Movie Review: The Final Year

The Final Year *** / *****

Directed by: Greg Barker.

 

I cannot help but wonder if The Final Year – a well-made documentary, that follows around Barack Obama and a few members of his foreign policy team during their final year in office would be as good as it is if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016 – as clearly everyone in this movie thought she was going to. The film has back stage access to the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Ambassador Samantha Power and speechwriter/advisor Ben Rhodes – and occasionally Obama himself – as they go about their work, You cannot say that any of them are completely unguarded – they know a camera is there after all, and they choose their words wisely, but they all seem less scripted than when you see them at press conferences and the like. The filmmaker, Greg Barker, clearly likes all of the people he’s making the documentary about – and more importantly, agrees with them. Had Clinton won, and like-minded people took over the roles, than The Final Year may have look like nothing more than idol worship.

 

But of course, Clinton didn’t win – Donald Trump did – and so the movie, unintentionally, captures something else entirely. There are the earlier moments in the film – when everyone is so sure Trump is going to lose, where Rhodes seems almost smug about the possibility of a Trump presidency – he laughs a little. If Kerry and particularly Powers seem like idealists, Rhodes never quite does – he believes in everything he’s doing of course, but he’s more a political animal. This gets him in trouble early in the film, when a New York Magazine profile about him comes out, and publishes a few choice quotes – in particular ones where he basically calls the Washington press corps stupid. As the film progresses – particularly as it gets to election night – it’s more like watching a slow moving car crash that they didn’t see coming. In the section in the months after the election, everyone seems to be a daze – not quite believing what has happened.

 

We’ve seen this in a few documentaries now of course. I saw it in Get Me Roger Stone, about the former Trump adviser as he celebrates the victory and 11/8/16, which documented people on all sides during election day, and even in the new Gloria Allred documentary Seeing Allred. But to see it from the inside of the Obama administration (or as inside as we’re likely to see) is different.

 

Overall, the film itself is interesting in showing how this sort of diplomacy works – the hard work someone like Kerry has to do in order to negotiate all the deals he did in the last year, or how hard Powers has to fight for her causes in the face of indifference and politics, or how Rhodes has to write the speeches, knowing Obama may change them. It’s interesting to see Obama himself on those stops, and interacting with the people. The film is, in essence, showing us how all of this is supposed to work. What makes it interesting is, of course, that Trump has basically thrown all this out the window – he does whatever he wants, and chaos has reigned during his year in office – no one quite knowing what’s going to happen day-to-day. It makes the film a little more depressing than probably intended – even if you don’t agree with what Obama and his team were doing, because it at least showed them as functional people working towards a common goal. I don’t know what the hell a similar movie about Trump’s first year would look like – but it wouldn’t be this.