The Fog of War

Errol Morris’s The Fog of War is a gripping documentary with one serious limitation: Robert McNamara has considerable control over how his account is heard. The former American defence secretary reflects on Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the difficulty of making decisions with imperfect knowledge. Morris organises his reflections into eleven lessons and gives him room to think. The result deserves close attention, provided we keep asking questions that an intelligent, articulate man can make surprisingly easy to forget.

McNamara addresses the camera directly, and cinematographers Peter Donahue and Robert Chappell make that encounter absorbing without offering much relief from it. There is time to study the speaker as well as to follow what he says. The production design by Steve Hardy and Ted Bafaloukos stays unobtrusive, an appropriate choice in a film whose main attraction is someone explaining himself. We need to concentrate on McNamara, and the interview gives us little excuse to look elsewhere.

Editors Doug Abel, Chyld King and Karen Schmeer give the interview movement through archive footage and recorded conversations. They make the shifts between recollection and historical material easy to follow, without reducing everything to a brisk illustrated lecture. The recordings are particularly valuable because McNamara’s account no longer has the soundtrack entirely to itself. John F. Kennedy and Curtis LeMay appear in that historical material.

Philip Glass’s solemn score helps sustain the unease, though it sometimes supplies more gravity than the material needs. We were unsettled by the recorded conversations. Hearing the people involved speak, alongside McNamara’s recollections, makes their decisions feel less safely remote. The voices do the work here, and the music is most effective when it leaves us room to listen.

The difficult part is deciding how much credit to give McNamara for being willing to talk. Morris lets him explain himself at length, and a lucid account can begin to feel like a sufficient answer even when the question concerns responsibility. We found ourselves listening with respect, then wondering how much of that respect belonged to the intelligence of the speaker rather than the choices he was describing. That discomfort is useful, but the film does not always press hard enough on the distinction.

Anyone looking for a prosecution will find Morris’s patience frustrating. We think his approach is largely justified: giving McNamara time to reason aloud makes it possible to hear where those reasons become evasions. The eleven-lesson structure is less convincing when it implies that such enormous mistakes can be made useful by numbering them. A political documentary need not deliver a sentence, but it does need to leave us equipped to question the person it has asked us to listen to, and this one does.

Allow more than its 107 minutes if watching in company. There is plenty here to disagree about, including how far Morris should have challenged his subject and whether giving him so much time was the right decision. We recommend it to anyone prepared to argue afterwards.