The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
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Movie Reviews of The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Movie Review: Great
Summary: 5 Stars
Errol Morris came to fame in the late 1980s with his anti-police corruption documentary The Thin Blue Line, and has spent the last couple decades gracing cinephiles with controversial, yet distinguished, films. Last year's Oscar-winning documentary The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara is his best yet, and one of the best films- documentary or not- ever made. It works as a history of the American Military of the last 50 years, and a personal portrait of ex-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, not to mention a philosophical foray into the nature of man and evil.
Yet, delineated as those 3 points are, the film is not dogmatic. McNamara is not portrayed as sympathetic, although sometimes he elicits sympathy- his love and loss felt at the murder of JFK, nor dogmatic, although his actions in the film and out belie that, and led to his being fired by LBJ. Morris takes an effective tack by parsing the film as 11 lessons from McNamara- a very Oriental approach to a life. This is also reflected in the fact that the film rarely answers questions, in the general or specific, rather intent on making its viewers think. Great art usually provokes queries, not smoothes with answers.
Thus the film's essence and its title, which refers to the chaotic complexity, therefore unpredictability, inherent in war.
This film has got to be the shortest 105 minutes in film history for, if the deleted scenes (culled from over 20 hours of interviews) are any clue this film should more properly have been a PBS miniseries. There are probably only a literal dozen or so films that will have relevance and cogence in 1000 years. This is one of them. Watch it. Understand it. Absorb it. If you don't you are likely to be as regretful as its prime subject.
Movie Review: A Green Visor War Criminal Speaks
Summary: 5 Stars
The brilliance of this documentary is Morris's decision to just let McNamara talk, with minimal prompting. He talks about the Vietnam War, the killing of innocent civilians and the death and maiming of our American soldiers as though he were a mathematician or an accountant attempting to solve a complex algebraic formula. He exhibits a chilling detachment of decision from consequence.
The only time he weeps is when he recalls JFK's assassination. He never seems to see a connection between that tragic loss of life and all of the lives he destroyed as Secretary of Defense. No tears for the Vietnamese dead, nor even for US dead and wounded soldiers; no emotion at all. The Vietnamese dead, civilian and military, are merely widgets that have to be destroyed as efficiently as possible. To McNamara, US dead and wounded are merely casualties of war, and would surely be minimized by his cocksure solutions to his algebraic calculations.
It is chilling to watch him reminisce. His resignation from the Johnson administration was not due to feelings of guilt, of which he seems quite incapable, but because his calculations were incorrect. His rationalizations are many and self-serving, but it all still comes down to the math for him.
The only reason he has never been tried as a war criminal is because the US did not have to surrender. Brought before a Nuremberg-style tribunal, one gets the feeling that he would be baffled at even being charged with war crimes. One can envision his incapability of understanding the criminal immorality of his decisions. How can the amoral understand the immoral?
So if he did not end up before a war crimes tribunal, what happened to him? LBJ appointed him to the presidency of the World Bank, to help third world countries like Vietnam try to improve their economies. What a sad and macabre irony was the luxurious fate of a green visor war criminal juxtaposed against the fate of the massive number of "body counts" ("people", in plain English) that he caused.
Of all the Vietnam War policymakers, David Halberstam, author of the "Best and the Brightest", had a special contempt for McNamara. I remember seeing Halberstam on a talk show (Dick Cavett's?) years ago. He proposed the most fitting punishment for McNamara; that he be sentenced to clean the bed pans of wounded Vietnam vets at Walter Reed Hospital for the rest of his life. Many would second a motion to that effect.
Eleven lessons? Not really. The one true lesson of this documentary is to pray that another McNamara, employed by a foreign power at war with the U.S., is not in a position to coldly "calculate" the mathematical odds of killing you, without reference to his or her own humanity.
Movie Review: The Fog Of War Gets Foggier
Summary: 4 Stars
In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, former Kennedy and Johnson Administration Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were not enough and hence he had to go before the cameras in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his interviewer not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.
After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 85, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the illi-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.
Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic The Best and The Brightest.
McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the `lessons' to be drawn from experiences. Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's Freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate `war criminal' to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery.
In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to watch this film if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defend their state.
Movie Review: A war criminal remembers ...
Summary: 1 Stars
The old boy is a war criminal, remember that! The fog was in his head, when he helped to lie the USA into attacking a country that posed no threat to the USA or anyone else. (Sound familiar?)Movie Review: Must see.....
Summary: 5 Stars
Gotta watch McNamara discuss his role in the quagmire we called the Vietnam War. There is a message in this film and it isn't in the interview itself.
Excellent for thinking people.