Of course, the biggest guns in Charlie Wilson's War are Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts themselves. If the combined force of these two cinematic howitzers can't get the audience interested in current events, nobody can. That's the tactic, anyway, that Universal will be betting on when it opens the film on Dec. 21. But as superpowers from Angelina Jolie to Reese Witherspoon have been learning lately, cinematic warfare is a lot less predictable today — and even more dangerous — than it was back in the '90s.
There is, as it happens, a bubble bath scene in Charlie Wilson's War. But it's Hanks in the tub, not Roberts, and there is no singing of Prince songs. At the moment, Hanks is sitting at a desk at an editing suite in Santa Monica, tweaking a project he's producing about another underappreciated politician: John Adams (Paul Giamatti will star as the second U.S. president in a cable miniseries beginning this March). Hanks' affection for American history is well known to anyone with an HBO subscription — after John Adams, he'll be launching The Pacific, a World War II miniseries that will bookend his 2001 epic, Band of Brothers. But except for a turn as astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, he's never played a true-life historical figure. Luckily for him, Charlie Wilson made it easy.
''Charlie walks in,'' Hanks recalls of his first meeting with the former lawmaker (now 74 and recuperating from a heart transplant operation), ''and he's wearing cowboy boots, a brown pair of slacks, a purple shirt, and mismatching suspenders with little Spitfire airplanes on them that he's run under the epaulets of his shirt. Half my work was done right there.''
The other half turned out to be trickier. Hanks had purchased the screen rights to Crile's book about Wilson shortly after its publication, in 2003, but it took a while for him to figure out how to adapt the story of this wildly unlikely hero. Here was a womanizing, boozing schmoozer who seemed to spend more time flirting with Playmates than crafting legislation as a member of the Congressional Appropriations Committee — where, it turns out, he was quietly procuring billions for the clandestine CIA operations that would ultimately oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. Part of the problem, according to Hanks, was that Wilson's tale is almost too outrageous for the screen, bustling with believe-it-or-not characters like Joanne Herring, the big-haired Southern socialite who helps Wilson cook up his covert plan while he's soaking in her tub and she's combing mascara from her eyelashes with a safety pin (Roberts, incidentally, steals the scene with that harrowing-looking maneuver). '' When I read the book, I was like, 'Wait a minute,''' Hanks says. '''This is too farcical! It's too much! You can't put all that in a movie.'''
NEXT PAGE: ''Honestly, I promise this movie is not a schlep,'' says Aaron Sorkin. ''It doesn't make anybody eat their vegetables or try to persuade you to a certain political point of view. ''