Backstabbing for Beginners takes an unsexy geopolitical scandal and makes it even more drab. Danish director Per Fly’s adaptation of Michael Soussan’s 2008 memoir of the same name focuses on the rampant abuses in the UN oversight of the Saddam Hussein-era Oil-for-Food program in the lead-up to the Iraq War, populating it with diplomatic ciphers who exist merely to spell out the convoluted plot for the viewer. If the heavy-handed script’s expository dialogue weren’t enough, the film’s protagonist, Michael (Theo James), frequently intrudes with interminable voiceover narration that further details the ins and outs of the bureaucratic morass, while doing virtually nothing to develop him as a flesh-and-blood character.
The fact that Michael’s dad was killed in the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut is meant to provide some emotional heft: the film includes archival footage of the rubble; upon meeting him, characters express sympathy to Michael for his loss two decades prior; and Michael’s narration melodramatically references his dad when thematically convenient. The very reason that Michael—the fictionalized stand-in for Soussan, who exposed the corruption—abandoned a lucrative Wall Street career track to delve into international diplomacy was to follow in his father’s footsteps. And yet Fly never manages to imbue Michael with humanity, leaning far too heavily on the dead-dad trope and a shoehorned romantic angle. His burgeoning love affair with Kurdish translator Nashim (Belçim Bilgin) feels so superfluous and contrived that Michael’s narration can only vaguely describe its impact on him as “going through emotions.”
As bland and listless as Michael is, at least his character avoids devolving into the outright cartoonishness of Ben Kingsley’s turn as Pasha, the undersecretary of the Oil-for-Food program who mentors Michael and dishes out snarky platitudes about the negligible role of truth in diplomacy. He also seems to a possess a never-ending supply of cringe-worthy alpha-male lines like “I’ll have you deported so fast your hijab will spin” while awkwardly inserting the word “fuck” into nearly every sentence. Pasha is a puzzling character on paper, and casting an actor with the gravitas of Kingsley in such a role feels like a ham-fisted attempt to subvert expectations. That Pasha’s only definable quirks are his arrogance and use of profanity makes him a relatively toothless, two-dimensional “villain” in a story that ultimately has to work extremely hard to drum up anything remotely thrilling about a corruption scandal that plays out in a series of unimaginatively shot scenes set in office buildings and cars.
Additional distance is placed between the viewer and the film’s complex subject matter by adding fictionalized elements to this story based on true events. Though this was likely done in an attempt to make the film more relatable, it has the opposite effect. Financial scandals don’t automatically make for compelling drama, even when set against a tumultuous Middle East backdrop, and Backstabbing for Beginners incorporates so little in the way of character development—framing virtually every bit of dialogue as an explanation of the labyrinthine plot that almost entirely told and not shown—that there’s virtually no reason for the average viewer to care.
The post Backstabbing for Beginners appeared first on Spectrum Culture.