Not Andy Warhol’s Bad. Just three movies that are uninteresting, incomprehensible and simply unwatchable. I couldn’t sit through more than the first 20 minutes or so of the first two, nor more than 10 of the third, and I’ll often watch movies to the end even so if there’s nothing better on. But not with Pieces of April, Barbershop or Starship Troopers 2: Heroes of the Federation; all three are not recommended.
Better was Errol Morris’ acclaimed documentary The Fog of War. This film shows a great deal of creativity without letting the creative distract from its core, a lengthy interview with Robert McNamara structured as a series of lessons learned (and this is the film’s subtitle: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara). For you young’uns out there, this Bay Area native made three significant contributions to modern American society:
- Using methods developed for the military during WWII, during a 15 year stint at Ford Motor Company he brought statistical analysis into the corporate world; while much of his work was used to improve marketing he also brought out a number of safety enhancements such as seatbelts and steering wheels that wouldn’t impale a driver after a crash.
- Drawing criticism from all sides, he left Ford five weeks after being named president to serve as Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ; he was one of the key architects of our initial involvement and huge expansion in Vietnam–this period was of course the meat of the discussion,
- Leaving the Cabinet late in LBJ’s term, he was president of the World Bank for 13 years; there was very little mention of his work at the bank but under his leadership some very substantial development programs were funded, though a number later drew strong criticism as wasteful and riddled with corruption on the receiving end.
Movies are a visual medium, to say the least, and so Morris couldn’t simply point the camera at McNamara and ask his questions. Instead, he weaves period footage with bits filmed for this documentary with shots of the 85 year old man talking. The bits Morris filmed, though, weren’t recreations of big historical moments but instead simpler scenes or illustrations; examples are skulls being dropped down the center of a stairwell, an experiment McNamara had done at Cornell University to understand the impact on a person’s head of a crash and how different packaging could protect us better; close up shots of various reports, prose and numerical, as McNamara explains how or when that information was used; and, shots of an old reel-to-reel tape recorder as conversations between McNamara and one of the presidents he served discussed played. But our subject was also on screen quite a bit, generally in extreme close up.
There were some topics he wouldn’t discuss, and secrets he wouldn’t divulge. One comes to realize that, many years after the fact, McNamara understood that Vietnam might have been avoided if leaders on both sides had been willing to talk to each other. The US was caught up in the Cold War, still very raw after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the decisionmakers saw this little faraway country as a chess piece of suddenly significant consequence in blocking the Soviet Union and China. The Vietnamese wanted only to reunite their country and finally be free of foreign domination, and they viewed the Americans as latest in a long line of would-be colonial masters. I wonder, now, how different the last 40 years would have played out if somehow both sides had understood and corrected the other’s mistaken perceptions.
McNamara stands by his record, doesn’t try to whitewash or evade his part. Now that most of the other participants are dead, he provides a level of insight for Vietnam and his part in WWII that I believe is rarely matched by anyone on the inside of such significant historical controversies.
recommended
BillSaysThis 