In 1994, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about England’s failure to qualify for that year’s World Cup called Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job. In delivering an unintentionally revealing look at cruel, thankless jobs and failure on an international stage, it’s a curious precursor for this piece of HBO access journalism, but the analogy stands — but whereas Taylor’s downfall was bleakly funny, The Last Year is just grim, not least because Taylor at least knew he was failing.
We follow a handful of the more interesting West Wing LARPers of the Obama era, and it’s a mixed bag. Samantha Power, UN ambassador and expert on genocide, is a gritty presence, grimacing through a series of meetings with victims of atrocities, but seems clueless what to actually do about any of it.
Deep into the Saudi intervention on Yemen, she tries to get their foreign minister to put on a VR helmet to experience a refugee camp, but he pretends not to understand her. Even more haplessly, she presents the president of Cameroon with a book on American national parks to inform him on climate change. The President, in office since 1982, doubtless filed the book next to his bulging Swiss bank records and went about a hard afternoon’s election fraud.
In her increasingly visible frustration Power, at least, seems aware that the collision of Obama-era idealism and the shitholes of the world is not a productive one. On the other hand, Ben Rhodes, subject of fawning profiles ever since he gave up a career as a novelist to become one of Obama’s speechwriters, comes across as a prize douche.
Having fallen total victim to diplomacy’s world of air miles, lanyards and the confusion of frenetic activity with actual work, he’s a kind of tragic figure, unable to see how pointless his exhaustion is. Tellingly, he couches everything in terms of ‘remarks’ and ‘positions’, never actual policies — aside from the vague drive to ‘do something.’ At one point, he delivers a self-consciously Sorkinian speech about the destruction of a Syrian aid convoy by the Russians, and some old state department hands visibly smirk at him.
Obama himself, meanwhile, drifts airily through the film, granting a few snatched backstage interviews but he’s already a post-political figure at the beginning of the film, making speech after sonorously delivered speech but he’s already clearly over the whole government thing. It’s all so sad, though, because while these may be the kind of dorks who went to schools too expensive to have their nonsense bullied out of them, these nerds were the best America had to offer.
This project, intended as a tug job, seems unaware of how revealing it is about the American liberal class.
Lurking over people’s shoulders on TV throughout The Last Year and gradually coming into focus is a certain real estate developer and hotelier, and the clowns sailing in his wake. The types who populated Obama’s foreign policy loved diplomacy because it’s jet-set politics: it’s easy to conclude Boko Haram is a A Bad Thing and give some victim a hug, but it’s hard to meet gross poor people back in the US, or to address the structural causes of racism, or give people afflicted by joblessness, opioid addiction or plain old economic grievance realistic hope — all of these the problems Donald Trump rode like a magic carpet to the White House right under the noses of people like Rhodes. Indeed, Samantha Power’s election night party is one of the most horribly funny scenes in recent years, if only because it’s always amusing to see people totally blindsided.
So, this has been more of a complaint against the later Obama years and his team’s failure to grasp that politics is about more than being good at your homework; how’s the actual film? Well, like the Graham Taylor doc, it depends what you bring to it. The Obama team had a shade of Camelot to a certain person, especially the kind of person who produces documentaries for HBO, but this project, intended as a tug job, seems unaware of how revealing it is about the American liberal class. It doesn’t give its subjects enough rope, but they take it anyway; maybe in watching it, in a world moved on from mere post-Bush moralising on the world stage, they’ll get a sense of the completeness of their failure.
On the one hand, there are more PhDs and position papers around than at a funeral at Davos; on the other, these people only paved the way for lunatics to take over the asylum — an asylum with nuclear weapons.