The Final Year
THE FINAL YEAR, documentary, not rated, Violet Crown, 3 chiles
There’s something almost quaint and anachronistic about the spectacle of a White House full of dedicated, idealistic public servants agonizing over the fate of the world, earnestly trying to make it a better place. It takes you back to another era, long ago. Two years ago.
Greg Barker’s documentary takes you inside the West Wing, and on the road, with the Obama administration as it completes an eight-year run. The focus is on the foreign policy team, and the principal players are UN Ambassador Samantha Power; Secretary of State John Kerry; speechwriter and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes; National Security Adviser Susan Rice; and the man himself, President Barack Obama.
The West Wing passages give the sense of the intimacy, bordering on claustrophobia, of those offices — “It’s a very small place,” says Rhodes, and at one point we find him huddled away in a monkish basement cell for a little privacy as he labors over a speech. Barker follows his protagonists around the globe — to treaty signings, to the UN, to African villages. We see Power, an Irish immigrant, shed a tear as she welcomes a new crop of citizens, and Rhodes gazing pensively out over the Havana shoreline. We see Obama make the first presidential visit to Hiroshima.
There’s success, and there’s frustration. Attitudes among the team are mostly positive (“If I wasn’t an optimist,” Kerry muses, “I wouldn’t be able to do this job.”). But there’s the occasional bit of conflict — a dustup between Rhodes and Power (reported, not seen) erupts over the optimistic tenor of a valedictory Obama speech, and there is anguish over global warming, the fate of the Boko Haram captives, and the knowledge that the team has very little time remaining to accomplish the things they would like to get done.
There is the comfort of knowing that they will be handing over the reins to Hillary Clinton. Rhodes allows himself a condescending smile when asked if Trump has a chance of winning. And then comes the film’s most devastating passage. The festive atmosphere as the loyalists gather to watch the returns on election night turns to a mounting sense of disbelief and horror. Rhodes, the phrasemaker, stammers as if punched in the gut: “I ... I, I ... I can’t. I can’t ...” Long, long pause. “I can’t put it into words.”
The Final Year can only be viewed through the prism of our knowledge of Trump’s victory, and the course thus far of his presidency. A documentary that was undertaken as a paean to the Obama legacy and a celebration of principled democracy ends on a note more disturbing than The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre. — Jonathan Richards