Texas is Hollywood’s most reliable source of home-grown bigots, and Charlie Wilson is right down there with the best of them. I didn’t have the slightest clue who Wilson was before Monday. Not many do. An audible groan rumbled around the stalls when he introduced himself as the Senator of East Texas to three naked Playboy models in a Las Vegas hot-tub.

Tom Hanks has piled on the pounds to play the coke-snorting alcoholic. He deserves an award for his Method zeal, but he has no real talent for debauchery or sleaze. Indeed Charlie Wilson’s War almost stalls before it starts. Then something magical happens when Mike Nichols rewinds the film to the early 1980s. A rich and randy Texan evangelist, played with spiky poise by Julia Roberts, converts Wilson into America’s most fervent Cold War hawk. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan inspires the senator to mount the biggest and most expensive covert operation in military history. A corny Washington soap dissolves into a vertiginous and unsettling drama.

The truth is surreal. The journalist George Crile spent 15 years researching the book on which the film is based. The campaign by the CIA to fight the Soviets by smuggling state-of-the-art weapons worth millions of dollars to the Mujahidin may have resulted in a CIA victory, but the consequences for world security have been catastrophic.

That Wilson orchestrated the campaign is alarming enough. That he was allowed, indeed encouraged, beggars belief. The surreal comedy is that every tense twist of this secret war is horribly true.

You know the award season is in full swing when Philip Seymour Hoffman starts popping up in every other film like a greasy pustular pimple. He is a bulldog CIA operative called Gust Avrakotos, and Wilson’s deeply unattractive enforcer. He puts Wilson’s dirty tricks into motion, and buries the evidence. Crile has done his homework. The shock of the film is the stark confession of how deeply the Americans became involved. The ironies are ghastly.

Audiences may flinch at the thought of another miserable war movie. But Nichols frames the film like a surreal comedy. He shreds every remaining ounce of faith you might have in American foreign policy, and he does so at a snappy pace and with great vim. Hanks may not be the most convincing rake, but his roving eye means the camera spends a surprising amount of time ogling shapely legs and acres of cleavage. Hanks is a blessing and a curse. He is compelling in a crisis. He puts a human face on this strange and unpredictable Texan. However, his mawkish and saintly moments in refugee camps and begging money for schools are unconvincing.

15, 95mins

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