Morris’s Oscar-winning portrait of Robert S. McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary, who offers his thoughts on modern warfare, is both compelling and provocative. The director made great use of his ‘interrotron’ – a device that allows the subject to see their interviewer on a screen in front of the camera, giving the impression that they are engaging with the audience directly. The film’s score underpins the gravity of the issues under discussion, but also adds a lyricism that elevates the artistry of the whole project.
bfi.org.uk
A contemporary review
Aged 85, Robert S. McNamara describes his life’s work to off-camera interviewer Errol Morris, structured in the form of sequential ‘lessons’. After an outstanding education, McNamara joined the US Air Corps and, alongside General Curtis LeMay, oversaw the fire-bombing of Japanese cities in 1945, causing him to reflect upon ‘how much evil must we do in order to do good’. After the war he became CEO of the Ford Motor Company, before being head-hunted by President Kennedy as Secretary of Defence. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 taught him that ‘the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations’.
After Kennedy’s assassination, he served Lyndon Johnson as the US first engaged in and then escalated the war in Vietnam. As the war became a political quagmire and public support waned, McNamara concluded it was a lost cause, and left the Cabinet in February 1968. He was subsequently instructed by meetings with Castro (who did have missiles in 1962) and a North Vietnamese general (who denied any attack on the US fleet in the Tonkin Gulf). Pressed by Morris to assess his own personal responsibility for failed policies, he concludes ‘I am not going to say any more than I have’.
Playwright David Rabe once protested the labelling of his magnificent Vietnam Plays as ‘anti-war’, arguing that plays about unruly youth, for instance, were not considered ‘anti-youth’; and that war, like youth, was ‘permanently a part of the eternal human pageant’. A medical corpsman in Vietnam, Rabe knew of what he spoke, albeit not so comprehensively as Robert McNamara, subject of Errol Morris’ latest investigation. ‘I’m not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war,’ McNamara tells Morris. ‘We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon.’
Robert S. McNamara has aged quite well, and lived long enough to revisit the byways of his awful career for a new generation perhaps less familiar with the name and face of the notorious cerebrate who prosecuted the Vietnam War under Kennedy and Johnson. Morris gives McNamara a spare, respectful platform here, their lengthy interviews augmented by vivid and unfamiliar archive footage, the airing of declassified White House tapes, and one of those thrumming Philip Glass scores suggestive of contemporary opera.
Morris tries to generate a probing intimacy with his subject, and McNamara is clearly on a mission to explain, if not to fully disclose. He implies that he came to see the Vietnam War as a hopeless endeavour before his Pentagon peers, but still insists upon the gravity of the Cold War stakes of the age (which Morris illustrates, perhaps inevitably, with tumbling lines of dominoes). McNamara’s toughest call on himself concerns the US fire-bombing of Japanese cities and civilians in 1945, decisive actions which, he offers, would be construed as war crimes had the war against fascism foundered. But then, every school-leaver knows that victors write history; and McNamara can offset his seeming remorse with the untrammelled bloodthirst of his accomplice General Curtis LeMay, who went on to lobby for pre-emptive nuclear war against Cuba.
Morris’ film is perhaps sharpest in showing how a wonk such as McNamara could be propelled to the zenith of the Pentagon, and how his intellect crashed, as any body’s would, in the face of a mission so wrong-headed as Vietnam. The McNamara of the 21st century shows an interest in counterfactual history that befits both a scholar and a man with compendious causes for regret. Naturally, he suggests that had Kennedy lived, the US would have smartly extricated itself from South East Asia, a delusion that was equally risible when essayed by Oliver Stone in JFK.
The force of recall does not leave McNamara unmoved: his eyes moisten before the camera on several occasions. Inevitably there are tears for Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and for the strains upon his wife Marge and three children. (One can imagine how the kids felt when a war protestor immolated himself below McNamara’s office window in 1965.) But then McNamara weeps even in reciting a stave from the hardy conservative mysticism of T.S. Eliot. He is not, one senses, a broken man, but rather someone who believes that tough choices are the unhappy lot of truly substantive individuals.
The Fog of War is handsomely assembled, and will enjoy currency for as long as the United States is embedded in Iraq, since McNamara ventures a critique of US unilateralism which is congruent to the critics of Bush’s war (‘If we can’t persuade nations of comparable values of the merit of our cause, then we’d better re-examine our reasons’). But its lasting impression is of a man who won’t be lured out from his wilderness of mirrors. It’s a diverting lecture on a big theme, but a frustrating experience too.
