‘The Longest War’ Film Review: Sobering Documentary Recounts Decades of Destruction in Afghanistan
Comprehensive and clear, Greg Barker’s film tells a story of U.S. involvement that is infuriating at times, befuddling at others and mostly just sad
Steve Pond | April 13, 2020 @ 6:33 AM
Last Updated: April 20, 2020 @ 12:17 PM
Lisa Maddox in 'The Longest War' / Showtime
If you’re looking for some old-fashioned nonpartisan outrage, where anger or sadness isn’t dependent on political leanings or party affiliation, you can find it in “The Longest War,” the sobering Afghanistan documentary by Greg Barker that premieres Sunday on Showtime.
The film is a dissection of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, the longest running war in U.S. history and a morass with enough blame to go around to leaders of all affiliations. That much is made clear in the first few minutes of the film, when a reverse timeline shows the last seven presidents – Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan and Carter – all promising things that didn’t happen.
Comprehensive and clear, the film tells a story of U.S. involvement that is infuriating at times, befuddling at others and mostly just sad. “My heart hurts for these people,” says CIA “targeter” Lisa Maddox of the Afghans at one point, “because I just don’t see how this ends.”
The film’s executive producers are “Homeland” creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who have set their show’s final season in Afghanistan, with “The Longest War” premiering after their series’ penultimate episode. It’ll be the second movie directed by Barker to premiere in three days; “Sergio,” a narrative film inspired by his 2009 documentary of the same name, landing on Netflix on Friday.
Apart from the new “Sergio,” Barker’s entire career has been in nonfiction, with his other films including “Koran by Heart,” the Emmy-winning “Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden” and “The Final Year,” about foreign policy in the last year of the Obama administration.
His storytelling style is methodical but well-paced as he trots out an array of journalists, American and international officials in the military and intelligence communities and Afghan citizens. And the patient, chronological telling is necessary to make sense of a conflict that goes back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and has turned into as much of a quagmire for the Americans as it was for the Soviets.
Over the years, the U.S. worked through Pakistan to arm and back the rebels who were fighting the U.S.S.R. and who succeeded in driving out the Soviets after 10 years; then stood back and watched the Taliban rise to power under a promise that they would purify and reunite the country under Islam; then became interested in the country after the terrorist organization Al Qaeda formed there under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden; then went into the country in full force after 9/11, only to turn its sights to Iraq in 2003 and let its operations in Afghanistan slide further into chaos.
“The Longest War” tracks the comings and goings, the changes in attitude and in tactics. One instructive juxtaposition: During the Clinton administration, the CIA had an opportunity to kill Bin Laden, but the president had signed an order stating that they could use “lethal activity” against the terrorist leader, but only if the purpose of the activity was not to kill him. Only a few years later, after 9/11, the CIA not only had orders to kill Bin Laden, at one point it was asked to kill him, cut off his head and ship it back to the U.S. One operative said he wondered, “Where am I gonna find dry ice in Afghanistan?”
The Obama administration finally mounted an operation that found and killed Bin Laden, but it also stepped up a campaign of drone warfare that killed numerous civilians at a time when the Taliban seized major territory for the first time in more than a decade.
The film touches briefly on Donald Trump’s proclamation when he took office that he could win the war in a week, but it’d involve killing 10 million people and wiping Afghanistan off the map. But by that point, the focus of the film isn’t on one man’s silly boasting, but on what a 2019 Washington Post investigation documented as 18 years of U.S. officials misleading the public about their operations in Afghanistan.
“It wasn’t even mission creep,” says one military officer of the complete lack of a plan in the country. “It was mission fantasy.”
One after another, the film’s talking heads describe the mess that Afghanistan has always been for outsiders – and as if to underline the disorientation, most are filmed in empty rooms and framed to show vast open spaces behind them.
The one who receives different treatment is the CIA operative Maddox, who is positioned as the conscience of the film. Before the narrative begins, she gets an intro that shows her in her daily life as a mother of young girls; it’s the kind of setup not afforded any other of the film’s subjects. So when she says her heart hurts for the Afghans at the beginning of the film, or when she returns to that theme near the end and says, “I don’t see how this war could be won,” we’re meant to listen and, crucially, to feel.
We do, even as the film tries to end on a note of something other than hopelessness as it points out that the age of its citizens makes Afghanistan the youngest country outside of Africa. But if its future is in the hands of its youth, will they ever have the opportunity to build a new society from the wreckage of decades? “The Longest War” can plant some seeds of hope, but it can’t make them grow.
10 Best Documentaries of the 2010s, From 'OJ: Made in America' to 'The Invisible War' (Photos)
Facts are so often stranger than fiction: The truth can be so terrible that we struggle to believe it, or so joyous and full of life that we’re inspired or moved. The past decade has seen a boom in the documentary space as streaming platforms have invested in their production and proliferated their distribution opportunities. So many docs that could have made this list, from those that have inspired public policy changes to others that captured gorgeous slices of life often overlooked, and even a few that pushed the visual boundaries of what’s possible in non-fiction storytelling. Here are a handful of the best documentaries from the previous decade:
10. "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" Alison Klayman’s documentary may have been many Americans’ introduction to Ai Weiwei, the outspoken artist (whose work has found a devoted following on social media) and whose voice that the Chinese government has threatened to silence more than once. Not only does Klayman’s extensive film retrace many of the highlights in the artist’s career; she also uses his story as a case study of the pressures artists in China face when standing up to the country’s authoritarian government.
