In what should be required viewing for all Americans, The Fog of War allows one of the most controversial American cabinet figures of the 20th Century to tell the story of the Vietnam War. Robert McNamara talks to us, the viewer, directly, through director Errol Morris' device known as the "Interrotron," speaking of American policies from World War II to the run up of the Vietnam war. If the movie were just McNamara telling us about what happened, that would be one thing. But the movie is much much more, as we hear from McNamara what he felt about each move, not only in his 85 year old body, but also through file footage and tape recordings made in Lyndon Johnson's White House. The Fog of War won the Oscar for best documentary, though it's wildly entertaining through the use of footage from the 1960s, making it almost a narrative movie rather than the "boring" documentary. There is a certain unsettling aspect of how McNamara and the viewer can look right at each other, with only the screen in between us, and he tell us about how orders he made killed hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians, how events he interpreted lead to the death of thousands of American kids in Vietnam, and how he tells us if the Americans had lost WWII, it would have been Americans tried for war crimes, instead of the other way around. The movie is presented almost as an autobiography, presenting each story as a life lesson, where there are 11 of them. I found this approach effective, as it gave the viewer an expectation of what McNamara has learned, and in turn perhaps what we as a country has learned. The present day parallels are obvious, take out most of the "Vietnams" and replace them with "Iraqs," give it 20 years, and the movie could be about Donald Rumsfeld. Errol Morris is about to elicit insights out of McNamara on camera by shouting out questions while McNamara speaks, asking the questions we want the answers for. This movie should be required viewing for all high school history classes, and maybe even for all voting Americans. It will make you think hard about the issues of war and national policy in a time went the debate is vital.
Review of The Fog of War
