The Final Year review – Trump looms over poignant portrait of Obama's farewell

There is an unintentional sadness to this film from Greg Barker. It’s a respectful documentary about Barack Obama’s final year in the US presidency, and everyone in front of and behind the camera clearly assumes that the baton is about to be euphorically passed on to Hillary Clinton. This feels like a feature-length season finale to The West Wing.

The title reminded me a little of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy – yet that sense of an ending is very different. The mood here is not complacency exactly, but with hindsight we can see a kind of innocence, or even naivety, as everyone earnestly goes about their legacy-defining projects as the hour of Hillary’s coronation draws near. When we witness Donald Trump’s victory in the final 10 minutes, the film itself seems to go into shock, to become numb, like the people whose unassailable political superiority it had been quietly celebrating. Barker is unable to look back and reassess the story he has been telling. Things change, and there’s incidentally an uncomfortable moment at the beginning when Aung San Suu Kyi is glimpsed placidly waving: a globally revered Good Thing.

Watched now, after 12 months of the current incumbent, this film has its fascinations and frustrations. How extraordinarily restrained, professional and high-minded these people are. Obama is as dignified and stylish as ever, but it is a flaw that he is in the film so little, and so unrevealingly. The emphasis is a little more on Secretary of State John Kerry, on the bullish young national security adviser Ben Rhodes (who annoyed the press by calling them ignorant on foreign policy) and most of all on the US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, the remarkable Irish-born former journalist and policy analyst who became a US citizen and who appears here to have become a major White House player.

The Final Year uneasily concedes the possibility that Obama was on the back foot on Syria and may have been outsmarted by Putin: a constant, shrill complaint from the right. And yet how empty that criticism sounds now that Trump’s Russian links have been revealed. Rhodes thoughtfully says that the pendulum will swing back. But when?