stuff.”

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