From 'Fog of War' emerges a clearer vision of Vietnam
`THE FOG OF WAR' ****
(this movie is on my to do list, this is an xlnt review, and the lessons are still valid today...)
By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic
January 23, 2004
The history of humanity teaches us at least two sad facts about war. One is that it brings tragedy. Another is it will be endlessly repeated.
These are among the disturbing truths we learn again in "The Fog of War," Errol Morris' fine, probing, haunting new documentary-interview with Kennedy-Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. It's a movie--arranged by Morris in 11 "lessons"--that creates an essential portrait of two great wars and the men who made the decisions, with, at its center, an American dreamer stumbling into a national nightmare.
The title "The Fog of War," recalled by McNamara from a Chinese saying, refers to the clouding of the mind that occurs in battle. But as McNamara opens up to the inquisitive Morris--an ex-University of Wisconsin history student who has become one of the most admired and original documentarians of our time--the opposite happens. The fog begins to disperse. We get a priceless inside look at how wars are fought, why and how military decisions are made and who makes them. The source here: a man of legendary energy and intellect who participated in World War II as a soldier, statistician and planner, and in Vietnam as America's minister of war.
McNamara's words and Morris' images at first create a bio of a classic American "can-do" guy, rising from humble origins in the Depression to business success and political power. We see that California kid using his brains and drive to win success as soldier/statistician (in the World War II Air Force, where his commanding officer was later famous Vietnam hawk Curtis LeMay) and later as the president of the Ford Motor Co. (the name of the automaker as published has been corrected here and in a subsequent reference in this text).
Though 85 when Morris interviewed him for the 20 hours edited into this 96-minute film, he proves just as much the domineering intellect now that he was when JFK plucked him from Ford to be defense secretary. The ex "whiz kid" seems to remember everything and, more importantly, to question everything as well. Though he never "apologizes" for being a principal architect of the Vietnam War, explaining that all his decisions were made "to serve my president," he is not locked stubbornly into rationales or defenses. He wants earnestly to understand the past--and profit from it.
As McNamara talks, Morris, with his quiet cinematic skill, mordant wit, wealth of fascinating archive footage and grim-toned Phillip Glass score, gives us a film both psychologically acute and historically revealing, dealing with deep moral and ethical concerns.
It's a deeply disquieting view. During the Cuban missile crisis, McNamara recalls midway though "Fog," we were inches away from an action--urged by LeMay, a commander whose bravery McNamara admired (and who was also allegedly the model for George C. Scott's madly gung ho Buck Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove"). That action would have ultimately caused widespread destruction and death on both sides; only one cogent argument from an unsung hero, ex-U.S. Ambassador to Russia Tommy Thompson, stemmed the tide. Thompson (no relation to the current Bush cabinet member), with his first-hand knowledge of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and those around him, explained to JFK the importance of a face-saving gesture, persuading Kennedy to accept an early moderate-toned communique from Moscow and ignore a later, more bellicose one.
Decades later, McNamara hears from Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that if JFK had attacked Cuba, under the impression that Soviet warheads were not on the island along with the Russian missiles (in fact they were), nuclear war would have commenced--with much of the U.S. East Coast struck, along with all of Cuba.
This is one of the most important of the movie's 11 lessons: Empathize with your enemy. It is an axiom, McNamara concludes, that was damagingly ignored in the later Vietnam conflict, where Johnson and his advisors failed to understand that the North Vietnamese saw the war as capstone to a centuries' long war of liberation and not part of the "domino theory" that dominated American military thinking.
Best known for his sardonic and ingenious films on American eccentrics and outsiders ("Gates of Heaven," "The Thin Blue Line"), Morris here takes us to the center of the American psyche and power circles. And there he finds just as much irony, confusion, angst and potential disaster.
Clearly, Morris intends us to draw the obvious parallels between the nation's Vietnam War policies then and its Iraq war policies now--and that's not hard to do. But his own views, as an ex-radical college war protester of the '60s and '70s now confronting the man on the other side, never become intrusive. McNamara on camera is allowed to state his own case and he remains ever the loyal servant of his presidents, however devastating his ethical arguments and intense moral questioning finally become.
"The Fog of War," a brilliant film on an important subject, may change your view of McNamara--and perhaps of international politics and war. It is a profound examination of the troubling proposition that good or well-meaning people can help create horrible and evil events--and be swept along in the turmoil they unleash. As "Fog" shows, few lessons are more historically important, few more tragically ignored.
`The Fog of War'
(star)(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Errol Morris; photographed by Peter Donahue, Robert Chappell; edited by Karen Schmeer, Doug Abel, Chyld King; production designed by Ted Bafaloukos, Steve Hardy; music by Philip Glass; produced by Morris, Michael Williams, Julie Ahlberg. With Robert McNamara. Interviewer: Morris. A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Senart Films and @Radical.Media production; opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:46. MPAA rating: PG-13.
chicagotribune.com
____________________________
Sun Times review of the same movie>> Also xlnt>
BY ROGER EBERT
How strange the fate that brought together Robert McNamara and Errol Morris to make "The Fog of War." McNamara, considered the architect of the Vietnam War, an Establishment figure who came to Washington after heading the Ford Motor Co. and left to become the president of the World Bank. And Morris, the brilliant and eccentric documentarian who has chronicled pet cemeteries, Death Row, lion tamers, robots, naked mole rats, a designer of electric chairs, people who cut off their legs for the insurance money and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.
