Doc looks back wistfully at Obama-era diplomacy
Greg Barker had assembled nearly all his footage for “The Final Year,’’ a behind-thescenes look at President Barack Obama’s globe-trotting foreign policy team, when something unexpected happened — so unexpected that it left its main characters literally speechless.
Donald Trump was elected president.
The development not only shocked those onscreen, but changed the trajectory of the film rather dramatically (not to mention the country and the world, but we’re talking about the film here.)
Suddenly, a documentary that would have been interesting mainly to diplomacy wonks and foreign news junkies became one that will, to many Trump opponents — the film’s likely audience — be both a painful trip down memory lane and a frightening reminder of how tenuous diplomatic deals can be, once the regime changes at home.
As a record of initiatives that were more or less stopped in their tracks, it may have become much more of a high-profile film — a reality that one of its main subjects, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, acknowledged at a recent screening. (She added that she’d trade that in an instant for a different election result.)
Power, a former journalist, was one of three main diplomats that Barker followed around the world as they sought to solidify the administration’s legacy — on issues such as the Iran nuclear deal, relations with Cuba, the situation in Syria, climate change and more — as the hourglass was emptying in 2016.
The others are Secretary of State John Kerry and longtime Obama aide Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Obama himself speaks occasionally to the cameras, as does National Security adviser Susan Rice.
Is “The Final Year’’ a fly-onthe-wall documentary along the lines of “The War Room’’ or the terrific, gasp-inducing “Weiner’’? Nope. Despite the feeling that we’re getting behind the scenes, it doesn’t contain a whole lot of revealing moments, and the subjects are portrayed in a flattering light. Despite being near the action, we don’t feel particularly close to it.
Still, we get to see the wheels turning, and it’s hard not to get wrapped up in some of the backstage moments. Some are amusing, as when a young woman asks Obama, on the sidelines of an event, how he shares family responsibility with his wife. Obama explains that you need to alternate whose career gets priority; Michelle will soon “get to do whatever she wants.’’ When? “Right when all this is over.’’
We watch Kerry as he returns to Vietnam in May 2016, working on normalizing relations more than four decades after he fought there and later became a fierce critic of the war. (Barker includes footage of a 20-something Kerry testifying to a Senate panel.)
As for Rhodes, we watch him sitting alone in Hanoi with his laptop, struggling with an early
draft of the momentous speech Obama will deliver in Hiroshima a few days later, the first U.S. president to do so. Others have
spoken eloquently about Hiroshima, Rhodes notes, but this will be the leader of the country that dropped the bomb.