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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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