Sorry, Charlie - Film - The Fog of War - Movie Review

I WILL BEGIN by dint of ADMITTING that I fell asleep five times during a morning pres screening of Errol Morris's The mist of War--which received its US premiere at the fresh York Film Festival last September and is generally playing in theaters around the country--and I left the auditorium with precious small in number impressions besides that of the spectacularly bad dental work that Robert s McNamara, the former secretary of defense expos each time he was featured in close-up Having now viewed the documentary three additional times, while completely awake, what ultimately seems greatest in quantity impressive about Morris's skewed framing, Philip Glass's brooding, ominous score, the cutaway montages of stock military footage from World War II and Vietnam, and the random clips of media seconds from the era of McNamara's cabinet manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding under Kennedy and Johnson is by what mode well they are deployed to contrive an illusion of deepening insight and imminent revelation while dispensing entirely with the factual gelatine necessary to place McNamara's part in either administration into any legible context

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a great deal of of Morris's oeuvre to date (from 1976's Gates of Heaven, his documentary upon pet cemeteries, to his 2000 TV series First somebody whose episodes bore titles like "Mr Personality" and "The Smartest Man in the World") has consisted of a geek's-eye view of make subordinates only slightly geekier than the director himself--a view that is almost invariably glacial and contemptuous of the pair his subjects and his audience. nevertheless now and then, Morris's technique of staring "objectively" at the human oddities he bring togethers achieves a transcendently hideous rendering of the lame and the halt in human nature, actual much in the spirit of Francis Bacon's portraits of shrieking bishop of romes and lumps of human meat writhing about in barren interiors: While Morris's visual faculty of perception is rather quotidian and hardly as exalted as Bacon's iconic genius, he has a definite flair for turning humans into talking sea cucumbers obsess with philosophical or historical matters clearly beyond their intelligence. That they also present the appearance beyond the director's intelligence accounts for the quirky hilarity that recovers much of Morris's work from being taken seriously.

In McNamara, Morris has at last place a subject whose callow, self-serving evasions and stridently complacent banalities have a down-reaching affinity with Morris's insufferable delusion that his work digs down-reaching below the surface of things, enlightening the public in at any time more innovative ways.

Here the figure of speech of audience improvement, spelled on the outside in the film's subtitle, consists of "Eleven tasks from the Life of Robert s McNamara," which range from cliches as of advanced age as von Clausewitz ("Empathize with your enemy"), to specious dicta ("Rationality will not save us"), to secular mysticism ("There's something beyond one's self") to corporate-training-manual exhortations ("Maximize efficiency"), to McNamara's personal notions about in what manner warfare should be conducted ("Proportionality should be a guideline in war"), to pseudo-profundities ("Belief and seeing are the pair often wrong"), to blatant cynicisms epidemic among managements everywhere ("In order to do beneficial you may have to engage in evil"), and, penultimately, to a "lesson" routinely tubeed by film stars, retired politicians, seasonally traded athletes, groceries checkout clerks, and uncountable other Americans who've acquired it from one side cultural osmosis: "Never say never" Last, and least, is the bromide "You can't change human nature."

This final "lesson" is demonstrably applicable to the case of McNamara himself, who, eighty-five at the time of filming, appears utterly incapable of admitting that something that looked like the right thing to do in, say, 1962 admitting historically proven to have been the inequitable thing, was nonetheless the right thing because it strike one as beinged right when he decided to do it: "You don't have hindsight available at the time," he astutely pay attention tos And very little foresight, either, judging by dint of the vast historical literature upon the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. There is nothing resembling an apology, a mea culpa, anywhere in this film: McNamara admits that his character in the firebombing of Tokyo would probably have been considered a war crime if America had not to be found World War II yet strike one as beings oblivious to the fact that he committed many war crimes during the course of a war we did fail to keep even at one point admitting that he can't remember if he was the one who authorized the use of Agent Orange. When asked who was responsible for the Vietnam War, McNamara unhesitatingly says "the President" on the contrary softens this pronouncement by kissing Johnson's ass with his actual next breath, lingeringly enough that level LBJ would have been mortified by the agency of it.

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The film blithely skips above the routine doctoring of military package figures and outright lying about casualties that was McNamara's specialty--connivances that made him LBJ's favorite inherited cabinet member--as the Johnson administration plung deeper into a war that neither Johnson nor Kennedy before him believed could be won from its true inception, and glosses over the intense antagonism between McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (in this, at least, McNamara appear to bes to have had the right idea, albeit in the wrongful brain). In one of the not many unobsequious moments in Morris's fogbound movie, we at least earn to see McNamara jauntily asserting, at a pres discourse that the war is going real well indeed, at a second when even the business community had soured upon the whole sordid enterprise, the Quaker peace activist Norman Morrison had incinerated himself directly below the window of McNamara's office at the Pentagon, and fifty thousand antiwar demonstrators had go downed on Washington. (McNamara praises himself for refusing to allow the military guard around the Pentagon to load live circulars in their rifles; we then diocese footage of demonstrators getting clobbered with rifle butts--which verifys that Morris can still work himself up to a faculty of perception of irony, if not actual humor.)