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Errol Morris’ latest and most profound documentary, THE FOG OF WAR (USA/Sony Pictures Classics), is significant enough for the Festival to have made it its centerpiece. FOG begins in typically, Morris-like fashion with a lot of stock footage, in which the young men, in crisp uniforms, firing naval artillery, don’t suffer a scratch. It then proceeds to the bloody quagmire of the Vietnam War with, as our tour guide, the 86-year-old Robert S. McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense, under Kennedy and Johnson — a very genial and brilliant fellow, the model of the Organization Man.
I was under the impression that, some years ago, McNamara had come clean by writing a book, “In Retrospect,” (1995), a mea culpa in which he ashamedly took the blame for the unseemly number of young men he had put in harm’s way. In this documentary, McNamara doesn’t go quite so far, except to say that had he realized, early on, this was a war of independence by North Vietnam, rather than his previous belief that S. Vietnam was a key, toppling domino in SE Asia, about to fall under Communist sway, he would never have kept upping the human ante.
If only he had held to the common sense directive of JFK that he withdraw our 1,600 “advisors” from Vietnam before the conflict in that country escalated, we could have avoided the ensuing slaughter. (We hear President Kennedy’s directive on a tape from the Kennedy Library.) Also on tape, we hear the Texan twang of Lyndon Johnson demanding that McNamara fashion a “trap” that would entail significant bloodshed and death in order to lure the nation into war.
It is ironic that McNamara, who saved so many lives by pioneering seat belts when he was the top gun at the Ford Motor Co., in the ‘50s, should have wasted the life and limbs of so many young Americans, Vietnamese and Cambodians by his continual expansion of the war.
But this slaughter is foreshadowed, as FOG reveals, by McNamara’s role in World War II, in which he helped map the firebombing of Japan’s major cities, alongside his bloodthirsty superior, General Curtis LeMay, as prelude to our dropping the war-ending atomic bombs.
It is amazing that the truly sanguinary McNamara did not accede to LeMay’s subsequent, fanatical program to bomb Cuba to extinction, in 1962, when we discovered Cuba’s Russian-made nuclear missile sites. Morris teaches us that it was not the wisdom of either John or Robert Kennedy to respond to Khrushchev’s solicitous rather than his bellicose telegram on Cuba. It was advisor Llwellen “Tommy” Thompson, who knew Khrushchev well from his years in the Soviet as American ambassador, (they had, on occasion, swapped dachas) who made the choice of telegrams. Thompson was able to tell President Kennedy that Khrushchev had surely written the furious cable when he was drunk, so that the angry wire should be ignored and only the obliging one answered.
Morris is not only one of our most fascinating documentarians, but, with this film, he also becomes a notable historian. McNamara, charming and articulate with his few, remaining side hairs still slicked back, as of yore–is America’s true doctor death. Unlike Morris’ previous, morbid subjects (there was one called “Mr. Death” in 1999), McNamara has slain millions with impunity. You might have thought that Vietnam was old hat by now, until you begin to transpose the smiling countenance of McNamara with the grinning head of Donald Rumsfeld; that is, our current secretary of death and disaster with our previous Secretary of Defense.
Iraq may not be a replica of Vietnam, but THE FOG OF WAR continually reminds us of our similar, foolish, go-it alone, intrusive, tremendously costly foreign policies.
Only at the end, does McNamara undercut the memory of the Vietnam Era, which he earlier termed “his most vital days.” To this day he can’t extinguish the memory of a male Quaker, who protested the war by torching himself outside McNamara’s window. This human torch still burns brightly in McNamara’s mind. (Of course the millions slain in SE Asia were anonymous to him.)
When McNamara speaks of the war years as having been “exceptionally happy” for his family, (even though exceptional hatred was spewed on them at every public appearance), you come to appreciate that he may be surreptitiously linking his wife’s premature death to the unbearable stress placed on his clan.
It is dreadful to realize that McNamara, after he cashed in his bloody Defense Department chips, went on to an affluent and prestigious career as head of the World Bank — even though so many young, promising lives had been snuffed by him. Robert S. McNamara was always exceptionally able and likeable, although unusually dangerous when his superiors were out for blood.

