Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
It is so tricky to do a war comedy right. Unless your aim is to be incredibly niche and you just go all-out irreverent, you have to attain a very delicate balance. It’s really not easy to pull off. A difficulty that is incredibly apparent in War Machine, Aussie director David Michod’s adaptation of Michael Hastings’s book about General Stanley McChrystal, whose tenure as the man in charge of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan was ended after Hastings’ reporting of his operation — rowdy, boozy trips to Europe to scrounge up troops from allies; loud shit-talking of the Obama administration — led to McChrystal’s ouster. War Machine tells the story pretty much exactly, though it makes the curious decision to change the names of McChrystal and Hastings but keeps reference to Obama, Hillary Clinton, and has Ben Kingsley playing Hamid Karzai.
The film kicks off with a voiceover that we don’t find out until much later is Scoot McNairy playing the Hastings character. Until then, it just seems like a wry, smart-assed omniscient narrator, akin to what Giancarlo Esposito is doing on Dear White People. We’re immediately introduced to General Glen McMahon, the thinly-veiled McChrystal analogue, played with extra everything by a gray-wigged Brad Pitt. McMahon (and Pitt by extension) takes up all the oxygen in every room he’s in, by his rank but also by his quirks and tics and pronouncements. The biggest problem that War Machine faces is that McMahon espouses some interesting and often contradicting beliefs about the war in Afghanistan. He’s all about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people; but he’s all about winning even more. And he seems utterly unaware of how those two things might come into conflict. McMahon comes out strongly against any kind of unnecessary acts of violence towards the Afghans, but he doesn’t ever seem to acknowledge that American presence in and of itself is an aggravating action in these towns. It’s a meaty issue, especially when combined with the ground-level soldiers who don’t seem to understand the virtue of a hearts-and-minds approach when they’re the ones getting shot at all the time.
The problem is that Pitt plays McMahon with such a bizarre affect that any kind of foreign-policy wrangling — or even sharp satirical points on the subject — get lost in the forest of his tics. He’ll just jog away bow-legged from a scene and suddenly any kind of substance escapes the room like vapor. There’s one scene that sticks, featuring Tilda Swinton as a German politician who seems to come closest to sparking some kind of introspection in McMahon, but it’s one scene in a vast forest.
So if the actual political complexities weren’t sticking, why not just go for something truly wild and crazy?Why not turn this into a take-no-prisoners dark farce? The ingredients were there. Anthony Michael Hall, seemingly still trying to prove his masculinity after his dorky Brat Pack days, plays a rageball second-in-command, and up-and-coming actors like John Magaro, Lakieth Stanfield, and Will Poulter all play soldiers. Throw in Kingsley and Swinton, and it’s an awfully formidable cast for a movie that ends up constantly drawn back to Pitt as its weak-link center.
Kudos to Netflix for taking on a movie like War Machine that would’ve likely been dead in the water at the box-office, even with Pitt above the title. It’s tough to imagine this movie having much of a life at the multiplex anyway, so might as well try to find an audience among the Netflix recommendations.
You walk away from War Machine with more questions than answers, unfortunately. Michod was able to do a tight, foreboding criminal tale with Animal Kingdom, so he’s definitely got the chops. But the kind of thread-the-needle comedic voice he’s looking for in War Machine proves to be too elusive.
