- The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara may be the worst documentary I have ever seen. I say this with some hesitation, given director Errol Morris' towering reputation, but honestly I have never seen a filmmaker stand in the way of their subject as obstructively as Morris does in this film. Nominally, any film about Robert McNamara should make for an engaging experience. I mean, for chrissakes, the man was the president of Ford Motor Company before serving as defense secretary for Kennedy and Johnson during both the Bay of Pigs invasion and most of the Vietnam War. Any stories McNamara tells should be interesting, but this film does everything it can to render them completely insipid.
- Let's start with some of the eleven lessons themselves. Lesson #4: Maximize efficiency. Lesson #6: Get the data. Lesson #10: Never say never. Lesson #11: You can't change human nature. Did somebody accidentally display the DVD track titles, or are these supposed to be profound statements? In McNamara's defense, he seems more intelligent and nuanced than these trite platitudes would suggest, but organizing the movie around such banal pronouncements isn't a way to tell an interesting story. I would have added Lesson #12: Don't talk down to your audience.
- More obnoxious than the film's organizational principles is its visual style. From toppling dominoes to Japanese people walking around on the street, the film never hesitates to introduce gimmicky graphics that distract from its actual intellectual content. Sometimes this has the effect of slowing the film down to a snail's pace as we are forced to endure some extended montage before getting back to McNamara's interview. In other instances, the film employs millisecond shot lengths seemingly designed to guarantee that the audience has no opportunity to read or process the numbers and maps it is being shown. Although this would be an efficient way of displaying information if one changed human nature, it actually helped to ensure that I never got the data. Shouldn't a film obey its own lessons?
- About McNamara himself: when allowed to speak, the man is interesting. If you can ignore the constant mid-sentence cuts intended to shield the audience from the impression of natural conversation, there are some interesting details here. Clearly, he blames Curtis LeMay for firebombing Japan and Lyndon Johnson for escalating in Vietnam, but he does so in the most respectful and conciliatory manner possible. He admits to mistakes, but is never precise about what they were. He suggests that governments should be honest with their citizens, but his recorded phone calls prove that he was striving to keep public communication to a minimum. He clearly thinks he was as smart as the newspaper articles claimed, even if he never quite accedes to their accusations of arrogance. Now he's trying to tell us what he learned from his life, but the movie doesn't let him do so effectively. Cut to a shot of him driving a car through DC refusing to elaborate any further. Sheesh, next time I'll just read the damn book.
- Soundtrack by Philip Glass, also overrated.
