Foreign Correspondent: WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT

If you believe Whiskey Tango Foxtrot it’s a miracle we’ve had any coherent reporting out of the war in Afghanistan. It’s a movie singularly focused on a group of correspondents living in a chaotic Kabul from 2003 to 2006. They drink, flirt, party, hook up, jockey for airtime and sources, and then occasionally ride out into danger with American troops. What work they accomplish seems to happen in quick bursts, often almost accidentally, between bouts of fear, discomfort, violence, and gallows humor. It’s a mess. The movie follows suit as a lumpy, misshapen thing, a real quagmire that blunders in with good intentions then bides its time getting more complicated until, suddenly, it withdraws. It is more concerned with a perspective of fish-out-of-water befuddlement than contextualizing its sights and events. It hopes you already know a little about the conflict, and are interested in seeing it from an off-center angle.

Taking the real story of reporter Kim Barker as its inspiration, the movie stars Tina Fey as a woman stuck writing up boring stories in a dull office who jumps at the chance to head off to Afghanistan and get her boots on the ground. She thinks it’ll be a fun change of pace, but the longer she stays the more she finds herself addicted to the frenzied and unpredictable lifestyle. She finds it’s much better than her life back home, with a sad desk job and a boring boyfriend (Josh Charles). She’s the fish out of water who discovers she’s wanted to run this sort of terrain all her life and didn’t even know it. There’s an Oprah-ready quality to the cliché self-actualization here, but this story of a middle-aged woman who gets her groove back by succumbing to her inner adrenaline junkie is no Eat Pray Love. It’s sharper, and edgier, just as likely to draw blood as to shout raunchy sarcasm, or stare contemplatively and uncomprehendingly at some aspect of Afghan life, which remains closed off to characters who are theoretically there to make sense of it for the rest of us.

Screenwriter Robert Carlock (a longtime Fey collaborator, from SNL to 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) conceives the piece with a seesawing tone, wobbling between serious-minded comedy and irreverent drama. It’s never more than mildly amusing, and the dread never quite lands either. But they try. There are scenes of tragic drone strikes played for straight-faced horror, a daring night raid undercut by a Harry Nilsson needle drop, and sudden outbursts of ordnance interrupting all sorts of activities. Fey heads out with troops led by a gruff, dryly funny general (Billy Bob Thornton), snarks with a coarse Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman), and makes warm tentative friendship with her interpreter (Christopher Abbott) and cameraman (Nicholas Braun). This is certainly a masculine environment, into which comes an easy rapport with a radiant blonde correspondent (Margot Robbie) who takes her under her wing. Together they make a fine statement about women in the war zone workplace: underestimated, undervalued, and constantly fending off unwelcome advances.

Less a narrative, more a collection of scenes that slowly arrive at a thematically tidy endpoint, directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (in a mode closer to their dark true crime comedy I Love You, Phillip Morris than their slick and smooth heist picture Focus) keep up the chaos. It’s a good way of keeping us disoriented, and then, minutes from the end, a shock to realize its become normalized in a cut back to a tranquil homeland. (That’s a pale echo of a far superior similar moment in The Hurt Locker.) They don’t go for long takes or coherent spatial geography. In fact, there’s little interest here in sketching out the geography or geopolitical facts at all. Put that with the loose structure and you get a movie that’s interested in reporters and war, but fuzzy with the specifics. And it’s this fuzziness, matched with the wobbly tone and wheel-spinning story, that ultimately sinks the film despite Fey having what is perhaps her most fitting non-TV role to date.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot treats its setting with casual disregard for understanding, coding its production design as Other, often scary. Every foreign element is shot to be as exotic, miserable, or mystifying as possible. It can’t decide whether Fey’s headscarf is a source of amusement, cultural appropriation, or social commentary. (Worse still is a sequence in which she goes undercover in full local garb, shown in billowing supermodel slow-mo while westerners smirk.) It casts several white actors to play major Afghani roles, and uses cross-cultural misunderstandings as cutesy punchlines, like when an elderly, maybe senile, villager sees an African American soldier and says, “the Russians are black now!” Maybe you could pull this off as metatextual commentary about the confusion Fey feels, but when you’re making a movie about a journalist, an aura of informal insensitivity in portraying this country is disappointing. It’s a movie that’s too fascinating in its setup to be this thin, hesitant, and unfocused in implementation.

Two for the Money: FOCUS

Focus is a shiny package that offers fleeting, but reliable, pleasures of moviegoing. It has attractive people in beautiful locations wearing gorgeous clothes engaging in wittily plotted preposterous schemes. It stars two glamorous, charming movie stars, an old pro near the height of his powers (Will Smith) and a young up-and-comer more than ready to take the spotlight (Margot Robbie). They meet cute as she, an aspiring scam artist, fails to swindle him, a veteran con man, in a hotel bar. He agrees to help hone her powers of observation, to shift her mark’s focus with one gesture while picking a pocket with the other. Besides, he needs a pretty and clever girl to help pull off his latest schemes. They have a flirtatious early scene lifting items off each other mid conversation, trading rings and wallets, testing skill. It’s easy to believe they’re both so charming they could pull off such delicate, intimate slight of hand with ease.

That also happens to be how writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (of the sly I Love You Phillip Morris and sappy Crazy Stupid Love) get away with making a featherlight and empty picture like this feel fun and diverting in the moment. The movie's so charming it’s easy to lose focus on how ephemeral its effects are. You don’t even feel 100 minutes slipping away. It's familiar, but cool. Of course the con man appears to fall for the con woman as their complicated schemes go well, or not. There are double crossings and ulterior motives, shady side characters and elaborately convoluted clockwork timing. It’s a movie of globetrotting, big bags of money, wine, watches, cars, and likable career criminals. Bursting with handsome, sleek cinematography that’s practically glittering, nighttime glows with warm light, daytime burns bright and colorful. It’s a cool look.

