Movie: Fog of War

 

I just finished watching The Fog of War. This documentary on Robert McNamara is an amazing piece of history and a compellingly told story. The film centers around interviews with the former Defense Secretary and allows his sense of narrative to structure the story. Consequently, its linearity is often circumscribed by digressions and asides as great tales often are. Though we often see him telling his story, contemporary footage and images intersperse and superimpose McNamara's words. The film also draws from recorded conversations with presidents that, when set against war footage, are hauntingly disembodied voices of the most powerful mouths of the time. McNamara's tale is not only historically and philosophically interesting, it is moving. The mentally acute octogenarian draws from deep and honest emotional reserves not to tell a story of regrets, but one of emotional significance. At one point, his eyelids red and slightly tear-brimmed, he firmly asks both rhetorically and with sincere interest in an answer, "How much evil must we do in this world to do good?" (Throughout, Glass' score wonderfully undergirds this emotional depth without making it maudlin.) The cogent mixture of the intellectual and emotional import of this film is best illustrated when McNamara quotes TS Eliot in the film's final chapter.

Though I had heard great things about it, I avoided The Fog of War because I never seemed to be in the mood for a documentary, especially about so heavy a subject as the Vietnam War. I was wrong about what I had anticipated the tone of this movie to be. Even with such a serious subject, it is thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking in an entirely stimulating way. No heavy-handedness here. Highly recommended.