Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Review)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the new war reportage film starring Tina Fey, works hard and fast for most of its nearly two hours to keep viewers at arm’s length. The intimacy and emotion we are trained to expect from dramatic “message” films is cut ostentatiously through and avoided in favor of swift establishment, point-delivery and immediate cutaway.

We first meet Fey’s character, Kim Baker as she is partying in a building in Afghanistan, dancing and drinking with other members of the foreign press core. We know nothing about the who, what or why of the scene beside what we are meant to infer from a basic knowledge of recent world events. A bomb goes off and kills the party vibe. We are then thrown a few years into the narrative past where we find Kim working a desk job at a national news network and living a very subdued life.

Not much is said by Kim or her colleagues in these scenes, nor Kim and her boyfriend nor even Kim and her bathroom mirror. Most films in establishing a character give us more than snap shots of their life. Most films and writers put the characters in situations where the characters can be elaborated upon and the audience can be drawn into intimate sympathy. It’s considered pretty important to get the viewer on the main character’s side before dragging them along for two hours.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot elides this normal business of courtship with the audience and instead relies on establishing the tropes, “Lonely bored professional gets chance at adventure,” and then crashes us straight into the advertised adventure. Only having seen the film one time I am not sure if this short-handing should be considered amateurish or audacious. The beginning narrowly worked for me based on my natural liking for Tina Fey and the fact that the beginning, what ever else it was not, was brief and the action begins very soon.

 The writers of the film are Robert Carlock, longtime Tina Fey cohort and co-creator of her successful television series 30 Rock, and Kim Barker, the war correspondent whose autobiographical book the film is based on. The book has been praised for its high energy, light handed treatment of the heavy subject of war reportage, revealing the adrenaline junkie aspects of covering the world’s most dangerous locations. It was likely this energy that attracted Carlock and Fey and which they sought to not betray by not making Kim Baker into an object of potential pity before getting her into her element as a war reporter.

Once Baker is in the field she falls immediately into the rhythms and impulses of an adrenaline fueled war reporter. She gets high-impact footage of soldiers in combat and adjusts easily to a rough tenuous existence in a largely strange and hostile country.

The best scenes in the film are of the interactions between the reporters and those on the inside keeping them safe. Housed in the same barracks their comings and goings acquire a self-contained provenance and culture that they themselves refer to as living in the “Kabubble”, being the world of high longt-term stakes but low day-to-day consequence they exist in. The immediate cinematic touchstone for these scenes is the reporter's room in the prison complex in His Girl Friday, which is perhaps the ultimate news-reportage classic this film was aspiring to.

And even though both films move fast and play loose with heavy topics (Capital punishment in His Girl Friday and War for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) where His Girl Friday gave deep immediate rooting in its characters and their motivations Whiskey Tango Foxtrot leaves it until two thirds of the way through the film before we are let into Kim Baker’s mind.

She explains to some female friends what motivated her to take the Kabul assignment and then her perceptive friend and translator spells out exactly why she is good at the job and why he can no longer help her. Once these scenes play out and we are allowed to see Kim Baker with more intimately perceiving eyes the rest of the film comes finally into focus. Scenes we’ve already sat through take on more dimension and everything that follows feels of greater importance.

 The movie bears the stylistic marks of both Tina Fey and Robert Carlock as many of the scenes play out like 30 Rock scenarios: uncomfortable encounter with extreme personalities leading up to a joke payoff and then cutting away. This serves in some case to keep the film moving and deliver entertainment value in the early stages when the film is still playing its cards unnervingly close to its chest. In other cases it feels a little cheap, a scene built up of people and perils  pays off on a translation joke and then cuts to the next day without giving us anymore about what happened or why. This sort of thing works for half hour comedies but it can feel like cheating in a feature film.

Ultimately this film is entertaining and I left feeling like it had done some justice to its subject and provided a real quality star vehicle for Tina Fey. However I’m still not sure if the eccentricities in the writing qualify as skillful or wrong headed. Because as distracting as I found the light treatment of the characters at first it may well have meant that the late stage revelations meant more. I am hoping repeat viewing will allow me a clearer opinion. But whatever I determine I do expect to enjoy watching it again.