Charlie Wilson's Soundtrack

Having been excused from Friday night's holiday pops show because (get this) there wasn't enough room on the stage for five stands of violas, I took advantage of the evening off to go to a movie I've been waiting to see for some time: Charlie Wilson's War, based on the true story of a hard-drinking Texas congressman who more or less single-handedly dragged the US into intervening in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1980s. (I know, I choose such delightful holiday fare, don't I?)

What makes the story remarkable is not just that Wilson was a little-known, skirt-chasing alcoholic of the highest order; and not even that he was concocting this scheme while facing possible indictment in a sex-'n-drugs scandal stemming from an ill-advised weekend in Las Vegas; but that he managed to engineer a half-billion dollars of covert government funding for an insurgent Afghan resistance without anyone in the press or public taking the slightest notice until years later.

So there I was, happily enjoying the diversion, thinking nothing of my day job, when the movie reached its climactic scene, in which the Afghani fighters finally have the anti-helicopter and anti-tank weaponry they need to fight back against the Russians, and they use it to great effect, and there is much rejoicing... and while all this is going on, what do I hear playing on the soundtrack? Handel's Messiah. I kid you not. To be more specific, it was the choral movement which comes roughly halfway through the First Part of the piece, titled "And He Shall Purify."

Only it wasn't, really. It was what I can only describe as the extended dance remix of "And He Shall Purify," with the lilting choral lines dancing over a decidedly electronic bass drum and other assorted accoutrements. It was an odd choice, and after listening to it for three or four minutes, which is how long the scene lasts, I came to the conclusion that someone involved with the film (my money's on Aaron Sorkin) must have really wanted to use that particular movement of the Messiah, and someone else must have been insistent in pointing out that baroque music was really not going to carry so well over the sounds of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Thus is compromise born in Hollywood, or so I like to believe.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the way Hollywood always loves to break out the classical chestnuts when they're making a war movie. And not for the little character development scenes, either. You're not going to hear Beethoven's Ninth while a couple of grunts pass a doobie around in a foxhole and try to forget where they are and what they're doing. No, when the full orchestra kicks in in a picture about human combat, you know you've reached a scene that will either be glorious or staggeringly awful. Oliver Stone is famous for this, of course, and Wagner would never be the same after Francis Ford Coppola got done with him. In The Sum of All Fears (which, while not strictly a war movie, is a movie about acts of war and their consequences,) the movie's denouement features a full rendition of Nessun Dorma, as all the bad guys are summarily and secretly executed by various secret agents around the world. There's even a whole CD available of classical music that's been used to bolster war movies.

Now, Charlie Wilson's War isn't really a war movie, I suppose. Whereas war movies are epic adventures, concerned with big ideas and the men and women called upon to lay their lives on the line for them, this is a film about politics and personalities, about backroom deals brokered in the service of what everyone involved hopes might turn out to be a greater good. Other than a couple of token scenes meant to remind us of just how brutal the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was (thereby justifying Wilson's somewhat shady dealings,) there isn't much in the way of a battlefield to be seen.

Still, there it was: Handel and the mujahideen, together at last. I suspect I'm never going to hear that movement quite the same way again...