And the filmmakers know what they’re doing with this surface cool. The film keeps a tight focus on Smith and Robbie as they court and con their way through trust-no-one schemes that are simpler than you’d think, but complicated to unravel the surprises. We start in New Orleans, where Smith is running an elaborate set of cons around a big football game. After some satisfying hijinks and romance, the movie switches gears, jumping to Buenos Aires for another con, longer and more elaborate with an even tighter focus on our leads. They’re charismatic in that con artist way of never entirely knowing just how deep their feelings for each other go. Are they using each other? Or is it really love? It’s not a particularly deep or interesting characterization, but either way there’s undeniable sparkle in their repartee and satisfaction in seeing them react to twists in the plot.

Ficarra and Requa have fun with a variety of shell game set pieces, from street-level scams to high-stakes betting and finally high-risk corporate espionage. Along the way we meet a bumbling master thief (Adrian Martinez), a brusk security man (Gerald McRaney), a high-rolling gambler (BD Wong), and a slippery racecar owner (Rodrigo Santoro). They’re an eccentric and slimy enough rouges gallery we can watch Smith in sharp suits and Robbie in stunning dresses flirt and fool their way into and out of lots of money without feeling bad about their victims. Everyone’s playing some sort of game here, and the screenplay unveils its twists and turns with fine relish. In the end, the flashiness fizzles – when the credits rolled I thought, that’s it?  But there’s something to be said for an enjoyably slight diversion that just wants to charm and dazzle with alluring megawatt star power and formulaic genre charms. Its surface pleasures go down silky smooth.

Love is a Battlefield: CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a romantic comedy that tries to do something new but in the process finds only stale ways to do the same old things. It’s a film with a deeply talented ensemble that walks through intertwining rom-com plotlines, but at the core the whole thing is flat and unconvincing. It has one foot in low-key observational humor and another in broad sentimental jokiness with no idea how to reconcile the two. As a result, the film lurches from moment to moment and, though individual scenes and performances can be quite good, the whole thing is nothing more than a disappointment.

The film stars Steve Carell and Julianne Moore as a married couple of twenty-five years. We are quickly made aware of their deteriorating relationship in an opening scene that makes economical use of editing and framing. We see a bustling restaurant from the point of view of several pairs of feet in fancy shoes, one after the other paired off playing footsie. Then, we cut to two pairs of feet that are stationary and separated with shoes of decidedly lower quality and flashiness. These feet belong to Carell and Moore as they sit with their dessert menus trying to decide what they want. “Why don’t we say what we want at the same time?” Carell suggests. So they do. He says “crème brûlée.” She says “a divorce.”

From there on out we follow Carell as he tries to get back into the dating game with the help of a ladies’ man (Ryan Gosling) he runs into at a local bar. Meanwhile, his soon-to-be-ex wife makes tentative steps towards an office romance with her company’s accountant (Kevin Bacon). Sprinkled throughout the main thrust of the plot, their thirteen-year-old son (Jonah Bobo) wrestles with his crush on the teenage girl (Analeigh Tipton) who babysits his little sister (Joey King) while the ladies’ man may have finally found the one perfect girl (Emma Stone) who will make him decide to settle down.

Writer Dan Fogelman, who has also written Tangled and Cars (how’s that for variety?), weaves the various plot threads together as clumsily as he handles the tone. The characters are sometimes well drawn and other times seem to be barely more than a one-note joke. Take Marisa Tomei, who shows up in a handful of scenes in barely more than a cameo, for an example that’s indicative of the strange approach the film takes. Her character, a woman who is picked up at the bar by Carell, is made the butt of relentless sexist jokes. She’s ridiculed for being aggressive in her pursuit of a relationship, then ridiculed for later expressing surprise that Carell doesn’t call her back. When she reappears in a crowd of people during the climax, all she can do is sit on the sidelines and shoot daggers with her gaze as she flips him the bird. What a waffling, cruel way to treat a character, not only by the film but also by the characters within it.

Similar problems exist with the Gosling character. Now, Gosling is super charming and his rakish role works just fine, but by the time the film makes an attempt at deepening the character, it feels forced. It’s fun to see his wandering ways tamed by Emma Stone, who flips the power balance in the relationship, but it doesn’t feel like it should move as fast as it does. Far more honest and patient is the way Bobo’s puppy love is handled, at least until it becomes precocious mawkish speechifying in the final twenty minutes before returning to subtlety in the end, giving him the final shot of the film. In fact, his is the most compelling of the plot lines. Maybe this should have been his coming-of-age story instead of an I-still-love-my-ex divorcee’s fantasy. Carell and Moore do all the heavy lifting with characterization that the screenplay doesn't quite give them. They communicate more in body language than they do through speaking.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who directed last year’s I Love You, Phillip Morris, a terrific raunchy based-on-a-true-story farce, do their best impression of a mid-80’s James L. Brooks or perhaps a mid-90’s Cameron Crowe, but the script just isn’t up to their level of craftsmanship. There are scenes here that shine. I especially loved a late backyard confrontation that features every character’s secret revealed in a believably funny and tense way. Perhaps what the film lacks most is an intensity and immediacy that comes forth in that moment and in others like that opening scene, or some of the material between Bobo and Tipton, or the first real date between Gosling and Stone. There’s great stuff here, but not, unfortunately, a great movie.