‘It is well that war is so terrible,” Robert E. Lee once said, “or we should grow too fond of it.” The quote makes almost no sense to us today, after a century of battlefield horrors and the awareness of the psychic and spiritual costs of war on those who fight it. But for soldiers in the premodern era, going off to battle often meant something entirely different: a thrilling escape from the daily drudgery of a hardscrabble existence, subsistence farming, or horrendous factory work in pursuit of a glorious ideal. Camaraderie and purpose were joined together with petty theft, looting, alcohol, and camp-following women. Hanging over it all was the exhilaration of facing and daring death.
The risk was enormous, but so was the psychic and personal reward from transcending the difficulties of ordinary life, which was laced with dangers of its own in any case.
Lee’s words would today mean the most, I think, to journalists who make their careers traveling to, and living in, war zones. I’ve never been one, and never been in the military, but I’ve known them and worked with them throughout my career. They don’t have to do it. No one makes them do it. They can do something else—anything else. They often wreak havoc on their quotidian lives by doing so, leaving angry ex-wives and yearning children in their wake. Their bravery and gall are the wonder of all who know them, and that glory explains some of their dedication, as does their determination to tell the stories of the countries they travel to and the soldiers who are fighting. But they do it because they love it. War is terrible, and they have grown fond of it.
The sharp-witted and surprisingly low-key Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a full-blooded character portrait of one such present-day foreign correspondent—an unlikely one, which makes this a classic fish-out-of-water-and-into-the-dust-of-Kabul story. Tina Fey is the star and producer of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which was written by her 30 Rock collaborator Robert Carlock. And it’s almost deliberately cast in the form of a 30 Rock takeoff in which Fey’s Liz Lemon character from that long-running sitcom is forced to move to Kabul and become a war correspondent. Kim Baker lives the same single-woman New York City media life as Liz and has a boyfriend as unsatisfying as many of Liz’s boyfriends.
Fey’s Kim is an instantly recognizable seriocomic type, which makes it all the more jarring when she is thrust into an unrecognizable reality. And the reality, it turns out, is fun. After decades of a cramped, parched life in Manhattan—her moment of crisis comes when she realizes she has been working out on the same piece of exercise equipment every night for years and can recognize the stains on the floor in front of it—Kim is soon transformed into a hard-drinking, late-night-partying, cursing-in-Pashtun tough guy.
Her life becomes more vivid and more exciting, complete with a quite reprobate Scottish photographer boyfriend played by the chameleon-like master Martin Freeman. We see her make a momentary return to her Manhattan apartment, which again could be Liz Lemon’s—the plants are dead, a clear sign her home is now Kabul.
The new Kim instinctively runs toward trouble rather than away from it, so much so that her wise formerly-a-doctor local guide (a wonderful performance by Christopher Abbott) warns her: The addiction to the kick of war-zone life has eerie parallels to a junkie’s need for an ever-more-powerful fix.
Based on The Taliban Shuffle, the 2011 memoir of the newspaperwoman Kim Barker, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is completely respectful of, even somewhat awed by, the courage and sacrifice of the American military personnel Kim covers. She develops a jocular, jousting, and mutually admiring relationship with a no-nonsense general (a delightful Billy Bob Thornton) whose sense of humor is as dry as an Algonquin martini. The only villains of the piece are the Taliban and the news executives in New York who have grown bored of Afghanistan and won’t run her stories.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is not a jangly action thriller, like The Hurt Locker, or a heartbreaking portrait of a society at risk, like The Kite Runner. It’s a more intimate thing. It’s a story of what it’s like to have a front-row seat in a true life-and-death drama in which you might be called to act at any moment, and the unparalleled transformative power of that experience. The question this smart, unpretentious picture asks is: Will Kim and her friends grow so fond of war that they will cease to recognize how terrible it is until it kills them?
