Zen Story from Charlie Wilson’s War
From the Boston Globe:
Toward the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” a CIA officer played by the pitch-perfect Philip Seymour Hoffman cautions the Wilson character (played by Tom Hanks) not to be too sure they have done something glorious. To make the point, he tells the story of a Zen master who observes the people of his village celebrating a young boy’s new horse as a wonderful gift. “We’ll see,” the Zen master says. When the boy falls off the horse and breaks a leg, everyone says the horse is a curse. “We’ll see,” says the master. Then war breaks out, the boy cannot be conscripted because of his injury, and everyone now says the horse was a fortunate gift. “We’ll see,” the master says again.
I really enjoyed this movie and this review does a great job of capturing my own impressions.
| Go to Home - Most Recent PostsThe real star of the film is the script. That [Aaron] Sorkin managed to tell so serious a story in so entertaining a manner should earn him a number of awards.
The actors deliver the goods as well. Hanks’ comic timing is as brilliant as ever. Roberts is indeed, as Wilson calls her in the film, “Helen of Troy,” inspiring powerful men through her beauty and–shall we politely call it–“southern hospitality” to get with her program of freeing the Afghan people from the godless menace of the communists.
But it is Hoffman’s spot-on portrayal of the quintessential CIA operative, half crude bluster and half savvy erudition, that steals the show, and should earn him an Oscar. He storms into the film like an angry elephant, and when he’s in a scene, it’s difficult to put your attention anywhere else.
There’s a serious set of lessons to be learned behind all the hilarity, however.
The first is that, when covert actions are authorized and paid for in secret, we’re not really functioning as a Democracy. The public didn’t know what Charlie Wilson and the CIA were doing, so they had no way to vote people into or out of office to shape that policy.
And if supporting the Afghans was so clearly the right thing to do, why did it have to be done in secret? We went to war in Iraq for far less, overtly.