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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: WTF is Wrong with WTF?

By Jacob Krueger

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If you go to see Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, you’re going to have a very mixed experience. There are elements of this movie that are truly beautiful, and then there are elements that are just so incredibly dissatisfying. So WTF is wrong with WTF? Why did a movie with such a stellar cast and compelling concept fall so flat both critically and at the box office? And what can you learn from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot about your own writing?

 

Every movie makes a promise to its audience.  If you deliver on that promise, you can get away with almost anything. But if you make that promise and you fail to deliver, the audience is going to eat you alive. And that's very much what happened with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

 

 

When you see the trailer for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and you see Tina Fey, the first thing you assume is you’re going to laugh your ass off for an hour and a half. As you know if you’ve seen the trailer, there’s a reason for this. The trailer excerpts only the very funniest moments of this film. But the truth of the matter is, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is barely a comedy. It's primarily a character-driven story about a copy editor who becomes an in-front-of-the-camera embedded journalist in Afghanistan.

 

Now, the idea of doing a funny Tina Fey movie about the war in Afghanistan is a brilliant premise, and once you bring that premise to the table, it is really hard to back away from it. It’s like giving kids a bunch of ice cream and then trying to get them to eat their vegetables. And, to some degree, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is certainly trying to deliver on that premise; there is an Alfred Molina character who's trying just as hard as he can to be funny, and there are some really funny moments in the piece. But the things that actually work best in the screenplay are not the comedic elements; they’re the dramatic ones.

 

At its core, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is actually a romance. And it's a very beautifully drawn romance. The script is just not fully cooked yet. As happens all too often, both in Hollywood and in indie film and even in student films, they shot it one draft too soon.

 

So what would a finished version of this script look like? To understand that, we need to look at the screenplay as if we were considering it for a rewrite...

 

At the center of the script, and at the center of the romance is a relationship between Tina Fey's character, Kim, and her Afghani translator, Fahim, who’s played by Christopher Abbott. And the scenes between Kim and Fahim are actually some of the most well written in the movie.

 

Fahim is Kim’s translator, an Afghani man who is engaged to be married to an Afghani woman, and whose culture does not even permit him to touch a woman like Kim. And, of course, the two of them are slowly falling in love.

There's a brilliantly written scene about halfway through the movie between Kim and Fahim that subtly captures the depth of that relationship. Kim arrives in Afghanistan and pretty quickly shows that she is a lot more than the scared fish-out-of-water that she seems. That, in fact, she is incredibly brave- fearless even- and willing to do pretty much anything to get a good story.

 

In one of the early scenes, she gets out of the protected Jeep in the middle of an ambush, and is running around unprotected trying to shoot video of the skirmish. And it's a surprise that this happens so quickly (and I’ll talk later about why it's also challenging structurally that this happens so quickly) but what we’re watching with Kim is that Kim actually does...