Tina Fey is funny and attractive. She’s a great writer and a talented comedian. That’s why she was able to become head writer during her stint on Saturday Night Live, why the network series she created and starred in, 30 Rock, was such a big hit, why the feature film she penned, Mean Girls, was so good that it even made Lindsay Lohan likable, and why she gets rave reviews every time she’s tapped to host an awards show. There’s no real mystery behind Tina Fey’s success. What is a huge mystery, however, is why the film industry has never been able to give her a starring role in a movie that wasn’t bad to mediocre, considering Fey’s massive movie star potential. The good news on that front is that Fey is great in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and it’s by far the best movie role she’s gotten to date. The bad news is that the film is still not good enough overall to be the thing to solidify her as the type of A-list actress who regularly gets to headline exciting projects.
From directing team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris, Focus), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is an adaptation of the memoirs of wartime reporter Kim Barker, focusing on the time she spent reporting on the war in Afghanistan in the mid 2000s. Fey plays Barker, or actually, she plays a fictionalized version of her named Kim Baker—you’ve got to leave enough room for plausible deniability, after all. Over the course of her stay in Kabul, we see the dangers of being out in the field, the partying the journalists get up to at night to escape the stresses of their situation, the friction that gets generated when you plop Westerners down in an Islamic society, and the struggles the media faces when it comes to getting a fickle public to pay attention to the day-to-day realities of our seemingly endless “war on terror.”
The problem with the film is that it touches on all of these things, but it never focuses on any of them. Fey’s character initially agrees to leave her desk job and go to Afghanistan because she’s feeling lost in her home life. She’s desperate for direction and meaning, but all she finds when she goes overseas are soldiers fighting a forgotten war that’s got no end in sight. They don’t know why they’re there, she doesn’t know how she got there—everyone in the film is lost. This might be a nice theme to explore, except for the fact that the story also gets lost in trying to do so. Basically the whole middle section of this film is a rambling thing that gives you little indication of where it might be heading. WTF almost says something about the war, it almost says something about the way the media covers the war, and it almost says something about the way that religions subjugate women, but every time you feel like you’ve finally zoned in on what the film is, it’s already moved on to being something else. This really does just feel like a series of someone’s memoirs, not a focused story that works as a whole.
The good thing about the film is that it’s full of strong acting. Fey brings everything that made her a great TV lead to the table here as well, and surprisingly she really doesn’t have to augment her bumbling-but-capable-career-gal screen persona much at all to make it work in a more dramatic environment. Fey generally plays gritty, strong, determined characters, but she’s still willing to show enough vulnerability to be funny and relatable, which works to make the war sequences of the film dangerous and the fish out of water sequences charming. If you could take what her performance accomplishes here and surround it with better screenwriting and better filmmaking, there’s no question that it would result in a big hit movie. Maybe it’s going to take writing a film for herself to finally get that job done.
There are a ton of great supporting players doing entertaining work here too. Martin Freeman shows off some range as the smooth-talking love interest. He’s so committed and is having so much fun playing a devilish rogue that he’s even believable punching out a muscled-up young stud at one point. Getting to watch him strut his stuff is a lot of fun. Margot Robbie shows up playing a rival reporter, and while she doesn’t get a whole lot to do, she’s such a potent screen presence that she always elevates the watchability of anything she appears in. Alfred Molina and Billy Bob Thornton generally just do their Alfred Molina and Billy Bob Thornton schticks in smaller roles, but they’re good schticks that have taken them very far in the movie business, so their contributions are also welcome. The guy who steals the movie from everyone else is Christoper Abbott though. He plays Baker’s contact in Kabul, and he can say so much while just using his eyes that it’s astonishing. Abbott is playing a character who has to keep his feelings bottled up on the inside, but somehow he’s able to let us know everything he’s going through at every moment, and never by resorting to doing any overt acting. There’s something that’s really kind and reassuring about his aura that makes you want to keep watching him. Keep an eye out for this guy. He’s going places.
As far as Ficarra and Requa, it’s hard to say where they’re going. They started out by directing the unique, transgressive, and pretty fresh-feeling I Love You Phillip Morris, but have followed that up by making a string of middling and safe-feeling studio pictures since. What’s the deal there? Are they just journeymen who deliver what the studio requests to the best of their abilities, or are they trying to make interesting work every time out and not quite hitting the same heights they did with their first attempt? Is there something about their approach to filmmaking that’s changed? Is there something they can go back to that would result in the creation of something better than the watchable but forgettable mediocrity of Crazy Stupid Love, Focus, and now this film? Seeing as IMDB lists their next rumored project as being one that involves the Looney Tunes characters, there’s a chance we might not like the answers to any of these questions. Somebody get these guys a dynamite script to work with, and soon.
