So, I saw the feature documentary film The Fog of War last night. It was released almost exactly three years ago, but I'm going to bet that most of you haven't seen it, so I'm going to go ahead and offer up my thoughts anyway. Here we go.
At first, Robert McNamara would seem to make a strange subject for an Errol Morris documentary. Morris has made a career out of his odd choice of subject matters, but these are usually limited to offbeat types like pet cemetery managers (Gates of Heaven, one of my favorite movies), backwoods small town residents who hunt turkeys (Vernon, Florida), mole rat specialists, robot inventors, lion tamers, shrub sculptors (all four in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), and even once a death row inmate (The Thin Blue Line, no relation to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line). But McNamara brings with him a much heavier story, considered by many to be the "architect" of the Vietnam War, the supervisor of one of the worst military fiascoes in American history, responsible for the deaths of thousands.
As it turns out, McNamara makes a very prototypical Morris subject: a conflicted man often paralyzed by his own complexity, a man clearly torn apart by his culpability, but not willing to admit that in as many words.
Long story short, The Fog of War reveals McNamara to be, at 85 years old, hardly the arrogant and bullheaded fiend his critics claim him to be (and to be honest, that's how I saw him going into the movie). He's surprisingly introspective, ruminating freely on his thoughts at being close at hand (and partially responsible) for the US firebombing of Tokyo in World War II that killed 100,000, and for being second in command only to the president (first Kennedy, then Johnson) during a conflict that saw 25,000 US soldiers killed during his command, and countless more Vietnamese. He refuses to take direct responsibility for anything, but openly admits that he was in charge when Agent Orange was introduced, among many other things.
McNamara walks an odd tightrope throughout the film, coming tantalizingly close to an apology for the things he did while also never really accepting full responsibility for them. Asked by Morris who was responsible for the Vietnam War, he responds without a moment of hesitation, "The President" (that being Lyndon Johnson in this case).
The parallels to today's situation in Iraq are so obvious that I almost feel like I'm wasting time by bringing it up at all, but I would be very interested as to what George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld would say about The Fog of War, and McNamara's candidness about the mistakes he made in Vietnam that were repeated almost exactly by Rumsfeld, who only recently finally resigned from the same office that McNamara once held.
Morris, as usual, does an excellent job of bringing out the most fascinating side of his interview subject, although his visual metaphors can be laughably literal (the transition from WWII to Vietnam, for example, is made by showing dominoes toppling on a large map of Europe and Asia on a line from Moscow to Hanoi). But is anybody really counting that against him in a documentary? Consider that The Fog of War won the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award in 2004, an award which had been won the previous year by Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. I'll take Morris' unobtrusive thoughtfulness over Moore's ham-fisted propaganda any day of the week.
And finally, the music: Philip Glass, one of my favorite composers, provided a score for the film, and did a fair job of it. Glass often seems a stone's throw away from self-parody, and that's certainly the case here, as he reprises some of his earlier works from the 1980s almost verbatim, and then actually includes several of his earlier works from the 1980s. Oh well. Glass has done enough amazing work that I'm ok with letting him slide with a mediocre film soundtrack, since most of the movie consists of McNamara talking to a camera anyway.
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