by Glenn Dunks
There is a pall that lingers over The Final Year. And rightfully so considering how everything turned out within the 2016 American presidential elections. And yet, that emotional baggage is brought to the film more by viewers and less so by director Greg Barker. The Emmy-winning director of Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden makes odd choices throughout this otherwise straight-forward documentary, not least of which is barely referencing the elephant in the room for the majority of its (brief) 90 minutes...
The Final Year promises itself as a glimpse inside the eighth and final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, although there is little to be found within it that lends it the weight that one might expect. Political junkies of all breeds will likely be disappointed by the very shallow look at Obama’s administration with Barker’s predominantly fly on the wall aesthetic absolving him of actually investigating the people, their policies or their actions. However much we may love Obama - and believe me, I do - what's the use of a documentary like this with the access they have if you're not going to at the very least interrogate your darlings a little bit?
And furthermore, landmark moments that we were all watching on our television screen go bizarrely unrecognized, or acknowledged only in in passing, giving the illusion that the former administration were oblivious to any and all political happenings around them (although I am willing to forgive this as, perhaps, a symptom of the film’s limit of 90 days of allotted filming).
It would perhaps be easy to just blithely dismiss The Final Year as a film made by die-hards with rose-tinted glasses. And yet there’s something murkier going on here, perhaps even insidious. This is a documentary that promotes its own form of nationalistic agenda where America is the greatest country in the world and where everything that Obama’s government did was right and just. Given current world politics, it is obviously easy to dream of the simpler times that was the Obama administration, but to just roundly ignore anything even approaching forensic inspection gives this documentary the illusion of being little better than the weird North Korean-esque propaganda that the current President trades in on a day to day basis.
When we actually get to spend time with Barack Obama (he is very much a supporting character here), it’s easy to see how so many would be willing to forget any critical insight; he’s such a personable man and a dignified leader in stark contrast to T***p. But that isn’t necessarily good filmmaking. For a film about politics and politicians, The Final Year is remarkably uninterested in interrogating anything about how or why we have gotten to where we are and how the Democrats played a part in it.
Filmed with little to no consideration for visual flair, The Final Year’s predominant dramatic thrust comes from its musical score by Philip Sheppard; a soundtrack so emphatic that one might believe it could cure cancer. A gallantly overpowering score that reinstates its importance with every single note. Another false note in a film that feels less and less genuine the more that time passes. And at a time when people from all around the country are heeding a call to political action whether that be through protest or running for office, The Final Year ultimately ends up as a tone-deaf waste. A movie about people who will ultimately be just fine by the upcoming electoral chaos that we know is coming, made by people who were so entrenched in what they thought would be a final victory lap that they forgot to look closer at what was happening right in front of them.
Oscar Chances: Despite its 2018 release, the film qualified for the 2017 Oscars. It did not make the 15-wide longlist.
Release: In limited release from this weekend.