The closing title card of Charlie Wilson's War is derived from a statement Wilson himself made to George Crile, as cited on the last page of Crile's 2003 book that gave the film its title: "These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And the people who deserved the credit are the ones who made the sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame."

Wilson's view is that after his efforts, as a Democratic congressman from Texas who gamed the military appropriations system during the 1980s and covertly channeled over a billion dollars to mujahadeen rebels to use in fighting the Soviet army, America failed to aid Afghanistan and lost the region.

History and a more neutral perspective has led others to a different view--that the secret work of Wilson, CIA operative Gust Avarakotos and right-wing Texas socialite Joanne Herring (played in the film by Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Julia Roberts) helped form the template for the Taliban movement that has bedeviled American political and military strategy in the region and is now being blamed by some for the killing of Benazir Bhutto.

That fundamentalist movement and Bhutto's killing obviously have implications for global security far beyond the scope of anything Hollywood can assay or significantly affect. But the resultant film represents a widely promulgated misreading of history, and it's interesting to trace how studio marketing can try to make a feel-good story emerge from it all.

Even some days after the Bhutto killing, as unrest and an accompanying government suppression of rights continues, that assassination is cloaked in mysteries--as to the perpetrators and their motive, and even as to the exact cause of death. Nonetheless the elimination of the charismatic leader of the Pakistan Peoples' Party undeniably echoes one the film ambivalently deals with, that of her father.

Yesterday mourners, as reported in the New York Times,

...wept and threw rose petals as the coffin was lowered into the grave beside the grave of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was president and prime minister from 1971 to 1977. He was ousted and executed by a military dictator in 1979.

That dictator was of course the real-life figure portrayed by Om Puri in Mike Nichols' film--Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. Aaron Sorkin's script shows his characteristic political savvy but also--all the more so now that a second Bhutto family member has died in the cause of democracy--may for some accept Zia's remorselessness a bit too blithely. That said, the film does have Tom Hanks' Charlie say, upon emerging from an Islamabad strategy session with Zia (during which he was reproached for asking his Muslim host for a whiskey): "I've just been told I had character flaws by a man who hung his predecessor in a military coup."

It's one of those moments, like the oddly glossy sequence of Russian jets strafing Afghan villages or the disturbing but quickly left-behind images of war-wounded Afghan children, that made some reviewers grumble--despite a generally admiring critical reception-- about the film's abrupt shifts in tone.

Thus Roberts' Joanne Herring (like her real-life character a great beauty, though sometimes looking in the film like Nancy Reagan in clown makeup) is a Commie-hating Republican who enlisted Zia in her campaign against the Soviets and has no problem reassuring a crowd of Houston fat cats, "Bhutto had a trial. He was found guilty...Zia did not murder Bhutto."

Charlie Wilson is portrayed in both the book and film as the ultimate pragmatist (though Crile makes much more than Nichols--with his fast-paced 97 minutes--of Wilson's assiduous courtship and devotion to the Israeli lobby.) And with the cuddly Om Puri portraying the legendarily charming Zia, film-goers, along with Nichols, shrug away his offstage thuggish-ness.

Zia, like the mujahadeen who mutated into the Taliban, was
a prototype jihadist buttressed by generous support from the C.I.A. (Interestingly, Tom Vickers, a decorated ex-Green Beret far less wonky than the chess-playing tactics genius the film makes him into, was just handed the top Pentagon job running Special Operations against the terrorist network worldwide, notably in Pakistan. He'll at times be going up against the endless crates of weaponry he funneled to the Afghans.)

Clearly Hanks and his Playtone Productions partner Gary Goetzman had initially acquired the Crile rights and set out to make a much steelier version of Charlie's tale. It was very late in the game when script points, and even shot footage, began to be subtracted from what Hanks is now calling a "serious comedy".

Amidst the onslaught of billboards and television ads, it's largely been forgotten that the filmmakers' hands were apparently tied by legal threats from Wilson and Herring after they saw Sorkin's original 145-page script. See the Rush & Molloy coverage here, describing how the pair:

succeeded in detonating part of the script that suggested Wilson and Herring had also seeded the events of 9/11... Aaron Sorkin's original screenplay...ended with a shot of the Pentagon in flames, implying that Herring and Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) had abetted Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda crew.

The audience-friendly film got a nice share of nods from the Golden Globes, has been largely dismissed in Oscar prognostications, and is at the moment fighting it out at the box office with a gaggle of also-rans including Sweeney Todd. It would appear to now be remote from much help or hurt from publicity regarding current events, despite such web static as a posting on the Foreign Policy.com site by a correspondent who said, upon attending a screening of Charlie in a theater after the Benazir Bhutto news had its impact: "...you no doubt noticed an odd historical parallel: Julia Roberts's right-wing Texas socialite earnestly defending a sitting Pakistani president who doubles as a general and took power in a coup--and is accused of killing a Bhutto...seeing it onscreen yesterday made everyone in the theater sit up a little straighter."

Given that Charlie's producers Hanks and Goetzman have exceptional historical awareness (witness their Band of Brothers and their currently filming pair of multi-part series on President John Adams and on World War II's Pacific theater), Sorkin surely was given license to go with the research. It seems clear (and Hanks hints in a New York Times profile) that the film's distributor Universal, feeling the heat from Wilson and Herring's legal hounds, saw trouble in the quick demise of any number of other war-themed pictures. Having absorbed a box office disappointment with the smart, tough and terrorism-themed The Kingdom, Uni seemingly had every good business reason to soften the final cut. Given the marginal receipts, perhaps a version that bellied up to the truth, as the script once had in the person of Hoffman's marvelously gruff Avarakos, would have fared better.

(A train burned by rioters in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination stands behind a billboard of the popular leader; photo by John Moore/Getty Images.)