9. "The Invisible War" Years ahead of the #MeToo movement, director Kirby Dick and co-writer Amy Ziering burst open the topic of sexual assault in the military with their painfully honest and eye-opening documentary. In “The Invisible War," multiple members of the armed forces detail how they were assaulted or raped by fellow soldiers or commanders and how they felt victimized a second time by the army’s failure to take action. In addition to picking up an Oscar nomination, the documentary was so effective in its mission to raise awareness of the issue that the Pentagon responded by overhauling how it investigates and oversees cases of sexual assault.
8. "O.J.: Made in America" You can argue over whether Ezra Edelman’s multi-part episodic documentary qualifies as television show or a film (the Academy gave it a Best Documentary Oscar before creating new rules that would make it ineligible), but Ezra Edelman’s comprehensive look at the rise and astronomical fall of one of pop culture's most celebrated athletes was a riveting event for many viewers. In addition to rare archival footage and numerous interviews, Edelman's film also put O.J. Simpson’s life into historical context, connecting the dots as to why the sports star would often play down his blackness to appeal to white audiences in the 1970s and examining the various responses to the “trial of the century” in the 1990s.
7. "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" Skipping conventional storytelling approaches like using a narrator or including a series of talking-heads interviews, RaMell Ross chose a nonlinear route for his feature debut. Through evocative footage and observational shots, Ross creates a portrait of the black community of Hale County, Alabama, that’s like few other documentaries. His camera is more of a free-floating spirit through the area, quietly observing the nuances between different groups and individuals at the intersection of race and class. Even with its experimental nature, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” earned an Oscar nomination.
6. "This is Not a Film" Forbidden by the Iranian government from making a movie, directors Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb record Panahi on an iPhone as he’s stuck at home under house arrest. At its core, the documentary is a protest film, a tool for discussing the limitations of persecuting artists in the country while defying the government’s orders by making a documentary. Politics aside, “This is Not a Film” also has a very day-in-the-life quality as it follows Panahi through stories about his previous works while as he prepares to stage future projects within the confines of his home.
5. "Dawson City: Frozen Time" In 1976, the small northern town of Dawson City unearthed an unlikely treasure trove of rare silent films in various states of decay. Decades later, Bill Morrison artfully composed fragments of these movies with other archival material and photos to tell the story of this town in a remote part of Alaska and the number of famous (or infamous) souls passed through it over its history. The found silent-movie footage from nitrate prints that survived the area’s harsh winters underground vary in their state of decomposition, but Morrison incorporates these so-called damaged works into the narrative.
4. "I Am Not Your Negro" Raoul Peck connects an unfinished James Baldwin novel about the murders of three of his friends who were leaders of the civil rights movement -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- to the present-day protests of Black Lives Matter in a visceral documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Incorporating interview footage and letters, Peck conjures up Baldwin’s insightful voice to echo the works of years ago, a haunting reminder of how far equality has yet to go in the struggle against racial discrimination.
3. "The Grand Bizarre" At no point is there a singular character to follow or voice-over narration to guide us. Instead, Jodie Mack’s dazzling stop-motion animated documentary just washes over its audiences with a fury of colors, patterns and textures of materials from around the world. This inventive documentary explores heady themes of globalization, mass production, cultural identity, travel, commerce and connectivity through the journey of several fabric swatches as they traipse around the world in immaculately arranged configurations, accompanied by Mack’s playfully evocative score. Borders and barriers fall away as the materials come to life.
2. "Cameraperson" Kirsten Johnson steps out from behind the camera to become the subject of her own moving documentary about her work and life outside the frame. Her memoir-doc includes home movies of her family alongside a number of movies she shot throughout her career, including “Derrida,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Happy Valley,” “Citizenfour” and “Very Semi-Serious.” It’s a delicate balance between the Johnson audiences have come to know through her work and the person whose life exists outside the camera that’s taken her to all these corners of the world.
1. "The Act of Killing" Shocking. Stomach-churning. Joshua Oppenheimer and an anonymous co-director uncover the humanity and the monstrosity behind some of the men who led death squads during Indonesia’s war against Communists. Using the guise of creating an extravagant movie about the men’s life stories, “The Act of Killing” gets its subjects to reveal dark secrets and dredge memories so awful, it makes them physically ill. They may never face the consequences for their actions, but this wildly fascinating and disturbing documentary captures perhaps one of the strangest confessions ever on film.
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Decade in Review: “The Grand Bizarre” and “Cameraperson” rank among the highlights of the decade
Facts are so often stranger than fiction: The truth can be so terrible that we struggle to believe it, or so joyous and full of life that we’re inspired or moved. The past decade has seen a boom in the documentary space as streaming platforms have invested in their production and proliferated their distribution opportunities. So many docs that could have made this list, from those that have inspired public policy changes to others that captured gorgeous slices of life often overlooked, and even a few that pushed the visual boundaries of what’s possible in non-fiction storytelling. Here are a handful of the best documentaries from the previous decade:
