As I watched the Magnolia Pictures doc "The Final Year" (opening Friday), I marveled at how director Greg Barker sliced and diced a tumultuous period when President Barack Obama's foreign policy team was racing to finish one of the post-WWII American presidency's most ambitious to-do lists in their last year in office. The film is an excursion through the real "West Wing" where big foreign-policy issues are hammered out and sometimes shot down.
From footage gathered over a year, director Barker finds his stars in obvious players: Pres. "No-Drama" Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the UN Ambassador, one-time Irish immigrant Samantha Power, so comfortable in the West Wing that we observe her seven-year-old son sprawled asleep on a government-issued sofa. The filmmakers also delight in the occasional funny aside, such as when an Obama aide points to the floor where, he says, "There's this massive dead cockroach right under the chair."
"The Final Year" presents the Obama team as a closely bonded group, unlike the impressions emanating from the Trump White House. Missing from the scene is Hillary Clinton, although a late chapter has Obama's team shocked and saddened by the 2016 election returns. You see little of Trump, other than as a kind of storm cloud on the horizon. Russian President V. Putin and his United Nations minions get far more attention, particularly when the war over Syria heats up.
In this year when films have devoted enormous attention to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the battle to save the UK and its allies from the Nazi blitz ("Darkest Hour," "Dunkirk"), it's refreshing to see American leaders given their due, especially Kerry, who begins the film on a slightly slapdash note, rushing back into his DC home with the aside, "I've forgotten my phone!" Kerry is seen throughout, challenging the Russians and other world leaders to get serious about preventing a humanitarian meltdown in Syria.
A moving moment arrives in the reflections of Ben Rhodes, a soft-spoken, balding Obama aide. "I remember walking home on 9/11. I was 23. My life had worked out for me: I was going to live in New York and try to write novels. I remember thinking, 'I'm going to do something different, I don't know what, but it's going to be about this.'"
This moment is contrasted with a thin-skinned moment when Rhodes, stung by attacks on the Obama-brokered Iran nuclear deal, is quoted in The New York Times Magazine asserting that "most of the reporters covering the White House were 27-year-olds who knew literally nothing about world affairs."
The best thing that can said for Barker's beautifully edited flashback through Obama's final year is that it should compel us to weigh the stakes for life on this shrinking planet with a current president who can casually oppose immigration from "shithole countries." But the film is further evidence that even the best of intentions and minds at work in a hot box like the White House can only accomplish so much. I recall that great Robert Redford line from the film "All the President's Men" as Watergate-era Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Asking in the Post newsroom, "Can you dial the White House directly?," he was told yes, it's (202) 456-1111.
Director Greg Barker's "The Final Year" is a flashback through President Obama's last year in office. Photo: Magnolia Pictures