**Spoiler Alert**
Director: Glen Ficarra and John Requa/Starring: Tina Fey, Billy Bob Thornton, Margot Robbie, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, Christopher Abbott and Cherry Jones
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot; militarized code for WTF, is also the new film by directors Glen Ficarra and John Requa, which is based on journalist Kim Barker's The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I have to admit that I wasn't eager to see the film. Tina Fey, who plays Ms. Barker, has proven to be less funny in her big screen forays than her television ventures. The other strike against this movie is its subject matter. I have to say I've had my fill with films about the Afghan War and don't relish more, though I had just seen Danish director Tobias Lindholm's excellent Afghan War drama A War only days before. Ficarra and Requa's film is a comedy/drama hybrid, though it skews more to the latter as the story unfolds. WTF isn't much of a drama and I can't remember laughing or even smiling during the film's comedic moments. Though a story of a journalist covering a war has comedic potential, Ficarra and Requa's can't coax anything funny from the material. I haven't read Kim Barker's book, so I can't comment on its qualities or lack thereof but I hope the film is an aberration. The film doesn't seem to be about anything more than self-absorbed, privileged, white, western journalists and their silly romantic lives and careers rather than the bloody conflict itself. Little in the film is taken seriously; everyone seems buffoonish though nothing is very funny and no one is very amusing.
Barker is deployed to Afghanistan by her paper after her bosses decide sending single journalists is preferable to sending those with spouses and kids. The fact that Barker has a serious boyfriend doesn't factor into their decision. We know from the outset that her time in Afghanistan will place a terrific strain on her relationship.
With her mind full of anxieties about her boyfriend and the task ahead, she arrives in Kabul and is met by her driver and interpreter; Fahim (Christopher Abbott). She is driven to the mostly-male media compound; a lively hive of journalists seeking stories, danger, after-hours drinking and sexual decompression. Upon meeting an Australian peer named Tanya (Margot Robbie), Barker is immediately asked if her security team is available for sex, which serves as a kind of initiation into the fast and loose culture that prevails on the premises. In explaining the advantages of being outnumbered by men, Tanya tells Barker a woman who isn't a catch back home becomes a sought-after prize in female-deficient Afghanistan. Committed to her boyfriend, Barker finds fending off aggressive advances by male colleagues and Afghan men alike to be a daily struggle.
As the story unfolds, we meet other characters who play a part in Barker's experiences. She becomes acquainted with Iain MacKelpie (Martin Freeman); a Scottish Lothario who is at odds with Kim's bodyguard Nic (Stephen Peacocke, who resembles a buff Hugh Grant); General Hollanek (Billy Bob Thornton), who allows her to tag along with his soldier's operations, and Ali Massoud Sadiq (Alfred Molina); an Afghan public official who Barker must charm to gain access to key interviewees and inaccessible places. But she finds she must also resist his advances, which are persistent and frequent.
The theme of a woman at the mercy and admiration of men is supposed to make Barker empathetic to the Afghan women, who endure the same.
We see some of Barker's reporting acumen while she rides along with Hollanek's units. During a road-side ambush, she quickly grabs her camera and works her way toward the front line of the firefight, which earns her the General's admiration. Later, after the General's unit becomes frustrated with what they believe is a Taliban mission to keep a village well from becoming operational, Barker encounters a group of women who take her aside to inform her of their culpability in the well's destruction. As Barker explains to the General shortly thereafter, the well denies the women the pleasure of gathering at the river for conversation and gossip. Subsequently, the general leaves the well in a rubble-strewn state of disrepair. The scene is supposed to highlight how the military is often ill-trained to deal with many aspects of foreign cultures, particularly the needs of women; which Barker is able to gain insight to in her unique role as a female reporter.
But aside from that interesting scene, the movie seems to focus almost entirely on who is sleeping with whom and who is trying to sleep with Tanya and Barker. Scenes of dancing, drinking, and partying journalists become almost a default visual.
But other issues eventually come to the forefront. Time away from her boyfriend leads to an incident where Barker catches him with another woman while on Skype, which seems inevitable. Rendered single, Barker becomes the romantic target of MacKelpie; the unlikeliest of seducers. As time passes, the two slowly become an item until MacKelpie invites her to return to Scotland with him, which she begins to consider.
Barker learns from her superiors at her paper that the war is rapidly losing its value as something news-worthy, which forces her to search for more compelling stories and interviews. The competition to find a juicy scoop becomes fierce, as Barker becomes the victim of Tanya's story-grabbing machinations. Furious, she returns home to face her boss; who, to her surprise, isn't a man but a woman named Geri Taub (Cherry Jones).
Having become accustomed to her bizarre life in Afghanistan, which she calls "the new normal," Barker grows weary of the scene, which leads to sweeping changes in her career and romantic life.
One might think the story would be irresistibly entertaining, but even though its source material is drawn from true-life accounts, there is nevertheless something tired and overly familiar about the story and characters. It isn't that Tina Fey is miscast or her acting skills aren't up to the challenge. What was surprising about Fey's performance wasn't its comedic aspects but the fact that she has dramatic aptitude. I can hardly fault her for the film's flaws. Billy Bob Thornton, though only onscreen occasionally, proved to be a fun and quirky presence and one of the film's best features.
So what is wrong with the film? It isn't funny, for one. It isn't an affective drama either. The Afghan world is purports to be partially about doesn't seem like a real place but something half-imagined and half-realized. No one in the film seems to give a damn about the country or people, who are engaged in a war that won't end. I didn't really want to know that much about Barker, whose life is supposed to be dramatically altered by her experiences though we don't see any evidence of such. Apart from feeling guilt about a soldier whose maiming she feels responsible for, nothing about her time in Afghanistan seems to matter much. All that does seem to matter is her career.
In reading the New York Times Arts section this morning, I noticed that the film fared badly at the box office, while the animated family feature Zootopia cleaned up. I don't normally pay attention to box office tallies but it seemed fitting that the film should lose out to a kid's flick. I happened to see Zootopia with my daughter over the weekend and found it to be a more pleasurable experience. Yes, I know they are two very different kinds of movies but being that I always prefer adult films to anything animated should tell you something about my estimation of the film. Somehow the animated characters seemed less cartoonish.
