Active Measures

Active Measures

“Dead is the enemy,” announced Russian politician Oleg Morozov on learning about U.S. Senator John McCain’s death last Saturday. A former war hero and presidential nominee who never hesitated to voice his distrust of Vladimir Putin, McCain smirks through a speech delivered by the Russian president in Jack Bryan’s new documentary “Active Measures” sneering with dramatic menace in the direction of the senator.

Donald Trump famously shares Putin’s disdain for McCain, having once said he prefers people “that weren’t captured” when referring to the five and a half years that the Vietnam veteran spent as a prisoner of war. It should be no wonder, then, that it took so long for Trump to authorize lowering the White House flag to half-staff after McCain’s passing.

If there’s one moment from his career that I remember most vividly today, it’s when he corrected a woman during a 2008 campaign event who had just made a racist statement about his opponent Barack Obama. Instead of indulging his supporter’s ignorant belief that Obama was a deceitful “Arab,” McCain took back the mic and said, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man and citizen who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” This act of “taking back the mic” from those trying to amplify division and misinformation stands in stark contrast with our oligarch-in-chief’s daily xenophobic fearmongering.

McCain is one of Bryan’s film’s most powerful interview subjects; “Active Measures” makes an incredibly strong case for how Russia attacked our 2016 presidential election while chillingly charting not only democracy but moral leadership in this country crumbling around us its first half details how Russian security services created similar chaos in other nations using propaganda, cyber attacks and recruitment of agents of influence as key weapons of political warfare; former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili remembers how Russia invaded his country during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, calling it a response to his country’s embrace of democracy. He later lost re-election in part because of the release of prison abuse footage that was then labeled as staged by the government.

Despite not delving into the complexity of the Russo-Georgian War or mentioning Saakashvili’s myriad current criminal charges, Bryan and co-writer Marley Clements paint him as an example of what can happen when progressive policies make someone a target for the Kremlin. Any democratic system is brittle once turned against by public opinion fueled with falsified information spread by foreign trolls pretending to be local voices targeting gullible voters. “It’s not about the size of their economy or their military,” Saakashvili says. “It’s about their state of mind.”

With its arrival in theaters and on digital platforms just over two months before this year’s November 6th midterms, “Active Measures” couldn’t come at a better time. What often works against it, though, is how lackluster much of its style is.

Director of The Young Turks documentary “Mad as Hell”, Andrew Napier’s edit is made to be overwhelming, and it succeeds almost too well: names and statistics are thrown at viewers so quickly that I had to repeatedly pause the film (which I was luckily able to do with my online screener) in order to try and absorb what was being said. People seeing this in a theater instead of streaming at home may leave not just angry but exhausted; Bryan rarely gives us a chance to breathe.

There is one notable exception: when Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, takes a long pause before explaining how Trump has enabled Russian money laundering in America throughout his career. The film even admits near the end that any one of its story threads could have been its own separate narrative and that is part of the problem.

Bryan wants to include every last thread of evidence while keeping the running time under two hours so much that the movie feels like a SparkNotes version of a multi-part miniseries. Often it’s cut and scored like a feature length political ad; many minutes pass by setting up all-caps text on screen for just a few seconds. Doron Danoff and John MacCallum’s music is offensively generic, like temp score background noise ready to be replaced by Philip Glass at any moment. And still, somehow, it works.

Vitaly Mansky’s film “Putin’s Witnesses” won the Best Documentary prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this year. The movie is a powerful work made up of footage that Mansky shot himself while working on Putin’s 1999 campaign. The director was struck by the persuasive power of Putin’s public image: he appeared cool headed, even jovial, as he took part in spirited debates with Mansky.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin had hoped that his successor would fight against totalitarianism and protect freedom of the press, but it wasn’t long before Putin began to pander to popular nostalgia for a resurgent Soviet nationalism. In Bryan’s film, these parallels between Putin’s backward-looking crusade and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan are spelled out, as is their shared loathing for Hillary Clinton. On suburban lawns in northern Illinois during the 2016 election, signs were displayed reading “Trump That Bitch”, which were a direct result of misogyny empowered and displayed by Trump.

Putin has never forgiven Clinton for what he sees as her role in fomenting protests in Ukraine against its Russian-backed president, Viktor F. Yanukovich who had been coached by Paul Manafort when he withdrew from the European Union. Police murdered student protesters in those demonstrations clashes that were famously chronicled in Evgeny Afineevsky’s Oscar-nominated documentary “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.”

But dismantling the EU is only one step toward Putin’s goal of increasing Russia’s clout on the global stage, which may have helped push his country into playing a role in Brexit as well as Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Government agents poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was supported by McCain; this left him disfigured but did not prevent him from being elected following a do-over vote demanded by Orange Revolution protesters, when Putin wanted Ukraine to be part of Russia again.

Russian company stopped pumping gas into Ukraine after disputes with the Russian government in the dead of winter, a year before Ukrainian Prime Minister and Orange Revolution co-leader Yulia Tymoshenko lost the 2010 presidential election and was unjustly imprisoned. Bryan shrewdly juxtaposes this angry cry from her detractors at Clinton with those who chanted “Lock Her Up” about Trump’s rival.

Trump makes an ideal target for Russian blackmail due to his wealth, inconsistent morals and having his finances exposed when his doomed casino broke anti-money laundering laws. McCain, with no trace of humor in his voice or on his face, wonders aloud: “Interesting Why would the Republican party remove a provision that would help a people who were invaded and slaughtered defend themselves?”

The man behind all this corruption is Semion Mogilevich as cartoonish a character as Trump himself whose claim that he’s simply a businessman “responding to the will of the people” isn’t far off from Al Capone in “The Untouchables,” according to Robert De Niro. Our president’s guilt seems only more obvious given that there appears to be a direct server link between Trump Tower and Russia’s Alfa Bank; Deutsch Bank supported Donald J. Trump; Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani both have strong ties with Moscow among others.

Notably absent among these pundits assembled by Bryan is Senator Bernie Sanders, whose own campaign for President was targeted by Russian bots trying divide voters around false accusations.

Clinton will tell how Putin’s father saved his wife from the ruins during the Siege of Leningrad and nursed her back to health a striking emblem of what he plans to do with his country. McCain suggests that perhaps even Putin himself, in addition to strategic moves like Hitler’s rise, ordered Russian apartment bombings that scared shell-shocked citizens into supporting him for president.

Russian critics who voiced opposition against his policies were jailed or killed after he took office as well as on any other day Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist loved worldwide being but one example among many others such like her who have met their ends at hands tied directly or indirectly related to those loyal only unto themselves such as these two men named herein [Putin & Trump] whose success depends upon keeping people ignorant about history because they know very well what it says about them.

I would love nothing more than to see an equally well researched movie from the other side of the aisle (and no, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest thinly disguised pack of lies does not count). Bryan sets a high standard for those who wish deny collusion between Russia and Trump in electing him How strange is it that Ronald Reagan said “Tear down this wall!” Why did he not also say: “Build more walls”? At first I thought this phrase came back around on Republicans themselves because they elected Donald J.

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