Yesterday Jan & I saw Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Tina Fey’s war comedy based on journalist Kim Barker’s memoir Taliban Shuffle. The short review is we liked it. A lot. The slightly longer review is a bit messier.
The Rotten Tomatoes summary tells us “While WTF is far from FUBAR, Tina Fey and Martin Freeman are just barely enough to overcome the picture’s glib predictability and limited worldview.” Aggregating one hundred, fifteen professional reviews Rotten gives WTF (military slang for What the Fuck) a sixty-one percent positive, positive, but definitely not a wildly positive reception. Rotten also invites viewer reviews who are slightly more positively inclined at sixty-four percent.
Of course any “war comedy” is immediately controversial, especially when the wounds of the particular conflict are still open. I’m sure hesitations about this movie are additionally complicated by the, at this moment in time at least, inexplicable casting of Christopher Abbott as Fahim Ahmadazi and Alfred Molina as Ali Massoud Sadiq, two actors of European descent as the film’s two principal Afghan characters. (They both turned in admirable performances, but, again, given the givens…)
Pretty much all reviews give Tina Fey full credit for a stand out performance as the lead character Kim Baker (notice the “r” is gone, perhaps reminding us this is a fictional treatment of Barker’s “darkly comic and unsparing memoir…”) She is joined by Abbot and Molina as well as Margot Robbie as Tanya Vanderpoel and Martin Freeman as Ian MacKelpie, with some serious scene stealing by Billy Bob Thornton’s Colonel and then General Hollanek. There is also a montage of “minor” characters, which reminded me how I’ve noticed what seems an increasing willingness in contemporary film making to include people with truly interesting faces, if still mostly in the background. The script, based on Barker’s memoir is by frequent Tiny Fey collaborator, Robert Carlock.
The plot is easy to summarize. Tina Fey’s Kim Baker writes for an unnamed television news program and is sick of her life, desk-bound, in a barely satisfactory relationship, with no change on the horizon, and then when given the chance accepts the opportunity to be an in front of the camera war reporter. She is shipped off to Afghanistan (compressed from Barker’s memoir which played between Afghanistan and Pakistan). Adventures ensue. Sex, alcohol, drugs. Danger. Lessons are learned. Finally, she returns to America, a new person.
Megan Garber’s insightful Atlantic review captures the issues with the film, positive and negative. As Ms Garber tells us “This makes for a war comedy in the tradition of M*A*S*H and Catch-22 and Tropic Thunder and Wag the Dog…” However, she goes on to note, this movie “differs from its predecessors in an important way: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is, oddly enough, a rom-com.”
I believe Garber puts her finger on the very dangerous point of the movie. The romance, however, is only tangentially with Freeman’s Ian MacKelpie. “the real lover here—sensitive and seductive and complicated and impossible—is war itself.”
And with that the dilemma of the film. Garber tells us “It’s a morally messy premise. Afghanistan is not Colin Firth. War is not Love Actually. And that is the problem with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which is overall a charming comedy about a terrible war: It is a charming comedy about a terrible war.”
Here’s where I disagree. The intention as Carlock states about his script, was to make a movie that “that dealt with horror and absurdity at the same time.” And Garber’s review acknowledges it often succeeded. Ultimately, however, she feels the movie evades its final obligation, to place responsibility for the mess. If I read her review correctly, Ms Garber wants a little less moral ambiguity. In war someone is left holding the bag. In any specific war specific people are left holding the bag. And she is certainly right in that the film assumes war rather than challenges it.
Instead, the film I saw universalizes the situation. War is; and this is what it looks like from the perspective of someone who is a professional observer, and how ultimately finding there can be no separation, the horror and the seductions are too powerful. Most of the myopia and privilege and hypocrisy of the characters, including Fey’s Baker, are exposed, yes, with a joke. But, somehow, that makes it all work.
It is bitingly funny, and to my mind, it succeeds at its hope.
I certainly think it worth seeing.
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