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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Errol Morris tries to pin down Vietnam War chess-master Robert McNamara, and the results are fascinating -- also troubling, deeply confusing and way too artistically precious.
Dec 19, 2003 | Among the insults directed at Robert S. McNamara during his years as secretary of defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson was that he was less a man than an IBM machine with legs. To the people who came to call the Vietnam conflict "McNamara's war," the man was the epitome of the soulless technocrat. Having come to the Department of Defense straight from the presidency of Ford Motor Company, McNamara was seen as treating war like a corporate enterprise, coldly detached from the human cost of his decisions.
That's why it's ironic that, of all the documentary filmmakers he should agree to sit down and be interviewed by, McNamara should give his consent to Errol Morris, whose work has always been so distanced from the people he puts on screen.
"The Fog of War," which is subtitled "Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara," isn't a hatchet job. Morris isn't out to "get" McNamara. He doesn't trap McNamara in the frame and turn him into a caricature, as he did with the interviewees in pictures like "Gates of Heaven" and "The Thin Blue Line." It might have been pointless to try, since, unlike most of the people who appear in Morris' films, McNamara is used to appearing in the public eye and knows how to handle himself.
The problem with "The Fog of War" isn't one of balance. Barring the convictions people already hold about the former secretary of defense, it would be very hard to come away from the movie feeling it either fully condemns or fully exculpates McNamara. The man himself is both distant and frequently emotional (his voice breaks with tears several times in the course of the film), willing to examine his actions -- not just in Vietnam but during World War II and the Cuban missile crisis -- and stubbornly unwilling to issue a mea culpa (that itself seems both arrogant and humble). The McNamara we see in "The Fog of War" is as much of a pickle as he's always been, seeming both searching and blind, hounded and complacent. He isn't haughty and dismissive in the way that still makes Henry Kissinger so hateful. McNamara's actions may fill us with repugnance, but you'd have to blindly hate the man not to acknowledge his intelligence or his willingness to talk, often bluntly, about his time in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
"The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara"
Directed by Errol Morris
Documentary
If Morris had simply concluded that he was dealing with an enigma, this investigation into McNamara's psyche might have been intellectually satisfying. But, as in his other films, Morris feels much more concerned with aesthetics than with moral or historical questions.
The interviews with McNamara were filmed with the gizmo Morris calls the "Interrotron." Morris places his subject in one room in front of a camera and conducts the questioning from another room. There is a small monitor above the camera lens on which the interviewee sees Morris asking the questions. The filmed result is the subject speaking directly to the camera, and in effect to the audience. Morris has said that he believes this results in true first-person cinema. Well, that's nonsense. The interviewee is still presented as Morris wants him to be seen and through the footage Morris surrounds the interview clips with. The director remains free to take any attitude he wishes toward his subjects. Furthermore, if one of the aims of a good interviewer is to get the subject into a state where he or she is receptive to being questioned, you can't expect that of a person sitting alone in a room talking to a camera.
What seems so strange about Morris' claim that his method results in more natural interviews is how much it fails to take into account. People engaged in the rhythms of an interview reveal themselves in ways that the audience can see (if Morris were dealing with fiction, the supposition of his method would be that a dialogue couldn't possibly be as revealing as a monologue). And Morris doesn't seem much interested in naturalism when he shoots McNamara from skewed camera angles, or layers Philip Glass' noodling (which Morris praises in the production notes for its "existential dread") on the soundtrack.
The strangest thing about Morris' method is that it undervalues his considerable abilities as an interviewer. Frequently in the course of "The Fog of War," we hear Morris' disembodied voice interrogating McNamara, and he's an alert, astute interviewer. That was obvious from a recorded conversation toward the end of Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," where Morris is heard talking with the convict David Harris. Morris brings Harris very close to confessing to the murder that the film's subject, Randall Adams, was charged with. (The critic Ray Sawhill said that he listened to this exchange and thought, "My God, Morris is thinking on his feet while talking to a psychopath.")
There's nothing objectionable about documentarians who try to give their work aesthetic value. The film "Lodz Ghetto," while being a devastating account of life in the Polish ghetto, had a beautiful poetic structure. The trouble comes when the aesthetics come first. Several times during "The Fog of War," Morris includes montages of charts and documents relating to the period McNamara is discussing (the World War II firebombing of Tokyo under Gen. Curtis LeMay; various bombings in Vietnam). The montages increase in speed as they go on. The meaning of these sequences seems to be that the specifics of each mission are beside the point, that they are just facts and figures which can't square with the attendant bloodshed.
Perhaps this is not what Morris intends, but the questions Morris is debating in these sections about the morality and effectiveness of the bombings makes you want more information, not less -- and this reduction of everything to a blur of documents comes across as a too easy point. And there's something cheap about the repeated visual of dominoes falling across a map of Southeast Asia, one Morris returns to again and again and again, long after we've grasped its somewhat paltry import.
