Does "Thirteen Days" get it right?

"Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale," Shakespeare wrote. Dramatists (not unlike historians and journalists) package events as a story, with an often arbitrary beginning, middle and end, omitting countless circumstances and compressing or trimming others for the telling. Even a multimillion-dollar razzle-dazzle film with wraparound sound, on a giant screen, with extraordinary special effects designed to hold the attention of even the most attention-deficient, testosterone-laden lads and thrill-seeking, love-lost ladies, will fail without a solid story. "Titanic" is not the highest-grossing film ever made because of its spectacular special effects; rather, it succeeds because of its gripping story, which is enhanced by re-creating reality with special effects.

Theatrical stories are uniquely crafted narratives, an art form. They typically deal with ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, situations that the audience can empathize (but not always sympathize) with; the characters are archetypes, not stereotypes. Film stories are built scene by scene, and those that are well-crafted hold our attention in every scene through the device that makes all drama work: human conflict. We are attracted to conflict like a moth to light -- we can't turn away, and we want to know how the conflict is resolved, or not resolved.

Robert McKee, a former Fulbright scholar who has spent much of his life studying and teaching the craft of storytelling (and instructing many of Hollywood's producers, writers, directors and actors), observes, "Story is a metaphor for life. It takes us beyond the factual to the essential." He adds, "What happened is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens."

McKee reminds his cinema students that theatrical truth wears many faces, and offers a wonderful example about the many stories portraying Joan of Arc. The historical facts are clear: Joan was a young French peasant girl who believed she had been divinely inspired to raise an army to defeat the English; her effort failed, and she was captured, tried and burned at the stake. Yet dramatists of stage, page and screen, all relying on the same underlying facts, portray a variety of Joans: French dramatist Jean Anouilh a spiritual Joan, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw a witty Joan, German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht a political Joan, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer a suffering Joan, Shakespeare (with a distinctly British view) a lunatic Joan and Hollywood filmmakers a romantic warrior Joan.

Similarly, "Thirteen Days" could have portrayed the Cuban missile crisis in many ways. While it does not tell the story that Hersh might have told, or indeed that many others might have told, it is a generally accurate portrait of the events, a compelling story well told and thoroughly enjoyable theater. I tip my hat in admiration and appreciation of the entire cast and crew (including Costner, for putting his box-office muscle into the project), screenwriter David Self and director Roger Donaldson, and producers Armyan Berstein and Peter Almond.

And I urge anyone interested in the underlying historical facts of the Cuban missile crisis to visit the interactive, multilayered Web site for the film. No reality-based film that I am aware of has more effectively employed the complementary medium of the Internet. Like the film, the Web site is informative and entertaining. And the war-simulation sequence shows how close we really came.

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