A Personal Fog of War

By Geoffrey Dunn, Metro Silicon Valley. Posted January 26, 2004.

For the past quarter century, Errol Morris has been one of America's most intriguing, innovative and, well, quite frankly, quirky documentary filmmakers. He is to nonfiction cinema what David Lynch is to fiction film and Diane Arbus is to documentary photography. With his offbeat character studies, unconventional camera angles and haunting musical scores by Philip Glass, Morris has forged one of the more unique and irreverent voices in American cinema, documentary or otherwise.

His collected oeuvre -- beginning with his iconoclastic look at pet cemeteries, "Gates of Heaven" (1978), to his spellbinding murder thriller, "The Thin Blue Line" (1988), and his unforgettable "Mr. Death" (1999), a chilling profile of a gas chamber engineer and Holocaust denier -- has forced Americans to plunge beneath the veneer of postmodern consumerism and confront their internal demons.

While 'The Thin Blue" Line directly resulted in the overturning of a first-degree murder conviction and, in and of itself, became a cultural cause célèbre, Morris' new film, "The Fog of War," takes the filmmaker into decidedly new and, what is for him, uncharted territory -- a subject as large as the history of human conflict in the 20th century and the life of one of the era's most controversial and reviled figures, Robert McNamara.

In his previous works, Morris had the luxury of introducing his audiences to stories and subjects mostly unknown to them, and as such, the films were marvelously revelatory and widely celebrated.

For those of us in our mid-40s and older, however, Robert McNamara needs no introduction. His image is indelibly etched in our collective consciousness.

As the secretary of defense under both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, McNamara was a larger-than-life figure, one of the so-called "best and the brightest" of the New Frontier. With his dark, slicked-back hair and wire-rim glasses, McNamara was one of the most recognizable figures on the nightly news for virtually all of the tumultuous '60s.

The antiwar movement in the United States, in which Morris says he participated as a student at the University of Wisconsin, thoroughly despised McNamara, his public arrogance and condescension, his seemingly emotional indifference to the horrors of Vietnam and the American assault he crafted and oversaw there. He was a numbers cruncher, an accountant with an army, dispassionate, interminably full of himself. Mac the Knife. Ice water seemed to run through his veins.

In his monumental history of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam wrote of McNamara:

He was intelligent, forceful, courageous, decent, everything, in fact, but wise...In the critical middle years [of the Vietnam War] he attached his name and reputation to the possibility and hopes for victory, caught himself more deeply in the tar baby of Vietnam, and limited himself more greatly in his future actions. It is not a particularly happy chapter in his life; he did not serve himself nor the country well; he was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.

That is heavy baggage for any film to carry, and "The Fog of War," subtitled "Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara," is burdened by that inescapable historical gravity.

Although constructed around only a pair of three-hour, sit-down interviews that Morris conducted with McNamara in 2001, the film, which is richly interspersed with haunting archival footage and rare, unheard audio tapes, makes for truly riveting, if troubling, cinema. The 85-year-old McNamara holds an audience in ways that cardboard Hollywood stars one-third his age never could.

"The Fog of War" opens with a classic McNamarism. As the octogenarian is getting seated for another interview session, he checks in with Morris about sound levels, then declares: "Now I remember exactly the sentence I left off on, I remember how it started. You can fix it up some way. I don't want to go back and introduce the sentence, because I know exactly what I wanted to say."

It is the McNamara of old. Didactic, always in control, asserting his intelligence and the perfect command of memory. The changes are subtle. He is clearly in the autumn of his years, slightly frailer, grayed, his hair thinned, a touch vulnerable, certainly more reflective, but he is nonetheless vital, engaged, articulate and, perhaps now, even wise. At least wiser. What's more, he's charming, almost likable.

During the course of the film, McNamara, something of an American Zelig, recounts various episodes of his life from the end of World War I right up until the present, a period that covers the second world war, his years at the Ford Motor Company and the postwar revitalization of the auto industry, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, most centrally, the Vietnam War.

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