The Final Year

Barack Obama’s final year in office already feels like a long time ago, so much so that Greg Barker’s doc­u­men­tary on the sub­ject seems to recall a sim­pler time. Despite con­tain­ing mate­r­i­al shot as recent­ly as Jan­u­ary 2017, it is imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent that The Final Year depicts a con­sid­er­ably dif­fer­ent admin­is­tra­tion – and indeed a dif­fer­ent Amer­i­ca – to the cur­rent reality.

In the first scene, Ben Rhodes – one of Obama’s speech­writ­ers and clos­est advi­sors – explains the unex­pect­ed pres­ence of the cam­era by say­ing to oth­er West Wing staffers that Bark­er is mak­ing a film, ​“about our administration’s diplo­ma­cy”. Tasked with con­dens­ing an entire pres­i­den­tial year into 90 min­utes, Bark­er is wise to restrict his obser­va­tion. His doc­u­men­tary is a mix of fly-on-the-wall mate­r­i­al and to-cam­era inter­views with both staffers and the 44^th pres­i­dent him­self which is struc­tured by department.

Look­ing almost entire­ly at the field of diplo­ma­cy, Barker’s inter­est is in the ways that Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion sought to close their term by reach­ing out inter­na­tion­al­ly. This arrives in the form of big ges­tures (Oba­ma speak­ing in Hiroshi­ma, or meet­ing diplo­mats in Viet­nam) and small ones (UN ambas­sador Saman­tha Pow­er meets the moth­ers of girls kid­napped by Boko Haram, then lat­er barters with her chil­dren using doughnuts).

There is a prob­lem with start­ing a doc­u­men­tary with a clear inten­tion. In this case, it’s to cel­e­brate one of America’s most pro­gres­sive and (com­par­a­tive­ly) peace­ful pres­i­den­cies. But there are also a set of assump­tions in place, name­ly that the pres­i­dent at the time of the film’s release would be a demo­c­rat. The unpre­dictabil­i­ty of real­i­ty ends up intervening.

It seems odd to fault a film­mak­er for his fail­ure to rearrange his film to match a frac­ture in real­i­ty, but the vale­dic­to­ry line Bark­er per­se­veres with rings false, his hope­ful con­clu­sion is wil­ful­ly naïve. Grant­ed unprece­dent­ed access and the kind of can­dour afford­ed by the participant’s aware­ness that they will be out of office by the time the film appears, Bark­er had an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate some­thing reveal­ing. The end result sad­ly falls slight­ly short.

Bark­er observes the administration’s final attempts to cre­ate a lega­cy that endures. He arrives at the lat­ter stages of the last leg of any term in office. Any work under­tak­en – espe­cial­ly that which is incom­plete – may be reversed or undone by the sub­se­quent pres­i­dent. There is a rush to tie up loose ends, to pol­ish the devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and push through planned pol­i­cy. This dri­ves a doc­u­men­tary that might oth­er­wise feel ambling, and also pro­vides it with its most cut­ting and painful irony.

From the moment that Trump first appears in the film, as a tan­ger­ine glow on a CNN mon­i­tor, he remains a spec­tral pres­ence that threat­ens to over­shad­ow it. As news anchors debate can­di­date Trump’s ris­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty, Rhodes refus­es to hear it. On elec­tion day, for the first time in his life he’s speech­less. ​“His­to­ry doesn’t fol­low a straight line” pro­claims Oba­ma in the film’s clos­ing moment. His lega­cy has been set utter­ly off course, and with it, Barker’s attempt at a pre-writ­ten sum­ma­tion falters.