In another thread about movies from last year we just got around to watching, I saw this this weekend. I was barely ten minutes in to it when I had to flip forward to the credits to confirm my (correct) suspicion that it was written by Aaron Sorkin.
As one would guess coming from Sorkin, the dialogue was crackling, especially between Wilson (Tom Hanks) and the CIA man Gust (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Julia Roberts was given equal billing but she didn’t appear in all that many scenes. The film gave great insight into Cold War politics and the kind of back channel dealings that had to go on to get things done.
The ending was a bit heavy handed - I could see a producer telling Sorkin “Make it more obvious (parallels to Iraq), people are dumb” and Sorking reluctantly going along.
All in all a very satisfying film. I’m surprised that the screenplay didn’t get any award nominations, nor Hoffman’s performance.
At the last minute I thought I should confirm that last claim, and sure enough Hoffman did get a nomination.
Yep, one of my favorite films from last year. I saw it 4 times in the theater, and, even if it weren’t a good movie, which it is, I could watch it over and over again just for Hoffman’s performance! It’s my favorite thing by him ever. The movie really should have gotten more nominations, but I am glad that he was nominated at least.
I didn’t see the ending as heavy-handed at all. There ARE parallels, but even so I thought that they were played down, in order to let people decide for themselves.
This is only my second exposure to Aaron Sorkin (other than The American President, I’ve never seen his other movies or TV shows) but I hope he keeps on doing films.
I thought it was maybe a bit heavy handed, but it didn’t bother me too much. I also found it entertaining.
I’ve only been exposed to a couple of other Sorkin things (A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention), but I liked this quite a bit. And loved Farnsworth Invention.
I think we discussed it in the thread from when it was released in December, but if anything Sorkin’s original script was MORE obvious at the end and Mike Nichols toned it down. I liked the movie a lot too.
I’m currently reading George Crile’s book, and, BION, the truth was even stranger and in some ways more satisfying than the streamlined and somewhat fictionalized film version. I highly recommend it to anyone who loved the film.
From everything I have seen from Sorkin (which is most) I don’t see him being very reluctant. He has many great qualities as a writer. Subtlety is not one of them.
I didn’t think the ending was about Iraq at all, I thought it referred to letting Afghanistan go to the Taliban by not following up with education and opportunities for teh populace, allowing the warlords to take easy hold of an ignorant and impovershed population.
I’ll watch it again and see if the end looks different second time around.
It was about the Taliban, but the parallel to Iraq was that the politicians thought a military victory meant, ahem, “Mission Accomplished” and that ignoring the people in the aftermath was a tragic strategic error.
You all could be right about Sorkin, but it seemed the last five minutes of the film had an entirely different tone than the rest of it.
I have it on good authority that Sorkin habitually writes wearing only a loincloth and a gauntlet made of unalloyed gold. Many a producer has tried to dissuade him (John Amodeo is reported to have said, “By God, Aaron, at least put on a bathrobe, and will you take off that ridiculous glove? Nobody can make out your handwriting, and you’ve destroyed three keyboards yesterday!”) only to be beaten to a pulp by a single backhand from the writer. During the filming of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Matt Perry used to have Sorkin beat him around a bit just to get that extra-haggard look during scenes where we was supposed to have been writing the entire show in a seventy-two hour binge. Sorkin also prefers to employ a character whose only function is to explain the already transparent analogy to those audience members who were subjected to a frontal lobotomy due to teenage sports injuries. Originally in The West Wing it was supposed to be a Oliver Twist-like orphan who would have been the President’s unofficial but brilliantly precocious head speechwriter, but then Haley Joel Osment grew 4" in the span of three weeks during the filming of the first episodes and they had to digitally insert Allison Janney in his place, which is why Bartlett always seems to be checking her rack.
I had a point when I started this, but it has since escaped me like Steve McQueen in a prison break movie.
Iraq? I took the ending as meaning, that by refusing to help the people of Afghanistan after the war, we left them open to fanatics, and 9/11 was the outcome. If we had taken the time to build some goodwill in the Islamic world perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.
That’s what I thought too. It was saying that we went in and helped them out by giving them mad weapons, but then we withdrew even when they still needed our aid. Bad, bad U.S.
Personally, I thought the movie’s strongest argument was that once you have the fate of an entire nation in your hands, you’re obligated to follow through in an intelligent and long-sighted manner that will help the people to live on happy and peacefully.
It certainly doesn’t seem to lead into a politic of, “Withdraw everything you got over there, now!” be that for reasons of not caring about the lasting effects, or thinking you have no place to be there to begin with.
I know I’m way late to the party here, but I just saw this over the weekend. My question is about Emily Blunt. While I’ve heard of her, I had to look her up because I don’t really know what she’s done and wouldn’t know her by sight. In the end credits, she has the 6th highest actor credit on her own title card (after Hanks, Hoffman, Roberts, Adams & Ned Beatty). In the IMDB she’s listed as Jane Liddle, daughter of Larry Liddle. She appears in a total of one scene and doesn’t have any dialogue. She’s on screen for a total of about 30 seconds, maybe. She is a buttoned-up outfit and looks disapprovingly at the attire of Wilson’s all-female support staff. Her character is in no way central to the story.
How did she get such a high billing, and why hire such a “name” actress for such a minimal part?
My guess would be that the part was bigger, but got edited out. The women in Charlie’s life play a bigger part in the book than the movie.
I also think the book is much better than the movie and the movie completely screws up the ending with its simplistic “if only we’d followed through” ending. It’s a lot more complex in the book, but some thoughts:
Charlie and the CIA (and others) made the classic mistake of believing that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. For years. And gave them billions of dollars in the process, all the while looking the other way at the atrocities their “friends” committed. Not that the Russians didn’t deserve it, but it was obvious we were not in bed with good people.
There was good reason not to continue pouring money into Afghanistan- the people in power were real assholes (and we largely put them there, see No. 1). Anti-women, anti-human rights, anti-education; sometimes from fundamentalist beliefs, sometimes just general dictator-wannabe dickishness.
While the lesson of the movie was “follow through”, I think the lesson of the book was “don’t get involved with assholes fighting each other”.