21 GRAMS (USA/Focus Features) is Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s English language successor to his sensational predecessor, AMORES PERROS. Both films are connected by a horrific auto accident which joins three, disparate tales to each other. These are all tales of domestic desperation of different types.
Both films are also alike in their complex and deliberately showy editing, although in 21 GRAMS it is infuriatingly hard to tell where we are in each character’s story at any given moment. Both films have screenplays attributed to Guillermo Arriaga. (On the basis of Senor Arriaga’s pidgin English at the Festival Press Conference, I should guess the 21 GRAMS script is the work of an uncredited American translation from Arriaga’s Spanish original.)
On revisiting AMORES PERROS, I became aware that the second and third stories were much weaker than the ferocious opener about two brothers who breed fighting dogs–and who fight like dogs themselves.
In 21 GRAMS (the title, esoterically, refers to the fractional weight loss between life and death, i.e., the soul) all three stories are rather awful, so you need a lot of non-linear editing to create curiosity about them. However, all three tales intersect in that druggy Benicio Del Toro’s
character kills Naomi Watts’ husband and kids by driving under the influence. These rather dreary lives are buoyed by the superlative performances of Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Del Toro. These actors’ performances should obtain for Mr. Inarritu an English-language film more commercial than this one, even though this flick was honored as the closing night selection of the Festival.
Sean Penn’s mathematics professor is a disbelievability. I have difficulty accepting the unlettered Penn as any kind of an intellectual. He does, however, take himself quite seriously, and was ridiculed for visiting Baghdad in his attempt to stave off our misguided incursion.
Penn, characteristically, plays a hot-head, (an overly familiar role for him), who urgently needs a heart transplant. Of course, he gets one from the dead husband of Naomi Watts, killed in the fatal car accident. Penn feels profound guilt about bedding Ms. Watts when he learns that he possesses her former husband’s heart. (I think this might be a literal joke, although that may be heartless of me.) Why would an ex feel guilty about bedding his own wife? The logic of this dumb but pretentious film escapes me, but the transplanted heart of Penn’s predecessor is certainly an old-fashioned Hollywood contrivance.
Then there is the magnificent Benicio Del Toro’s guilt-ridden driver, a born-again Christian, who is fired from the local country club for getting an obvious tattoo on his neck. Del Toro might have won an Oscar for this remarkable performance if he hadn’t just won one for TRAFFIC the year before.
The marvelous Melissa Leo, playing Del Toro’s wife, rejects his lassitude in wanting to get caught. On the night of the crash, she ferociously polishes the incriminating bloody bumper until it gleams. It is a scene that sticks in my memory along with her fervent performance.
Penn’s star-turn won the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival, although I think his vengeful hoodlum in MYSTIC RIVER far eclipsed it.
Although Penn deserved this year’s Best Actor Oscar for MYSTIC RIVER, there were those on the Coast who were fearful that, if he won, he might turn his acceptance speech into a political address. Instead, Michael Moore took the evening’s denouncing-the-President honors.
I always thought Penn was a superb actor, but now he has come into his own. At the Q & A session, following the National Board’s screening of 21 GRAMS, I asked Penn what he thought about A. O. Scott’s New York Times review of him in MYSTIC RIVER, equating his acting with the emotional sway that Clift and Brando held for their generation. I pointed out that the Times had not always been so generous to him. Mr. Penn guffawed, and, after some moments had passed, I realized that his sub-verbal snicker was his reply.

DOGVILLE (Denmark/Sweden/France/Lion’s Gate Films) is the latest “let’s brutalize the sweet, innocent damsel” recapitulation, written, directed and otherwise perpetrated by Lars von Trier, who gave past Festivals, BREAKING THE WAVES and DANCER IN THE DARK. Mr. von Trier is a great filmmaker, according to his apologists, or a truly dreadful one, for detractors like me–except for BREAKING THE WAVES.
Whether it was a shrewd, career move by Nicole Kidman to have played the victim in this film as well as in Robert Benton’s THE HUMAN STAIN, (both intended as prestige works) remains to be seen. Both pictures left nary a trace at the U.S. box office.
DOGVILLE is an insufferably long, three-hour parable of the cruelty and narrow-mindedness of small-town America, conceived by an egotist who has never set foot in the U.S., although he keeps mocking us. In fact, the agoraphobic von Trier rarely travels far from Copenhagen.
DOGVILLE was shot on a European soundstage with Mr. von Triers’ usual hand-held camera and the minimalist lighting effects of a Danish, Dogma Production. In this case, however, the miniature floor plans of the small houses on Dogville’s Main Street are all just stenciled-in blueprint outlines. Rather than achieving Dogma’s usual ultra-realism, the film is, in fact, ultra-theatrical.
There are a lot of top names in the movie working for low wages and the cachet of appearing in a von Trier epic: Harriet Andersson, Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Patricia Clarkson, Ben Gazzara, and Chloe Sevigny. But none is memorable except for the gifted Paul Bettany as Kidman’s lover, turned betrayer, as well as Kidman herself, who gives a performance of astonishing pathos.
J. Hoberman, the Village Voice guru of abstruse dreck, called the film “the most provocative and, most likely, the greatest movie in this year’s festival. [It’s] Lars von Triers’s masterpiece….”. Well, it may not be as ludicrous as those pictures von Trier shot in a metaphoric hospital, which include the 4 1/2 hour, THE KINGDOM, but, as parables of American cruelty go, it has little to do with the economic harshness of the ‘30s. Not that I think we are above reproach, but von Trier’s American evil has only a contrived, fictional patina rather than a factual base — even if it is buttressed by Dorothea Lange’s authentic, Depression-era photos of gaunt, Dust Bowl victims.
Kidman, a real trouper, ultimately gets collared with a large and painful, rusty metal lock and chain, while her handsome lover (Bettany) turns traitor by offering her to all the men in town. After three hours of this somnolent union of “Our Town” and “The Visit,” I was longing for lunch.

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