by Sarah Bashir

Fog of War

Title: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Cast: Robert McNamara (himself)
Director: Errol Morris
Duration: 95mins
Genre: Documentary
Rated: PG-13 for war related images and destruction

Tagline: A film about the former US Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara.

Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary is about facts and fallibility, morality and mortality, recollections and responsibilities. Its subject is Robert S. McNamara; its focus is the 20th century, in particular, aspects of World War II and the Vietnam War, but it has implications for the present. It's an elegant, composed and dense work, but its impact is unsettling and challenging.

McNamara, now 87, played a significant role in American public life over decades, but it's his military role, serving in World War II, and as Secretary for Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, on which The Fog of War concentrates.

Our first glimpse of McNamara is at a press conference in the 1960s, checking with reporters and camera crew on the best placement of a graphic. The next comes from the present, and it's McNamara discussing with Morris what he's going to talk about, and where he left off during the previous interview.

From the first moment, we're presented with the image of a subject who likes to demonstrate that he's aware of and in control of the process he's involved in: it's the first of many glancing insights that Morris gives us about the man and his methods. Later, McNamara tells Morris that one of his rules was: "Never answer the question that has been asked of you. Answer the question you wish you had been asked."

Here, he's presented as a man who held positions of considerable power - a man considered by many to be a warmonger, responsible for escalating American involvement in Vietnam - acknowledging mistakes that he made, or was complicit in, avoiding other matters: someone engaging, sometimes evasively, with history and his part in it.

Morris uses a good deal of archival material, as well as imagery of his own: semi-lyrical shots of bureaucratic objects or recording items, such as punch-cards or tape-players, and symbolic elements such as slow-motion shots of lines of dominoes collapsing or being restored, or slow-motion and speeded-up footage of people in city streets. Philip Glass's music, which Errol Morris has employed before, feels a little predictable and familiar here, a reflex effect.

McNamara is virtually the only speaker. This concentration on the individual has been criticized: it has been said that McNamara has been given too much license or credit, or has not been sufficiently challenged by the filmmaker.

This implies that the interview with McNamara is unmediated, and tends to overlook how Morris contextualizes, juxtaposes and presents his material in ways other than the use of a "talking head" with a different point of view. There are, in fact, other voices, in the sense that there is archival material that underlines, undercuts or comments on what McNamara has to say. This includes taped conversations from the White House archives of phone calls and conferences on matters ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to the best spin to put on the situation in Vietnam.

And silences, evasions and circumlocutions can be revealing. When McNamara says, for example, that he doesn't want to talk about the impact of the Vietnam War on his family, his prohibition is as eloquent as disclosure. When he says, "I'm not sure I authorized Agent Orange", it's impossible to take it at face value. (Of course he authorized the use of it and there are documents to prove it.) There's a fascinating moment when, talking about what he would have said, had he had opportunity to do so, at a ceremony marking his abrupt departure from the Johnson administration, he seems to conflate himself and the president. He and Johnson differed about the conduct of the war - yet, when he's talking about a moment at which they could not have been further apart, he seems to put them together.

The Fog of War doesn't feel exculpatory. The title of the film comes from McNamara, trying to explain the complexity of war: he has borrowed the notion from the military philosopher Von Clausewitz, who wrote: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty."

There are some certainties in this film - in particular, an account of the firebombing of Japan during World War II, and the numbers of cities destroyed and civilians killed. And there are questions, spaces, ellipses and uncertainties, matters that the film leaves the viewer to reflect on - matters about the past, and some issues very specifically about the present, about the current exercise of military and political power.

Trivia for the Fog of War

McNamara originally agreed to an hour-long interview for the Errol Morris PBS series, "First Person" (2000). The interview lasted eight hours and McNamara stayed for a second day of interviewing. He also returned months later, for two more days of interviews. Morris found himself with more than enough material for a feature-length documentary.

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