Richard Kelly, Sight and Sound, April 2004
THE FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. MCNAMARA
Director: Errol Morris
©: Sony Pictures Classics
Production Companies: @radical.media, SenArt Films
In association with: Globe Department Store
Presented by: Sony Pictures Classics
Executive Producers: Jon Kamen, Jack Lechner, Frank Scherma, Robert May, John Sloss
Producers: Michael Williams, Julie Bilson, Errol Morris
Co-producer: Robert Fernandez
Associate Producers: Ann Petrone, Adam Kosberg
Production Supervisor: Dia Sokol
Production Supervisor (Film Crew): Tonya Bertram
Production Supervisor (China): Sarah Gold
Technical Supervisor (Interview Crew): Chris Fadale
Production Co-ordinator (Interview Crew): Karen Corsica
Production Co-ordinators (Film Crew): Dina Marie Piscatelli, Kevin Hayes
Production Accountant: Heidi August
Location Managers (Film Crew): John Cefalu, Dan Kemp, John Latenser V
Post-production Supervisor: Brad Fuller
Archival Research Supervisor: Ann Petrone
Researchers: Jeffrey Crocker, Claire Jones, Jeff Krulik, Jason Kohn, Paul Loram, Andy Rice, Shawn Tabor
Director of Photography (Film Crew): Peter Donahue
Director of Photography (Interview Crew): Robert Chappell
Portrait Photographer (Interview Crew): Elsa Dorfman
Still Photographers (Interview Crew): Claire Folger, Sumaya Agha
Visual Effects Supervisor: Robin Hobart
Graphics Supervisor: Alex Kreuter
3D Animator: Zachary Morong
Animation/Visual Effects: Evan Olson
Editors: Karen Schmeer, Doug Abel, Chyld King
Associate Editors: Steven Hathaway, Daniel Mooney
Editorial Consultant: Charles Silver
Production Design: Ted Bafaloukos, Steve Hardy
Art Director (Interview Crew): Steve McNulty
Prop Master (Film Crew): Gary Shartsis
Wardrobe (Film Crew): Julie Vogel, Eddie Marquez
Make-up (Interview Crew): Maria Scali
Make-up (Film Crew): Donyale McRae
D.I. [Digital Intermediate] Titling: Benjamin Murray
Digital Intermediate: Post Works
Original Music: Philip Glass
Additional Music: John Kusiak
Executive Music Producer: Jim Keller
Musical Producer: Kurt Munkacsi
Associate Music Producer: Cat Celebrezze
[Music] Recording Engineer: Héctor Castillo
Additional [Music] Engineering: Dan Bora
Sound Designer: Tom Paul
Production Sound Mixer (Interview Crew): Steve Bores
Re-recording Mixer: Lee Dichter
Recordists: Harry Higgins, Terry Laudermilch
Supervising Sound Editor: Coll Anderson
Dialogue Editor: Brian Bowles
Sound Effects Editor: Sean Garnhart
Military Consultant: Shawn Tabor
Technicolor Co-ordinator: Joe Violante
Special Advisers: Julia Sheehan, Janet Lang, James Blight
Very Special Thanks: Caroline Kaplan, Jonathan Sehring
In Memory of: Harvey Goldberg, George L. Mosse
With
Robert S. McNamara (interviewee)
Errol Morris (interviewer voice)
USA 2002
107 mins
35mm
SHIFTING LAYERS: THE FILM SCORES OF PHILIP GLASS
Koyaanisqatsi
Tue 6 Aug 18:20; Sat 24 Aug 12:50; Mon 26 Aug 11:30 BFI IMAX
Powaqqatsi
Wed 7 Aug 20:40; Sat 24 Aug 15:20
Naqoyqatsi
Thu 8 Aug 18:20; Sat 24 Aug 18:00
The Truman Show
Thu 8 Aug 20:30; Sat 10 Aug 18:30
The Illusionist
Fri 9 Aug 20:30; Thu 29 Aug 18:10
UK Premiere: A Place Called Music + Q&A with director Enrique M. Rizo
Sun 11 Aug 15:15
The Hours
Sun 11 Aug 18:00; Mon 26 Aug 17:30
The Philip Glass Effect
Wed 14 Aug 18:10
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Wed 14 Aug 20:20
Dracula (Philip Glass Special Edition)
Thu 15 Aug 18:10
Visitors + UK Premiere: Once Within a Time
Thu 15 Aug 20:10; Tue 27 Aug 17:50
Notes on a Scandal
Fri 16 Aug 18:30; Thu 29 Aug 20:40
Jane
Sat 17 Aug 20:40; Sat 31 Aug 15:10
Kundun
Sun 18 Aug 18:00
The Thin Blue Line
Mon 19 Aug 18:10
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Mon 19 Aug 20:30; Mon 26 Aug 20:10
Candyman
Fri 23 Aug 18:20
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent
Fri 23 Aug 20:40
With thanks to
Richard Guerin, Director of Orange Mountain Music
SIGHT AND SOUND
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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