Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Film (2016)

With Tina Fey (Kim Baker), Margot Robbie (Tanya Vanderpoel), Martin Freeman (Iain MacKelpie), Alfred Molina (Ali Massoud Sadiq), Christopher Abbott (Fahim Ahmadzai), Billy Bob Thornton (General Hollanek)

Commissioned to go to Afghanistan in 2003, Kim Baker (Tina Fey) soon got into the swing of things, becoming a courageous documentor of the goings on in those frightful war-torn backwaters. Encountering US military personnel like General Hollanek (Billy Bob Thornton), influential Afghani politicians like Ali Massoud Sadiq (Alfred Molina) or other courageous war reporters and photographers like Tanya Vanderpoel (Margot Robbie) and Iain MacKelpie (Martin Freeman), Baker, modeled from Barker, but not identical, navigates, over the course of several relentless years, a drama of human interactions. All the while, a frightful, and, by a certain point, very unpopular, war put a variety of stresses on Baker and on all involved.

Tina Fey, as Baker, does an amazing job embodying the spirit of Barker. She is passionate, determined, courageous and extremely witty. As only Tina Fey can do, there is a great deal of humor embedded in each and every one of her gestures and lines. Just watch her closely and you will see how adroit she is at responding to the typical input. Her subtle movements of body and expression fire off in rapid sequence a string on non-verbal comments on her partners in crime at every step.

Martin Freeman is wonderful as MacKelpie, the Scottish photographer with whom Fey falls in Kabul. For a guy who got a big name playing the young Bilbo in the three Peter Jackson Hobbit films, Freeman creates a marvelously robust and gritty role here. It’s a pleasure to watch him and Fey do their thing. They both have passion, electricity and there’s a density of feeling that their performances create together.

Margot Robbie as Tanya Vanderpoel, the other major woman journalist on the case in Afghanistan, is alluring, sharp, tough, and gives Fey’s Baker a run for her money.

Billy Bob Thornton as the marine officer is a scream. He is both the authority figure and his own spoof. He’s a great pretender – the bearer of considerable authority who gives, in his interactions, a sense that he might be doing it all with a wink.

Alfred Molina is the perfect sleazebag politician. He has bravado, a certain kind of courtly charm, and an insidiously self-absorbed stance.

The film, though well-done, is obviously an adaptation of the Barker memoir and it is not entirely clear which parts are fact and which fiction. We learn from Barker that she did, in fact, have a flirtation with a high-level Pakistani politician, not, as in the film, with an Afghani official. And though her friend and sometimes paramour, embodied by Freeman in the film, was in fact kidnapped, the events recounted in the film which detail Baker’s involvement in the release – quite dramatically done – did not, in fact, happen that way.

(3/24/2016: An interview with Kim Barker, author of The Taliban Shuffle, is here.)

– BADMan