War Machine

Watching War Machine is to witness a film applying an accessibly dark comic tone to the low-hanging fruit of the futility of nation-building in Afghanistan. The movie takes place in 2009, when General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt as a version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal)—fresh off successes in Iraq—is put in charge of the multi-nation, U.S.-led coalition to stamp out the Taliban while molding Afghanistan into what a country should look like according to Western democracies, which, as McMahon describes it, means jobs and security. Our introduction to McMahon comes through a narrator, Sean Cullen (Scoot McNairy), who is based on the late Michael Hastings. It was Hastings’ article for Rolling Stone that led to McChrystal’s ouster, and it was Hastings who wrote The Operators, upon which this film is based. His narration sets the sardonic tone, and every characterization and situation that follows reinforces it. The problem with War Machine is its difficulty keeping its tone consistent in the service of a compelling story or dramatic rendering of ideas.
Cullen-as-narrator casually drops that McMahon was a straight-A student with a degree from Yale, while simultaneously characterizing him as a well-meaning jock out of his depth. The way Pitt plays him and Cullen describes him, McMahon is a decent, disciplined jarhead trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. If you were already inclined to think of our involvement in Afghanistan as an incompetent diaster, War Machine might be your film: Those given charge of transforming the region can’t even make an electric razor or Blu-ray player work.
For director and screenwriter David Michôd, McMahon is well intentioned but doesn’t realize he’s in way over his head. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai (Ben Kingsley in full comic mode) is only figurehead and knows it, something that McMahon doesn’t when he seeks out Karzai’s approval for a mission. With few exceptions, Pitt’s McMahon is the cartoonish stand-in for military buffoonery and blind spots, a gruff-voiced, hoo-rah enthusiast not far from Pitt’s Aldo Raine character in Inglourious Basterds. Such is his commitment to routines that he takes a seven-mile run every day, eats one meal per and sleeps a mere four hours. His speeches to the troops demonstrate he understands that you can’t kill the very people you’re trying to help. In his math lesson to European leaders, McMahon notes that “10-2 = 20.” Meaning that the more of “them” you kill, the more you inspire others on the fence to join “them.”