(Errol Morris, USA)

By Gabe Klinger

As a critic, I wouldn’t want to offend Errol Morris by saying The Fog of War – which had its North American premiere in Toronto – is a mere recapitulation of Robert McNamara and James Blight’s recently published book and post-9/11 manifesto Wilson’s Ghost.  In the book, McNamara offers five or so chapters on the prevention of war and nuclear catastrophe. In the film, his ideas are presented as “lessons”, narrated by McNamara himself and visualized by Errol Morris. As in his last two films, the only talking heads or “eye witnesses” are the very subjects; The Fog of War captures McNamara’s perspective and no other. The audience might consider the former Secretary of Defense’s proposals, neatly packaged and all-too attractive in their practicality – much in the same format that the Republican convention once criticized McNamara for his solipsistic rationality in presenting solutions that (as McNamara would later admit) ultimately backfired in the U.S.’s involvement with Vietnam.

Borrowing from much of the same logic, Morris’ formally accomplished and highly textured visualization does not save the film from its middling encapsulation of an important piece of American history. It doesn’t lack the subject that would make a great film – or even personal responses from McNamara that are unique (though they are far and few in between) – but it simply doesn’t have the storytelling mechanism that would make the incidents more vivid for the audience.

As a filmmaker, Morris has not expanded his style for quite some time, though he makes small alterations that would lead one to assume he is open to adapting around his subjects. In The Fog of War, Morris’ interviewer’s voice is always on-hand, perhaps more as a form of protection against clinically representing McNamara than as a way of offering a corollary to his methods as a journalist. And it’s not that he’s asking the wrong questions – the questions are right, too right – but that the responses are not recorded any differently in 35mm than they are on the written page. In fact, we also sense that Morris has some pre-conceived idea that McNamara is not going to respond to the questions pertaining to regret for the lives lost in Vietnam and the effect it must have had on his family life. McNamara, who Morris also goes to lengths to show us is a neurotic and perfectionist, seems to think this will open a can of worms which he is not here (in front of Morris’ “Interrotron”) to discuss.

Beyond any worthy or unworthy reasons for making a film, Morris has unsurprisingly created a work of inter-textual repetition and meaninglessness. While at a screening of the film, I could see some audience members furiously reading each lesson to keep up with the film’s stories – but in fact, it is no story, just a text, or a series of pagebreaks with pictures. With this subject matter I automatically thought of Claude Lanzmann, whose masterful films on the Holocaust present deceptively simple narrative and visual strategies that hauntingly recreate – in the simplest, most didactic manner possible – the horrors of war. Which is to say, Lanzmann is a storyteller in ways that Morris never makes possible for the audience by bombarding us with too many images, mood-enhancing effects and music (by Philip Glass, who in his repetition seems to be Morris’ real model). In Lanzmann’s Sobibor (2001), the concentration camp of the title is shown to us in present day still images, from a distance (there are just fences and fields), as the subject of the film – a Jew who was involved in a camp rebellion – tells the story of how they escaped at a do-or-die moment. The film is a great off-screen adventure story that lives on in our minds long after we have seen it, precisely because of its abstraction towards concrete images that would represent the Holocaust. 

As a fan of Morris’ films I was deeply disappointed by The Fog of War, perhaps as a cinephile, but also as someone interested in McNamara as a figure who still manages to elude people. In recent years McNamara has met with officials in Vietnam and in Cuba – and they are the sole moments in the film that suggest an outside and non-military perspective. Morris only feeds McNamara’s fire in his interview questions (by offering appropriate analogies and idioms) and not offering facts that might lead the subject down other pathways. His epilogue – in which he shows the subject driving in his car on a city street – merely borrows from his Fred Leuchter story, Mr. Death (1999), by showing McNamara in a banal environment and unsubtly suggesting to us that, well, “he is human, too”. 

A formula is still a formula, even when applied to a different subject. That’s not to discourage anyone from seeing The Fog of War for bringing McNamara’s lessons into view, but I hope audiences will also see it is an ineffective work of art. Because to disregard that would be the ultimate offense to Errol Morris, one of the most talented filmmakers today.