'Charlie Wilson's War': History In the Making

But, of course, star power isn't what it used to be — not when Tom Cruise can't help his last movie, Lions for Lambs, earn more than a measly $15 million. Except for franchises (the Ocean's sequels and the Dan Brown adaptations), neither Roberts nor Hanks has had a megahit since the turn of the century. Granted, Roberts has been in semiretirement since getting married and having kids, acting mostly in animated films when she's acting at all. And Hanks hasn't exactly been idle: In addition to his HBO projects, he'll costar with his son Colin in The Great Buck Howard, which will debut at Sundance this January, before moving on to higher-profile projects like Ron Howard's Da Vinci follow-up, Angels & Demons. But Charlie Wilson's War is precisely the sort of tricky picture that could use a sprinkling of their old '90s-style magic.

''I am no guarantee that a movie is going to be a success,'' Hanks states flatly. ''I am no guarantee that a movie is going to touch the national zeitgeist. The only thing I can guarantee is that it will be news if it does and it will be news if it doesn't.'' What's changed in the entertainment universe, Hanks thinks, is that ''the audience has figured out there is no connection from one of my movies to the next. The audience has become smart about stars. So it's chaos out there now. Nobody has any idea why people are going to see a movie. Nobody knows what's going to be a hit or what's going to be irrelevant. There are no new models. The new paradigm in Hollywood is that there is no new paradigm.''

Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the old paradigm — ''Nobody knows anything,'' as William Goldman famously nailed it in 1983 — but then Hollywood has always been an uncertain place. In any case, Roberts has been forced to adjust to the new realities of the movie star business too. ''I've actually gone on a pop culture fast,'' she says. ''The TV shows and gossip magazines — it seems so polluting and toxic now. It's exhausting just looking at a newsstand these days. Your eyes cross. You can't even focus. People aren't as interested in making a cool movie or constructing interesting characters. Now it's just about being big and shiny and fabulous.''

Charlie Wilson's War is as cool a movie as any Roberts or Hanks has made these past couple of years. It's certainly chock-full of interesting characters. And even in this uncertain decade, they 're still pretty big and shiny and fabulous. Who knows, maybe that's enough to get the world interested in...the world.