McNamara agreed to talk with Morris for an hour or so, supposedly for a TV special. He eventually spent 20 hours peering into Morris' "Interrotron," a video device that allows Morris and his subjects to look into each other's eyes while also looking directly into the camera lens. Whether this invention results in better interviews is impossible to say, but it does have the uncanny result that the person on the screen never breaks eye contact with the audience.
McNamara was 85 when the interviews were conducted -- a fit and alert 85, still skiing the slopes at Aspen. Guided sometimes by Morris, sometimes taking the lead, he talks introspectively about his life, his thoughts about Vietnam, and, taking Morris where he would never have thought to go, of his role in planning the firebombing of Japan, including a raid on Tokyo that claimed 100,000 lives. He speaks concisely and forcibly, rarely searching for a word, and he is not reciting boilerplate and old sound bites; there is the uncanny sensation that he is thinking as he speaks.
His thoughts are organized as "11 Lessons From the Life of Robert McNamara," as extrapolated by Morris, and one wonders how the current planners of the war in Iraq would respond to lessons No. 1 and 2 ("Empathize with your enemy" and "Rationality will not save us"), or for that matter No. 6 ("Get the data"), No. 7 ("Belief and seeing are both often wrong") and No. 8 ("Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning"). I cannot imagine the circumstances under which Donald Rumsfeld, the current Secretary of Defense, would not want to see this film about his predecessor, having recycled and even improved upon McNamara's mistakes.
McNamara recalls the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came to the brink of nuclear war (he holds up two fingers, almost touching, to show how close -- "this close"). He recalls a meeting, years later, with Fidel Castro, who told him he was prepared to accept the destruction of Cuba if that's what the war would mean. He recalls two telegrams to Kennedy from Khrushchev, one more conciliatory, one perhaps dictated by Kremlin hard-liners, and says that JFK decided to answer the first and ignore the second. (Not quite true, as Fred Kaplan documents in an article at Slate.com.) The movie makes it clear that no one was thinking very clearly, and that the world avoided war as much by luck as by wisdom.
And then he remembers the years of the Vietnam War, inherited from JFK and greatly expanded by Lyndon Johnson. He began to realize the war could never be won, he says, and wrote a memo to the president to that effect. The result was that he resigned as defense secretary. (He had dinner with Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and told her "Kay, I don't know if I resigned or was fired." "Oh, Bob," she told him, "of course you were fired.") He didn't resign as a matter of principle, as a British cabinet minister might; it is worth remembering that a few months later Johnson, saying he would not stand for reelection, also effectively resigned.
McNamara begins by remembering how, at the age of 2, he witnessed a victory parade after World War I, and engages in painful soul-searching about his role in World War II. He was a key aide to Gen. Curtis LeMay, the hard-nosed warrior whose strategy for war was simplicity itself: Kill them until they give up. Together, they planned the bombing raids before the atomic bomb ended the war, and Morris supplies a chart showing the American cities equivalent in size to the ones they targeted. After the war, he says, in one of the film's most astonishing moments, LeMay observed to him that if America had lost, they would have been tried as war criminals. Thinking of the 100,000 burned alive in Tokyo, McNamara finds lesson No. 5: "Proportionality should be a guideline in war." In other words, I suppose, kill enough of the enemy but don't go overboard. Lesson No. 9: "In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil."
McNamara is both forthright and elusive. He talks about a Quaker who burned himself to death below the windows of his office in the Pentagon and finds his sacrifice somehow in the same spirit as his own thinking -- but it is true he could have done more to try to end the war, and did not, and will not say why he did not, although now he clearly wishes he had.
He will also not say he is sorry, even though Morris prompts him; maybe he's too proud, but I get the feeling it's more a case of not wanting to make a useless gesture that could seem hypocritical. His final words in the film make it clear there are some places he is simply not prepared to go.
Although McNamara is photographed through the Interrotron, the movie is far from offering only a talking head. Morris is uncanny in his ability to bring life to the abstract, and here he uses graphics, charts, moving titles and visual effects in counterpoint to what McNamara is saying. There's also a lot of historical footage, including some shots of Curtis LeMay with his cigar clenched between his teeth -- images that describe whatever McNamara neglected to say about him. There are tape recordings of Oval Office discussions involving McNamara, Kennedy and Johnson. And archival footage of McNamara's years at Ford (he is proud of introducing seat belts). Underneath all of them, uneasily urging the movie along, is the Philip Glass' score, which sounds -- what? Mournful, urgent, melancholy, driven?
The effect of "The Fog of War" is to impress upon us the frailty and uncertainty of our leaders. They are sometimes so certain of actions that do not deserve such certitude. The farce of the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction is no less complete than the confusion in the Kennedy White House over whether there were really nuclear warheads in Cuba.
Some commentators on the film, notably Kaplan in his informative Slate essay, question McNamara's facts. What cannot be questioned is his ability to question them himself. At 85, he knows what he knows, and what he does not know, and what cannot be known. Lesson No. 11: "You can't change human nature."
suntimes.com |
