War Machine
David Michôd (2017)
In 2010 Rolling Stone published ‘The Runaway General’, a profile by Michael Hastings of Stanley McChrystal, then commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in the war in Afghanistan. The piece included remarks, attributed by Hastings to McChrystal and members of his staff, that were critical or insulting of the American government and senior figures within it. McChrystal’s resignation quickly followed. Hastings’ non-fiction book The Operators – an expanded account of the month he spent with McChrystal and his team, in Europe and Afghanistan, for the Rolling Stone assignment – appeared in 2012. According to Wikipedia, Hastings became ‘a vocal critic of the Obama administration, Democratic Party and surveillance state during the investigation of reporters by the US Department of Justice in 2013’. In June of that year, Hastings died in a car crash, aged thirty-three. (His Wikipedia entry includes a ‘Controversy over alleged foul play’ sub-section to the section describing Hastings’ death.) War Machine is a fictionalised adaptation of The Operators, with a screenplay by the director David Michôd (Animal Kingdom (2010)). Brad Pitt plays the McChrystal-inspired protagonist, General Glen McMahon.
War Machine is, for the most part, unsubtly satirical. The dialogue is, at this level, often effective – when, for example, McMahon insists the US can win the Afghan conflict ‘not through superior military might and power but through the unassailable might and power of our ideals’. (I watched the film as an audience of one, at a mid-afternoon screening in Curzon Bloomsbury’s Minema; it was easy to imagine the approving laughter certain lines would get from a fuller house.) The writing and acting sometimes combine to give a character and their words poignancy: in Keith Stanfield’s outburst as a frustrated young Marine, who points out that his training hasn’t been in winning hearts and minds; in Tilda Swinton’s cameo as a politely exasperated German politician. Meg Tilly, expressive and touching as the General’s desperately loyal wife, makes the most of her opportunity, through having more time on screen than Stanfield or Swinton, to enrich the film for longer. In the end, though, these characters are doubly thwarted. The brick wall they hit is a compound of American military intransigence and David Michôd’s approach to his material. Whenever he’s on the verge of greater depth, Michôd seems anxious to pull away and return to entertaining but obvious political satire.
There’s no blunter weapon in the writer-director’s arsenal than his leading man: Brad Pitt gives a mostly disastrous performance. At fifty-two, he’s now about the same age that Stanley McChrystal was in 2009 yet Pitt doesn’t seem mature enough for the role – although that’s a relatively minor issue. General McMahon may be a figure of fun but Pitt is cartoonish in the wrong way. The physical caricature he creates isn’t a comic basis for characterisation but almost the full extent of that characterisation. His stiff, upright carriage is mildly amusing in the General’s daily jogging routine but Pitt puts on a voice that never remotely belongs to him and moves his face in a way that suggests the man he’s playing (a graduate of Yale as well as West Point) is not so much arrogantly deluded as mentally defective. McMahon is meant to be the central satirical target but Pitt plays in such a different style from the rest of the cast that he comes across as the only target. His attention-grabbing turn obscures the scope of War Machine’s critique of military ambition and miscalculation, as well as some of the better acting going on around him. As a hawkish major-general (supposedly based on Mike Flynn, who’s become in 2017 a bigger and more notorious name than he ever was before), Anthony Michael Hall illustrates that it’s possible to be satirically effective while still properly inhabiting a character but he’s inevitably overshadowed.
The film’s voiceover narration notes at an early stage:
‘What do you do when the war you’re fighting just can’t possibly be won in any meaningful sense? Well, obviously, you sack the guy not winning it and you bring in some other guy.’
It’s on this basis that Glen McMahon gets the Afghanistan job and loses it when the Rolling Stone profile is published. Brad Pitt’s shortcomings in War Machine are most acutely illustrated through the fleeting appearance of another star, at the very end of the film, as McMahon’s ISAF successor. Russell Crowe hardly suggests David Petraeus, who succeeded Stanley McChrystal, and his bellicose lumbering towards the camera is no less stylised than Pitt’s movement has been. Yet Crowe has terrific comic dynamism and, in the course of a few seconds, hints at a personality within the comic-strip contours of the image he presents.
Almost in spite of himself – or, perhaps, of David Michôd – Brad Pitt introduces occasional but welcome grace notes of melancholy to his portrait of McMahon, which echo the contributions of Keith Stanfeld, Tilda Swinton and Meg Tilly. Michôd too, though determined to stress repeatedly that the theatre of war usually produces farce, at least acknowledges, in a well-staged episode in Helmand Province, that it’s lethal farce. On the whole, however, he’s more comfortable making Glen McMahon look foolish (the only one-to-one time he gets with the President is when Barack Obama eventually summons McMahon to fire him) – and War Machine lacks the underlying anger that might have infused its comic moments and made them mordant.
The narration, for much of the film, is oddly detached from what’s being shown on the screen. The sardonic drawl on the soundtrack has most of the best lines (‘The thing about counterinsurgency is that it doesn’t really work … You can’t win the trust of a country by invading it’) but we don’t know to whom it belongs. Only about halfway through is the narrator identified as the Michael Hastings figure – the Rolling Stone journalist Sean Cullen (Scoot McNairy). Cullen materialises while McMahon and his entourage are in Paris, departs the scene after a while, and, in the closing stages, resumes his voiceover. Ben Kingsley is the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Reggie Brown appears momentarily, but in virtual backview, as President Obama; the man himself shows up briefly as a talking head on a television screen. The American political and military top brass are otherwise pseudonymised. The actors playing them – Sian Thomas (as the Hillary Clinton equivalent) and Nicholas Jones (the Richard Holbrooke one), at any rate – don’t attempt impersonations.
7 June 2017