TAKE TWO! Tom Hanks breaks up his co-star Julia Roberts during the filming of Charlie Wilson's War in Los Angeles.

Given the current Congress's utter inability to end the war in Iraq, it's hard to imagine that a lone representative—let alone one as fond of boozing and womanizing as Charlie Wilson was in his day—could have waged a secret war against a superpower. Yet that's what the Texas Democrat (played by Tom Hanks in a Christmas release from Universal) did in the early 1980s, when, with the help of ultra-right-wing socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), renegade C.I.A. operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and collaborators in Israel, Egypt, and Pakistan, he boosted the annual funding for anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan from $5 million to $1 billion. Sure, the scheme was crazy—but it worked: the Russians lost the war and, eventually, their empire. If the whole thing hadn't backfired when Islamists based in Afghanistan pulled off 9/11, Wilson and his pals would be Cold War heroes.

Instead they are the walking ironies on display in Mike Nichols's Charlie Wilson's War, based on the 2003 nonfiction best-seller by the late 60 Minutes producer George Crile. Hanks captures the title character's hedonistic charm without neglecting his inner patriot, and Roberts plays Wilson's lover and political muse as a Houstonian Arianna Huffington (the pre-liberal version). "They are idealists, and literally strange bedfellows," says Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay. "After witnessing both the incredible suffering and the incredible courage of the Afghan people, they felt they simply had to help somehow. And it just snowballed into the biggest covert war in history."

—MICHAEL HOGAN