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Not everything Brad Pitt touches is gold.

etflix original content film War Machine came out in 2017. I can’t say I remember the details of its release but I do remember that Netflix quickly began foisting it upon me. Their teaser is this torso shot of Brad Pitt affecting this odd-looking stance – stiff bearing and screwed-up face. Somewhere in the blurb it also pushes Pitt’s involvement.

The funny thing is I didn’t* recognize him. Despite looking directly into Pitt’s stare, I did not realize that was him. It’s not that he looks all that different. A different haircut and that weird-ass facial expression is about all there is to it. It’s also not a matter of acting – I’m looking at a still shot. In this case, it must say more about my social deficiencies than anything, or anyone, else.

Brad Pitt not only stars but he has production credit here. The film was made through Pitt’s company, Plan B Entertainment. Given my positive impression of all things Pitt, I was predisposed to want to watch this one. As I read through some of the comments on Netflix’s site, however, I saw that there were many that experienced the movie as simple, anti-American invective. I decided I wasn’t in the mood for that. While I left it in my streaming queue, I had little-to-no thought of watching it.

Things change.

Provided with our recent ignominious ending, we can now evaluate America’s Afghani Adventure (TM) with a genuine form of hindsight. The traditional lines of support for one position or another have been utterly shaken up over the last few years. Donald Trump was a proponent of ending America’s presence. This not only moved some conservative backing to the anti-perpetual-war position but ginned up support on the liberal side to #resist and keep our forces engaged. The old neocon crowd hasn’t changed their tune but the professional military, also expected to be hawkish, has long been influenced by the Obama/Biden administration and its appointments – lending another left-of-center voice to keeping the fight going in Afghanistan.

Since the end of August, however, it seems far less unpatriotic to criticize US policy when there are no troops to “support” in Afghanistan.

I lead in this way because many of the deepest criticisms of the movie were along these lines; that the film is anti-American and fails to “support our troops.” In some ways it is. It certainly might feel even more so if you had just come from Afghanistan or if you had friends still there. With passions cooling, now is my time to take a look.

In fact, this seemed an ideal time to take that look. If War Machine is indeed a critique of US Afghanistan policy circa 2010 and circa 2016, does that critical analysis seem different today than it did a few years ago? Were there phases of Afghan policy that were more right or more wrong than others? Is such a critique in any way predictive of what happened at the end of this summer? In other words, now we have tested the policies of doing more and of doing less (actually, nothing) and can objectively evaluate the outcome.

With all this in mind, it’s hard for me to call the film anti-American. Believe me, I would if I thought I could. The biggest accusation it makes is that General McChrystal leaked his report to the press so as to pressure President Obama into giving him the “surge” he requested. However, saying so is not anti-American – because this is true. McChrystal really did alter Obama’s policy by leaking his report. War Machine does portray 2010’s Operation Moshtarak as a ill-conceived failure – which in hindsight it objectively was. Although that failure was apparent in 2016 when the movie was made, it is even harder to argue for success after the Taliban not only retook Marjah and the contested Helmand Province, but the entire country. Beyond that, there is some lampooning of the military brass and their entourage, which may or may not be exaggerated. Of course, these are just fictional characters. They are not real people.

You see, Pitt doesn’t play General Stanley McChrystal, he plays General Glen MacMahon. Anthony Michael Hall isn’t General Michael Flynn, he is Major General Greg Pulver. Siân Thomas isn’t playing Hillary Clinton, even if she looks just like her. The shift to fictional characters offers a plausible deniability when engaging in speculation or stretching the truth. No, McChrystal didn’t actually say such-and-such, but MacMahon did!

It all leaves me a little bit confused as to what I’m watching. Is it a kind of docu-drama? Is it meant to be farce or satire – conveying its message through bits of absurdity. For example, I’ve tried to figure out Pitt and his stiff portrayal of the General. I watched some video of McChrystal and can’t see reflections of the character there. Did Pitt think he was lampooning McChrystal? Did the director? Is MacMahon supposed to be deliberately exaggerated to make him some kind of cartoon whipping boy – a generic caricature of a commanding general? I cannot tell.

