“Ah, America, you beacon of composure and proportionate response,” a sarcastic narrator says over the opening images of David Michôd’s War Machine. The line, deadpan but obvious in its criticism, largely sets the tone for the film’s wan satire, a riff on Stanley McChrystal’s brief, overhyped stewardship of forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s avatar here, General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt), arrives in the country to the same reverence and awe that surrounded his real-life counterpart, a man with endless qualifications who also loves to be on the frontline with his troops, a four-star general you could easily mistake for a chummy sergeant. He projects an aura that says he would rather be called Glen than Gen. McMahon, though most of his subordinates just lovingly call him Boss.
The elaborate setup of Glen’s deep connection to his men swiftly leads to a punchline that his leadership in Afghanistan will consist far more of appeasing coalition and native administrators in diplomatic meetings than actual combat prep. American politicians and staffers come to Glen with ingratiating smiles filled with condescension, an unspoken boast that they ultimately set the agenda and can pull rank on this decorated general at any time. None takes to this power with more relish than Pat McKinnon (Alan Ruck), a sniveling, pompous schemer who subtly contrasts the Afghan insurgency with a form of bureaucratic subterfuge and manipulation. It’s been said that war is too important to leave to the generals, but in a modern economy where we all go beyond our job responsibilities, Glen becomes his own diplomatic representation while also planning ground strategies.
This is fertile ground for a send-up of the true, pencil-pushing face of modern warfare, where everything from meetings to drone strikes can be handled at a cold remove, but the film truly builds from its straight-faced, wry premise. Pitt plays Glen with faces he left on the cutting room floor in both Burn After Reading and Inglourious Basterds, an insouciant pucker of preening arrogance and constant impatience. Glen speaks in gruff, curt sentences that speak to a man of action, though frequently he employs these speech patterns to circumlocutious explanations of the insurgency and the need for more troops. He speaks constantly of wanting to “win” the war, though in his vague platitudes about winning hearts and minds, he does not sound as if he has any solutions at all. Pitt never reconciles his goofy body language with Glen’s farcically hollow mission statements, leaving a performance that never quite reaches the level of parody.
The same is true of Anthony Michael Hall as Mike Flynn avatar Greg Pulver, though perhaps because Hall’s two-dimensional work as an aggressive, punchy officer seems almost quaint compared to the real man and his ongoing scandal. As for the rest of the cast, which includes Topher Grace as Glen’s PR flack, RJ Cyler as the resident IT soldier and John Magaro as Glen’s assistant, they are locked into roles that have no capacity for depth. They are window dressing for a character study that never bothers to dig into its character.
Based on Michael Hastings’s embedded reporting on McChrystal (Scoot McNairy’s Rolling Stone scribe Sean Cullen provides the narration), War Machine seeks to peel back the curtain on the wearisome dying days of the War on Terror’s first stage. In one of the few genuinely resonant scenes, it finds Glen in Germany to raise support for coalition troops, standing in front of a hilariously convoluted, self-negating flowchart on insurgency when a politician (Tilda Swinton) points out that the reduced al-Qaeda and Taliban presence has reduced the ground mission to an ideological battle that by definition cannot be won. But even that scene, brilliantly underplayed by Swinton, is too obvious, as is Glen’s interactions with his wife (Meg Tilly) that lean heavily on the well-worn image of a warrior’s inability to adjust to a moment’s peace.
There are potentially rich avenues of exploration in the film: Mrs. McMahon’s tacit understanding that she means less to her husband than war, the Obama administration’s head-in-the-sand approach to the conflict, Afghan President Karzai (Ben Kingsley) sarcastically thanking Glen for pretending that he needs the man’s approval to run military raids. At every turn, however, War Machine falls back on the comforting clichés of modern war films. Its only good joke is its last, when the Rolling Stone article that dooms Glen does not get the egotistical general on the cover.
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