![]() ![]() (Though, to be fair, tequila seems to be the booze of choice for the expats in the “Kabubble.”) It is cartoonish in its satire. The film, like its small-screen predecessors, marries big themes and small. And it is in many ways tonally similar to that team’s other productions, among them the Fey-Carlock-Michaels collaboration of 30 Rock and the Fey-Carlock one of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot-we might as well refer to it as WTF-was adapted for the screen by Robert Carlock and produced by Fey and Lorne Michaels. (Woman on the street: “Cover your head, you shameless whore!” Fahim, Kim’s fixer: “She says, uh, welcome to Afghanistan.”)Īnd on and on. (Donning one for the first time, Kim exclaims, “It’s so pretty I don’t even want to vote!”) A joke about the many challenges and ironies of a Western woman navigating a Muslim country. There’s also: A joke about Afghan men thinking that Kim “would make a handsome boy.” A joke about burqas. “That is officially the most American-white-lady story I’ve ever heard,” the expat replies.) ![]() (Kim explains why she took the Kabul assignment to a fellow expat. (She first gets assigned to Afghanistan because, as her assigner puts it, she is one of the few “unmarried, childless people in this bureau.”) At another, a joke about Kim and her privilege. (Mocked by a colonel-the scene-stealing Billy Bob Thornton-for bringing a bright orange backpack on an embed, she protests, “The girl in the North Face store said it was, like, military grade!”) At another, a joke about Kim’s 40-something-single-lady status. At one moment, a joke about Kim and her ignorance. It flirts with the big ideas implicit in its story-the dangers of casual colonialism, the limits of cultural relativism, the failings of American interventionism-and then, just as it seems ready to make a point … it instead makes a joke. And that is the problem with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which is overall a charming comedy about a terrible war: It is a charming comedy about a terrible war. At one point she pretty much chases it down in an airport.Īnd, as in any good rom-com, much of the dramatic tension in the movie stems from romantic uncertainty: Kim being an American, she always has the option to change her mind and break things off. Kim’s suitor is the ongoing quagmire that one Marine she interviews refers to as the “forgotten war-capital F, capital W.” The conflict excites Kim, and fulfills her, and saves her from herself. And while Kim may engage in an inevitable flirtation with a lascivious fellow-expat (a dashing Martin Freeman), the real lover here-sensitive and seductive and complicated and impossible-is war itself. This makes for a war comedy in the tradition of M*A*S*H and Catch-22 and Tropic Thunder and Wag the Dog, but that differs from its predecessors in an important way: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is, oddly enough, a rom-com. Just as the movie is about to make a point … it instead makes a joke. Kim, in short order, discovers the dangerous romance of war that is not one’s own: She falls a little bit in love with the conflict she’s covering. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’s plot revolves around the thing most any movie about war correspondents (including, yes, that one) will: the tension presented by people who are on the one hand heroes risking their lives to tell important stories, and on the other, the framework goes, self-indulgent adrenaline junkies. They call the space they’ve carved for themselves “the Kabubble.” ![]() The Westerners-war correspondents, war photographers, bodyguards-are fueled by a cocktail of sex and drugs and actual cocktails they are in Afghanistan, but in another sense they are very much not. Initially clueless about the chaos she’s been plunged into (she angers the locals, loses her money, gets scammed by a kid, confuses “Afghans” and “ Afghanis,” etc.), Kim gets her bearings with the help of her fixer, Fahim ( Christopher Abbott), and of the rowdy expat community she finds in Kabul. The basic premise, though, is the same: Kim (Fey), unsatisfied by her desk-jockey job-and just as unsatisfied by her relationship with her “mildly depressive” boyfriend (Josh Charles)-volunteers to cover the war in Afghanistan for her news network. The movie, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa ( Focus, I Love You Phillip Morris), offers some light modifications to Barker’s experience: Kim (now surnamed “Baker”) is a television, rather than newspaper, reporter the setting for the action is abbreviated into simply “Afghanistan” people have been blended together to create efficient composites. ![]() Recent editions of Barker’s book have since been renamed Whiskey Tango Foxtrot-WTF, in the military’s phonetic alphabet-to reflect the name of its new film adaptation, starring Tina Fey and promoted mostly as a quippy war comedy. ![]()
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