That, in a nutshell, is what dooms this production to mediocrity. It attempts to do a bunch of things yet, while it may come close some of the time, really gets none of them right. The film has its laugh-along, funny moments – but it isn’t a comedy. It tries to show military action but does so by condensing the “largest operation of the war” into the actions of a single platoon of Marines. It purports to show the personalities behind the headlines but every character is entirely two-dimensional. As a Netflix Original, I’d like to blame its problems on trying to make a heavy-weight film on a fly-weight budget, but I’m not even sure that was the problem. The budget is about triple the well regarded (by me, at least) Danger Close. It is $10 million more than the masterful Big Short, whose formula’s footsteps it would seem to follow.

I don’t hate it, and I certainly don’t hate it for the reasons that I was led to believe I would, but I can’t bring myself to love it either.

Watching the production credits I got one other* revelation. I saw that the music was done by Nick Cave (again). Maybe it’s not Brad Pitt’s name in the credits I should look for, but Cave’s.

I’ll dwell on one last credit. The voice-over narration for the movie is by “Sean Cullen” played by Scoot McNairy. He’s an actor I know from the (well-done using about 7% of War Machine‘s budget) indy film Monsters in which Scoot played “a cynical journalist.” Likewise here, Cullen is a cynical journalist from Rolling Stone who, despite his role as narrator, gets very little screen time. Yet, he may be the pivotal character in this particular story. Cullen is a swap-out for Michael Hastings, the BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the article The Runaway General, published in Rolling Stone.

As portrayed in the movie itself, it was the spotlight shown by The Runaway General that got McChrystal fired**. Hastings then went on to write the book upon which the movie is based. I haven’t read the book but I have read the article. As with the movie as a whole, I’m not sure I find it all that subversive. The worst thing that McChrystal did (by my reckoning) was to encourage a “f*ck Joe Biden” attitude among his staff. That men occasionally drink too much or speak disparagingly of diplomatic niceties and/or politics hardly seems scandalous. While it may have been that all of this smaller stuff was the final straw given the troop request leak, I’m guessing the ultimate sin was to vulgarly criticize the administration. At least until Obama’s own vulgar critique of his former VP (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”) was leaked by an aide, criticism of the President’s people is criticism of the President.

Yet the story has another meta-twist to throw at us.

Following the release of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan and then another exposé about the contractor-led war in Iraq (I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story), Hasting died aged 33. He died in a car crash one day after announcing that he was under investigation by the FBI in connection to a “big story” he was working on. Comments from his lawyer suggest his new target was the CIA. The nature of his demise, in a single vehicle car crash where the flaming Mercedes-Benz hit a palm tree at what appeared to be its maximum speed, fueled suspicions of murder. It has been speculated that the nature of the crash was indicative of a car whose computer controls had been hacked.

In the days that followed, witnesses offered evidence to support foul play. Hastings apparently received threats over his McChrystal book and was now “agitated” and “tense” – presumably with regard to his new endeavor. He is reported to specifically have been worried about his Mercedes and tried to borrow a friend’s Volvo – perhaps intending to “go off the radar.”

It is worth adding that his own family regard this combination of paranoia and erratic behavior as a sign of mental difficulties, perhaps related to drug abuse. This may be a more plausible explanation for the crash than a grand, high-level government conspiracy to snuff out a small-time reporter.

It remains worth considering that Netflix took on the project (already underway under another studio) after Michael Hasting’s death. Much of the talent, including the director/screenwriter came on in the years following the “accident.” It’s not an angle that is explored in the film in any way but the possibility that Hasting’s work resulted in being targeted for death certainly had to have had an influence.

I only found this out after I watched the movie. Knowing that last bit, it probably would have made me want to watch War Machine even knowing I would find the experience a tad disappointing.

*For that matter, I didn’t pick up on Anthony Michael Hall until I saw his name in the closing credits. Russell Crowe, as McMahon’s replacement “Bob”, I didn’t notice until after the fact. Crowe does not appear in the credits. I guess it pays to be Brad Pitt.

**Point of trivia. Until McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, was dismissed by Obama, no commanding general had been relieved wartime command since Harry Truman tussled with Gen. Douglas MacArthur during Korea (per the Rolling Stone article). After McKiernan, Obama sacked McChrystal and then McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus, left under a cloud after barely more than a year. Although cleared in an inquiry, General John Allen relinquished that same post days after being cleared of political misconduct related to one of Petraeus’ scandals. Finally, “Fighting Joe” Dunford, Allen’s replacement, seemed to manage being promoted upward and onward out of the Afghanistan mission. An indictment of the Obama presidency or maybe the war in Afghanistan as a whole?