LATE REVIEW.(The Talk of the Town)('The Fog of War')(Movie Review)

American families plunked down half a billion dollars for movie tickets in the holiday season just past, a nice upturn in an otherwise disappointing year, with Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" beating out "Cold Mountain" and "The Last Samurai" among other contenders at the top of the lists. Yet argument can be made that the persistent screen image that audiences took home with them wasn't Sir Ian McKellen's sonorous Gandalf or Jude Law's tattered Confederate deserter Inman but that of the age-freckled eighty-five-year-old former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara staring out at the camera and into himself while he talks about the hundred and sixty million people who died in wars during his lifetime. McNamara is less the star than the soul of "The Fog of War," a feature-length interview or history lesson or moral travelogue by the documentarian Errol Morris, who previously gave us "The Thin Blue Line" and "Mr. Death." McNamara is rarely offscreen in this film, except for footage that shows younger versions of himself (with his super-clear, rimless eyeglasses and slicked-back hair) wielding a pointer in front of a map of Vietnam or shaking hands with another general on a distant tarmac or clanking along in an amphibious tank. Here, stubbornly vis-a-vis in closeup that stops at the knot of his necktie, he is still energized by war, gesturing and jabbing his finger at us, then pausing with jaw ajar as he contemplates what he must next bring forth about the Cuban missile crisis or the firebombing of Tokyo or the Quaker protester Norman Morrison, who immolated himself outside McNamara's Pentagon office (he was there) in 1965, in reaction to the escalating American devastation of the Vietnamese countryside. Morris employs the "Interrotron," a device that appears to keep a subject in intense eye contact with the audience, yet the film never conveys the sense that he wishes to "capture" McNamara or betray him into accountability with tough questions. Some of the questions put by "The Fog of War" do feel almost unbearable in their consequence, but the hardest of them come from McNamara himself.

Audiences emerging from this unique work have been divided about which of its messages deserve respect and, taken together, what they say about the man up there explaining and perhaps revising parts of an extraordinarily pertinent public life. Men and women of an age to have protested the war in Vietnam or even to have fought in it (people now in their fifties or early sixties, that is) angrily claim that McNamara does not have the right to second sight or even apology at this stage. (He does not apologize but says, "We all make mistakes.") Among critics of the film, Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, points out that President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis was not the pure seeker for peace that McNamara portrays him as but was making a secret deal with Nikita Khrushchev to pull our missiles out of Turkey in return for a call-off of the approaching seaborne Soviet weapons, while McNamara himself was becoming an advocate of a preventive attack. Younger audiences, perhaps, will shiver at McNamara's account of a subsequent discovery that, contrary to belief, armed Soviet nuclear missiles were already in place in Cuba, and that Castro had urged Khrushchev to use them if need be, even ...