Ray Pride

There's something haunting at the center of "The Fog of War," Errol Morris' characteristically imagistic documentary, an interrogation of former Secretary of State Robert McNamara, who was at the right hand of JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. McNamara is on camera for much of the movie, with Morris' questions sometimes shouted from off-screen toward the hard-of-hearing subject. He has many postures: sincerity, self-deception, denial, rationalization. He coolly describes deaths during the Vietnam War and concurs with the opinion of his higher-up during World War II, General Curtis Le May, that if we'd lost that war, they'd both have been prosecuted as war criminals for the firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japan. But when the subject of the Kennedy assassination comes up, McNamara weeps. One of Morris' assistants found a piece of archival footage of JFK at a desk, blank-faced, preparing to make a speech. In the film, it's slowed, restored, pristine, dreamlike, as McNamara cries. It sticks in your mind as forcefully as Philip Glass' doomy drone of a score and the then-85-year-old McNamara's decades of self-construction. An important film, perhaps an aggravating masterpiece. 106m.

"The Fog of War" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2004-01-20)

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