by Brendan Foley
The trailers for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot worked very hard to sell the movie as a wacky, girl-power driven buddy movie with Tina Fey and Margot Robbie having fun action adventures in between sassy one-liners and girls’ nights out.
The actual film, now available on DVD, VOD, and Blu-ray is actually much closer to Paul Greengrass than Paul Feig. At times shockingly blunt in its depiction of war and the media’s relationship with armed conflict, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot mixes dark truths and bitter melancholy with more familiar comedic tropes. While some baffling creative decisions hold the film back, WTF as I will be henceforth be calling it, contains some exceptional work throughout.
Based on The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker, WTF casts Tina Fey as Barker. The movie opens with Barker filling out boring copy for a boring story before going home to her boring boyfriend (played by Josh Charles, so go ahead and guess how that one’s getting resolved). Barker’s life seems on endless repeat, and when she turns on the news and sees reporters like Tanya Vanderpoel (Robbie), foreign correspondents who are neck-deep in the war in Afghanistan, it makes Barker long to take action in her own life. She impulsively takes a job opportunity in Kabul and soon finds herself immersed in the adrenaline-pumping lifestyle of a war reporter. What was supposed to be a three-month assignment expands to cover years, with Barker chasing bigger and bigger rushes of danger in her hunger for a story.
The script, by Fey’s 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt collaborator Robert Carlock, has an episodic structure that I assume comes from Barker’s book, following Kim as she hops from assignment to assignment. Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (they wrote Bad Santa and directed Crazy Stupid Love and last year’s Focus, also with Robbie) keep things humming nicely, throwing a lot of narrative balls up in the air for payoff later.
I’m going to say a bunch of nice things about the film in a moment, so let’s just real quick talk about the dumbest move in the entire film. In general, WTF’s treatment of Afghanistan and its people mostly works. There’s an Otherness to their depiction, but since we are experiencing the film through Kim’s sheltered, scared point of view it largely works. But the two most (and only) prominent Afghani characters take a more offensive route. For a character named Fahim Ahmadzai, they cast a white dude from Connecticut named Christopher Abbott, and Alfred Molina turns up as an Afghani politician named Ali Massoud Sadiq.
If either of these guys were giving earth-shattering performances, the brownface would be slightly more palatable, but Abbott is given nothing to play besides “is Muslim, nice” and Molina is weirdly terrible throughout. I love Doc Ock as much as the next right-thinking American, but Molina appears to believe he is in a guest appearance on 30 Rock, and he plays wacky to the back bleachers.
It’s not a movie-destroying mistake, but it is dispiriting to see folks as smart as Fey and her team blunder this fucking badly in 2016. When you have prominent cultural figures like Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, and Kumail Nanjiani speaking openly and honestly about the limitations imposed on their careers by virtue of being people of color, a major studio film white-washing the only two prominent Afghani roles in their Afghanistan-set movie.
Disappointing.
The rest of the ensemble works well together. Martin Freeman shows up as a photographer, a slightly seedier version of his usual affable persona. Billy Bob Thornton pops in and out of the movie as a refreshingly not-evil military figure, and Evan Jonigkeit impresses with his small role as a Marine who by film’s end has become the voice of reason and conscience.
Robbie walked off Wolf of Wall Street as a fully-formed movie star, and she continues to display that knack for playing to the camera well here. Tanya knows that in this line of work her looks are an asset, maybe even a weapon, and she moves through the movie with ferocious confidence.
This is Fey’s show, though, and WTF features some of her best work. It’s been interesting to watch Fey grow as a comedic performer from Saturday Night Live (when she was playing herself) to 30 Rock (where she started out playing a riff on herself and grew more and more confident as a comedic and dramatic performer) to now, when she holds the screen like a pro and deftly plays the tonal shifts throughout. When the bullets start flying, something clicks inside Barker and she runs towards the action, not away from it. Fey does a great job illustrating that sensation of waking up to who you really are, that dawning awareness of being able to do what you never thought possible. As the film progresses and Barker’s drive for stories morphs into an addiction, she charts that shift beautifully as well.
Carlock’s script plays the material very straight (Molina excepted) but he and Ficarra and Requa still find spaces to color in the machine-gun wit and casual surrealism that marked his other collaborations with Fey. There’s a stretch of the film where Robbie and Freeman are showing Fey the night life of her new home, and they wander into a Chinese restaurant/karaoke bar/brothel smack in the middle of Kabul.
For their part, Ficarra and Requa juggle tones well. They seem to be attracted to stories about people who are just past the breaking point and set fire to their own lives. Bad Santa and Crazy Stupid Love follow certain formulas (loser hits bottom, finds redemption; forty different kinds of romantic comedy clichés in CSL) but in each case they push their characters and situations to messier, more desperate places, challenging them to decide who they really are and what action they will take to become that person.
WTF does not pull its punches when it comes to the war material, and the final movement of the film deals bluntly with the questions and implications of what the last decade of war has meant to this country and this world. It’s a messy, imperfect film, but that may be the only sort of movie that these conflicts deserve.