War Machine

The setting is post-9/11 Afghanistan soon after Barack Obama’s election in 2009. Having initially invaded the country to terminate Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, the Americans find themselves facing a foe they don’t know how to identify and completely alienated from ordinary Afghanis. General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt) is sent in as head of NATO forces to sort things out but his gung-ho methods only make the situation worse.

With a script adapted by Australian director David Michôd from journalist Michael Hastings’ book ‘The Operators: The Wild & Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan’, itself based on his article on US army general Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, War Machine is clearly intended in the spirit of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 Cold War satire, Dr Strangelove. Unfortunately his film falls short of that high bar, leaving us with a sturdy but unfinished frame and little take-home value. Building the film around the driving force of protagonist McChrystal/McMahon and Brad Pitt’s caricatural interpretation of it, when the actor is not onscreen it all feels rather hollow; part comedy, part satire, part character study, part war movie but with not enough of any of these ingredients to make for a satisfying whole.

To cut to the chase, what holds the film together is Pitt’s scenery-chewing performance (the film was made by Pitt's Plan B production house). Gone is his laid-back loose-limbed screen persona and with little more than make-up and a near permanent facial rigor Pitt transforms himself into a wound-tight disciplinarian, determined to impose his will irrespective of the situation. This self-defining quality is somewhat overstated in a scene in which a German journalist (Tilda Swinton) suggests that he is out-of-touch with the world, but rather poignantly shown in his relationship with his loving wife (Meg Tilley) who knows that at heart he is a good man. 

Endearingly wrong-headed (his team idolise him for his old school antics), even funny as McMahon’s stick-up-the-ass attitude may be (think of Captain Kilgore in Apocalypse Now,1974), for us the audience, it is small consolation to the ordinary Afghanis who become collateral damage in the pointless conflict. Michôd quietly reminds us of this in one of the strongest scenes in the film when McMahon gives a wad of money to an Afghani father whose young son has just died in a US raid on a village all the while spouting his vapid platitudes about rebuilding the country, creating jobs etcetera, etcetera, ecetera…. 

All up, War Machine is not a bad film it just needed to be more satirical, more comedic, more dramatic and, even, more bellicose, in whatever proportion, to work.

FYI: Michôd calls on fellow Australians Russell Crowe for a wryly amusing closing scene and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to provide the score.

 

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