Not what she wanted The film begins with the voiceover monologue of journalist Elena McMahon, in which she, among other things, admits some of her mistakes. This is not just about ordinary mistakes, failures, but a fundamentally wrong approach to the profession. Let us listen to her words about the feeling of weightlessness as a symptom of depression caused by the loss of a familiar environment. The work goes to the result - a career for employees and an increase in influence for the newspaper. To achieve the result, a certain ballast is dropped, which, perhaps, in fact, is a connection with reality. And this is not happening in the Internet era, but in the 80s - the time of telegrams and wired phones. Work in zero gravity from 9:00 to 13:00, and then, apparently, your personal time. Which you do not have to spend on some journalistic investigations, because the overall picture is already known.
Elena really sees the big picture of US policy in Central America and likes to be one of the first to ask uncomfortable questions to senators. El Salvador and Guatemala in the past. Now it is Nicaragua’s turn to discredit the revolutionary forces and covertly, bypassing the ban of Congress, to support the Contra with weapons. And this is budget money, which is, in fact, the financing of terrorism. Whether the senator is making money from his event is not shown. But we hear him refer to Nicaragua as a “cancer.” So he's breaking the law and supplying weapons just for bloodlust? In 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the policy of US interference in the affairs of other countries, citing as a vivid example the crime of supporting the Contras.
Elena McMahon is gradually becoming a zero-gravity desk journalist, but her consistency in the inconvenient coverage of Central America, even without any in-depth analysis, still troubles those she calls “war pigs.” Is she capable of deep analysis, part of the ballast she had to drop? The complexity of the character is that Elena is woven into the American success matrix on several levels. It’s not just her career, it’s also her family – her father Dick recalls pre-revolutionary Havana with nostalgia and spent his whole life supplying weapons. And here's Dick in the hospital. His father’s last job was to deliver it to Nicaragua. The last thing he wanted. She's taking the case. Out of respect for your father? Because of her anger at being removed from Central America and asked to cover an election race where weightlessness is already beyond measure? Or is it an attempt to feel again and not just to understand the truth of the real world?
The director focuses on the mythological image of Elena’s father, with whom she has not seen for many years. And so there will be no immersion in reality - we will be immersed in a dream, in the world of double agents, French spies and people with two surnames. Guidelines from the past office work will not help there.
In El Salvador, Elena was driven by a thirst for justice, and a world of human suffering opened up to her. Now she is trying on the terrible world of her father, who is already ill with Alzheimer’s, a world of deadly risks of blood business, which sooner or later will destroy you from the inside. It opened not reality, but the world of its enemies – a world of constant fear of becoming a criminal, a world of losing connections between events, a world of physical survival, a world hanging on an eternal hook debtor with a fake passport or a fake life. One Jones tells Elena her fate - unnamed victims of the Vietnam War, where he includes reporters who after such a dive simply could not live on.
7 out of 10
Original