Matthew Heineman’s latest documentary, “Retrograde,” opens with a pan from left to right across the mountain ranges of Afghanistan. Audio clips overlay soundbites from four generations of Presidents discussing the American invasion of the Middle East, from the purposeful threat-neutralizing of the Dubya years to Obama-era fatigue to the wavering defeatism of Trump to Biden’s resolution for withdrawal. As the situation goes quagmire and the hope in their cascading voiceover fades away, the frame changes along with it, sliding on a gradient from crisply defined peaks backlit by sunrise into the murky limited visibility and ominous unknowability of night. It won’t be long before the significance of this formal symbol presents itself to us — we came in with clarity of intent, raring to free the Afghan people and ensure domestic security in the States by eliminating the terrorist menace, but decades of mission drift set the military off course.
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This is an American-made narrative, and though Heineman harbors some measure of critical intent toward our government and its rash decision-making, he still takes their line at face value. His boots-on-the-ground look at the chaotic days before and after the army’s total pull-out from Afghanistan makes it halfway to an insight, so torturously close to grasping the point without quite getting there. He’s clear-eyed about the ruinous results of the hasty exit strategy — that our leaving the nation high and dry has put its citizenry in a more precarious, hazardous position than they were in to begin with. But he can’t bring himself to acknowledge that we should never have been there in the first place, instead extending excessive credulity to the state-sponsored horse pucky about how our soldiers would be greeted as liberators. The political theorists of social media already have an idiom for Heineman’s blinkered brand of quasi-consciousness: the problems are bad, but their causes are very good.
Every documentarian must weigh the benefits of gaining access to their subjects against the limitations that come with negotiating for their approval. In this instance, the crew’s ostensible cooperation with the U.S. military has resulted in an unambiguously pro-troop perspective that compromises the film’s ability to be unsparingly honest about how and why we’ve landed in this no-win clusterfuck. As portrayed by Heineman, the key officers (their identical beards and wraparound shades as much a uniform as their fatigues) are middle managers caught between the remotely issued commands from an out-of-touch Congress and the long-suffering citizens of Afghanistan they wish they could do more to help. If a viewer didn’t know otherwise, they’d have no idea of any animosity between the occupiers and the occupied. In a teary meeting, the Americans bid a respectful farewell to their local liaisons, speaking to them as brothers-in-arms. Elsewhere, a bombing instructor emphasizes the importance of avoiding civilians, explaining that raining down death on the wrong people can inadvertently seed the next generation of anti-American radicals. That our drone operators have long since already done exactly this goes unmentioned.
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There’s no talk of anything that would frame the armed forces as a tool of ill-intended Western influence. Heineman makes the tacit suggestion that if anything, we should’ve stayed longer and sallied onward with a war (well, a “war”) started on false pretenses, with no end in sight. That’s the only conclusion he can draw from the devastation we’ve strewn in our wake, starting with the Taliban’s swift and hostile takeover the second the dust on the extraction choppers had settled. At the uppermost echelons of the military, the populace of Afghanistan is represented in the quixotic general Sami Sadat, the last hope for his culture’s counter-fundamentalist faction. Through him, the human toll of this unceasing crisis comes into view, his battered belief in victory providing an uplifting note for Heineman to end on. But the costs can be more material than that, too; the flagrant waste on display in a montage that sees Americans destroying computer monitors and firing off all unspent rounds rather than giving them to the remaining Afghan freedom fighters is a sharp visual metaphor for a careless, callous, destructive imperial project.
In one of his more impressive gets, Heineman makes his way into a Taliban leadership meeting during which spooky music murmurs in the background as a firebrand riles up the crowd. As he rhapsodizes about the brutal aggressions of the power-hungry West, one might start to think the guy’s onto something, until he pins all the unrest on the machinations of those nefarious Jews. Nonetheless, the scene illustrates a crucial core of contradiction in the tangled web of motivations that fueled the past twenty years of disaster, a complicated grey area in which the opposite of the wrong thing isn’t necessarily right. Heineman’s thesis that because leaving has gone so poorly, staying would’ve necessarily been better is incorrect at best, and disingenuous at worst. He wants to think structurally, aware that America can and does flatten other nations beneath our clumsy footfalls. He just can’t — or won’t — see the whole structure out of apparent fear that it’ll be too unflattering for all involved, including him, the army’s useful launderer of their image-sanitizing talking points. [C]
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